several books on the intersections of
art, science, and detection. According
to Dolnick, the Rosetta Stone was not
only, as its discoverers suspected, a key
to Egyptian hieroglyphs, and thereby
to a huge swath of otherwise inaccessi-
ble ancient history. It was also a lesson
in decoding itself, in what the human
mind does when faced with a puzzle.
T
he discovery of the Rosetta Stone
was not kept secret. The Courier
de l ’Égypte, the newspaper of the French
expedition, carried the news a couple
of months later, and within a few years
plaster replicas had been sent to schol-
ars in Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh,
and Dublin. Copies of the inscription
were dispatched to a number of Euro-
pean capitals and also to Philadelphia.
You’d have thought that this would have
set off a stampede to decipher the stone,
but in fact the response was slow. As
Dolnick tells it, “Most scholars took a
brief look, gulped in dismay, and skit-
tered back to more congenial ground.”
In the end, more than twenty years
passed before the stone was made to
yield a key to the hieroglyphs.
One can see why. First, the script was
dead. Egypt fell to Rome in 30 B.C., after
Caesar Augustus (at that time still called
Octavian) defeated the forces of Cleop-
atra and Mark Antony at the Battle of
Actium, and the Queen, according to a
version given by Plutarch—and then,
memorably, by Shakespeare—placed an
asp on her breast and died. Three centu-
ries later, the Egyptians’ religion died.
After the Emperor Constantine con-
verted to Christianity, in 312 A.D., he
began rolling it out as the official reli-
gion of the Roman Empire. By the end
of that century, the Emperor Theodosius
outlawed all pagan worship, and many
temples were destroyed. (The Rosetta
Stone had likely been displayed in one
such temple.) There is no evidence that
hieroglyphs were ever used after the fourth
century A.D. No surprise, then, that nearly
fifteen hundred years later there wasn’t
any text, let alone any human being, to
help European scholars decode them.
But wasn’t there the Rosetta Stone?
Yes, but it was frustratingly incomplete.
Pieces had broken off, not just from its
hieroglyphic text but from the Demotic
and Greek texts as well. What had the
missing lines said? Then, too, no one was
sure, early on, which way hieroglyphic
writing ran: from left to right, as in Eu-
ropean languages, or, like Hebrew, from
right to left, or even going back and forth
between those two, like ribbon candy.(This last pattern is called boustrophe-
don, from the Ancient Greek bous, or
“ox,” and strophe, or “turn”—hence, “as
the ox turns” while plowing—and was
sometimes used for Ancient Greek,
Etruscan, and a few other writing sys-
tems.) Or might the text be running ver-
tically—perhaps top to bottom, as with
traditional Chinese, or even bottom to
top (much rarer, but found, for example,
in ancient Berber)? Never mind that,
though. Where did the words begin and
end? Like classical Greek and Latin, the
inscriptions had no spaces, not to speak
of punctuation, between words. Were
they even what Europeans called “words”?
Furthermore, whatever the would-be
decoder figured out regarding one hi-
eroglyphic text might not be transfer-
rable to another. Modern readers of En-
glish can go back maybe six centuries
and still hope to understand a text writ-
ten then. Chaucer, who died in 1400, is
readable after perhaps a day of practice.
But hieroglyphs developed over some
thirty centuries. The Rosetta Stone, as
one can deduce from its inscription, was
carved in 196 B.C. How could its de-
coders claim that the lessons they de-
rived from it applied to, say, a text from
the time of Ramses II, who reigned
from about 1279 to 1213 B.C. and is con-
sidered to have been ancient Egypt’s
most important pharaoh? And, if schol-
ars couldn’t apply what they learned
from the Rosetta Stone to documents
written under Egypt’s most important
ruler, what could they say with confi-
dence about ancient Egypt as a whole?
Finally, according to Dolnick, a major
impediment to any kind of useful tran-
scription was something less technical:
the widely held belief that hieroglyphs
communicated deep spiritual truths,
which could not be lightly disclosed.
Almost certainly, no one in the world
could read hieroglyphs during the nearly
fifteen hundred years or so before the
Rosetta Stone was discovered, but that
doesn’t mean that people weren’t look-
ing at hieroglyphs, or reproductions of
them, and at Egyptian monuments, or
drawings of them, and thinking about
what these things meant. Nature abhors
a vacuum, and the vastness of Egyptian
statuary made the vacuum left by the
hieroglyphs’ impenetrability seem com-
parably great. From the early Middle
“Don’t waste your time on video games, they said.” Ages through the eighteenth century,