THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021 85
atha Christie leading the pack. The En-
glish are also connoisseurs of the cross-
word puzzle, and Dolnick notes that
Bletchley Park, England’s decoding cen-
ter during the Second World War, re-
cruited its cryptographers not just from
Oxford and Cambridge but also from
among known crossword champions.
He seems to see a relationship be-
tween England’s decoders and its non-
conformists. He gives a whole chapter
to William Bankes, a rich collector who
practically killed himself and a number
of workmen while transporting an obe-
lisk from Egypt back to his estate in
Dorset. It’s still there, though he even-
tually had to say goodbye to it. Arrested
in 1841 for sodomy, a crime that was at
the time punishable by death, he spent
his later life in exile in Venice, buying
up Italian paintings and other exquisite
things and sending them back home.
Another English favorite of Dolnick’s
is the Victorian archeologist Flinders
Petrie, also well connected and tireless:
Indifferent to hardship, or perhaps even
fond of it, Petrie labored away under the des-
ert sun in a pink onesie or sometimes in the
nude.... “He served a table so excruciatingly
bad that only persons of iron constitution could
survive it,” one dismayed visitor reported. The
food was canned, and much of it dated from
digs in previous seasons. Petrie and the other
archeologists “tested for freshness by throw-
ing the cans at a stone wall,” one historian
writes. “If a can did not explode, the contents
were deemed fit to eat.”
T
here is surprisingly little about pol-
itics in Dolnick’s book. It is safe to
assume that whatever workman first laid
eyes on the big stone near Rosetta in 1799
was Egyptian, but, to my knowledge, he
remains nameless. Likewise, throughout
those fights about who owned the un-
earthed Egyptian antiquities, Egypt was
not among the contenders. Only in the
twentieth century did repatriation—the
return of art works removed from coun-
tries by conquerors, scholars, grave rob-
bers, and wealthy Western collectors—
become an international issue. And only
in 2003 did Egypt, in the person of Zahi
Hawass, of Egypt’s Supreme Council of
Antiquities, ask that the British Museum
send the Rosetta Stone back. The mu-
seum declined, whereupon the Egyptians
modified their demand, asking only that
the stone be loaned to them. Again, the
British demurred.
Against the Egyptians’ claim that the
Rosetta Stone, and thereby a portion of
the Egyptian people’s identity and pride,
had been stolen from them, it was ar-
gued that, whatever the stone represented
under the pharaohs, it now belonged to
the world, and furthermore that the
Egyptians would not be able to take
proper care of it. Nor, it was said, had
they been the ones to uncover it and
study it, enabling it to tell its story. Un-
like other antiquities under dispute—the
Elgin Marbles, say, which Greece has
long demanded that the British Museum
return—the stone’s glory is a matter not
of beauty but of information. The rea-
son it is the Rosetta Stone rather than
just any old stone is that it allowed schol-
ars to recover an immense tract of an-
cient history. And if that is the case, some
Western scholars have argued, the stone
was lucky to have been carried off to Eu-
rope, where linguistics was, at the time,
far more advanced than in Egypt.
This is not a line of reasoning that
Egyptians are likely to embrace. To them,
the stone was made by Egyptians, about
Egyptians, at a time when Egypt was
one of the oldest, richest, and greatest
powers on earth. When much of the
world, Dolnick writes, “shivered in cavesand groped in the dirt for slugs and
snails, Egyptian pharaohs had reigned
in splendor.” Egyptians would like peo-
ple to know that.
This is a huge, complicated story, one
that involves not just Egypt and the Ro-
setta Stone but the farthest reaches of
modern geopolitics. Dolnick’s book is
really just about the decipherment and
the people involved in it: how they solved
this fantastic puzzle and how their per-
sonalities and circumstances affected
their procedures. His tale ends poignantly.
Both Young and Champollion died be-
fore their time, Young of heart disease,
Champollion three years later, of a stroke.
Young was fifty-five, an honored scien-
tist; Champollion was forty-one, the
world’s first professor of Egyptology,
at the Collège de France, in Paris. On
his deathbed, he grieved that he hadn’t
finished his “Egyptian Grammar.” “So
soon,” he said, as he felt the end com-
ing. Putting his hand to his forehead, he
exclaimed, “There are so many things
inside!” After Jean-François’s death,
Jacques-Joseph completed his brother’s
“Egyptian Grammar” (1836-41) and then
his “Egyptian Dictionary” (1841-43): a
life, two lives, well spent. “Don’t you just love curling up with a good phone?”