84 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021
further, Champollion showed that the
system also used rebuses, a kind of lin-
guistic pun simultaneously pictorial and
phonetic. An example in English is
“CU” for “I see you.” Dolnick asks
us to imagine writing “Winston Chur-
chill” by drawing a pack of cigarettes
followed by a picture of a church, then
a picture of a hill.
That’s not all. The phonetic values
of hieroglyphs, as with the Hebrew al-
phabet, included consonants but not
vowels. What if a reader encountered
“bd”? Did it mean “bad” or “bed” or “bud”
or “bid”? Writers of hieroglyphs solved
this problem by following the ambigu-
ous word with a so-called “determina-
tive,” a hieroglyph saying, in effect, “I
know that looks confusing, but here’s
what I mean.” Dolnick explains, “Old
and praise look identical, but the hiero-
glyphs for old are followed by a hiero-
glyph of a bent man tottering along on
a walking stick; praise is followed by a
man with his hands lifted in homage.”
This sounds like a useful study aid, until
Dolnick tells us that about a fifth of the
characters in a typical hieroglyphic text
are determinatives—not so much words
as glosses on words.
Collecting all these different modes
of communication, one can safely say
that ancient Egypt’s written language—
if we choose to speak of it, developing
over more than thirty centuries, as a sin-
gle language—was an enormous rag-
bag, full of smoke screens and stum-
bling blocks and tricks and puns and
redundancies. Why, then, did the Egyp-
tians keep it for so long? First off, for
most of its existence it was not intended
for use by the general public, the vast
majority of whom could not read or
write. Literacy was the preserve of priests
and some of the nobility, together with
scribes, people whose profession it was
to read and write for others. Given that
situation, those who could read hiero-
glyphs probably weren’t sorry that oth-
ers couldn’t. By being difficult, the script
kept the riffraff out. (Demotic, the short-
hand version of hieroglyphs, eventually
developed as more of the riffraff learned
to read.) Finally, hieroglyphic writing,
with its suns and seas, its lions and snakes
and beetles and bulls, was beautiful, and
some people no doubt cared about that.
Dolnick points out that there are hiero-
glyphic texts in which it seems that the
order of symbols has been adjusted to
make a sequence more pleasing to those
with an eye for such things.S
o, what does the Rosetta Stone actu-
ally say? Alas, after all our pop-culture
experience of ancient Egypt—Cecil B.
DeMille’s Red Sea parting, the block-
buster King Tut exhibitions, Elizabeth
Taylor’s cleavage—the stone’s text is a
bit of a letdown. A few thousand words
long in translation, the inscription is for-
mal, fulsome, and rather boring. It tells
us that the stone was to be installed in
a temple wall in honor of the ruler Pto-
lemy V Epiphanes Eucharistos, and its
ceremonial purpose presumably accounts
for its tone. The text was inscribed in
196 B.C., to celebrate Ptolemy’s corona-
tion. (He had become pharaoh about
nine years before, but, as he was only five
or so at the time, a series of regents ini-
tially handled affairs of state.) It begins
with a long invocation of the king:
The lord of the sacred uraeus-cobras whose
power is great, who has secured Egypt and
made it prosper, whose heart is pious towards
the gods, the one who prevails over his enemy,
who has enriched the lives of his people, lord
of jubilees like Ptah-Tanen [the god of Mem-
phis], king like Pre [the sun god], ruler of the
upper and lower provinces, the son of the gods
who love their father, whom Ptah chose and
to whom the Sun gave victory, the living image
of Amun, the son of the Sun, Ptolemy, who
lives for ever, beloved of Ptah, the god mani-
fest whose beneficence is perfect.The inscription then catalogues the
pharaoh’s benefactions to his people. The
list sounds a bit like something out of a
reëlection campaign. The great man, it
says, has lowered taxes, secured benefits
for soldiers, amnestied prisoners, made
splendid offerings to the gods, and put
down rebellions, impaling the rebels on
stakes. The decree goes on to specify the
processions to be performed, the libations
to be poured, the garlands to be donned,
and the statues to be venerated in rec-
ognition of the pharaoh’s accession and
his birthday. It ends with the instruction
that this text is to be copied and installed
in Egypt’s important temples. (Other
stones have since been found, with var-
ious fragments of the Rosetta text.)
The quotation above is not from Dol-
nick but from a competing book, “The
Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of An-
cient Egypt” (2007), by the Egyptolo-
gist John Ray. Dolnick quotes only a fewsnippets. This stone, which was hidden
for maybe two thousand years and then,
once discovered, caused an international
decoding competition that eventually
opened up more than three thousand
previously illegible years of ancient his-
tory—this world-famous text receives
merely a nod from Dolnick.
Indeed, throughout his book, Dol-
nick seems almost to punish the Ro-
setta Stone for its stuffiness and to chan-
nel, in however sophisticated a manner,
the sizzle-and-pop style common in
histories of ancient Egypt. If he has
some information on how Nile croco-
diles managed to have sex without caus-
ing themselves bodily harm, or how the
Egyptians mummified not just people
but also snakes and dung beetles, he
manages to get it in. Qualifiers are kept
to a minimum, quantifiers to a maxi-
mum. Cliff-hangers are welcome, hy-
perboles likewise. At the Battle of the
Nile, Napoleon’s naval commander loses
both legs to a cannonball. Does this
make him want to go lie down? No. He
“remained on deck, tourniquets on his
stumps, giving orders from a chair, until
another cannonball blasted him apart.”
Others on deck are having similar dif-
ficulties: “For several minutes, mangled
bodies ... rained from the sky.”
One hesitates to scold Dolnick for
this sort of thing. He does the hard stuff,
too—he is good on the intricacies of
decipherment—and it is not a crime to
keep things lively. John Ray may have
made room for the actual Rosetta text,
but, perhaps to reward us for soldiering
through that, he reproduces some very
hot Egyptian pornography from a pa-
pyrus now housed in Turin.
Dolnick has not just a journalist’s fond-
ness for narrative color but also an affec-
tion for England that plays, like a basso
ostinato, beneath his text. For a long time,
there was disagreement between the Brit-
ish and the French about who should get
credit for the Rosetta Stone’s decoding:
Young, who had the first, crucial insight,
or Champollion, who did the rest? To-
day, almost everyone gives the palm to
Champollion, and Dolnick does, too, but
his book repeatedly makes reference to
the British love of decoding. Sherlock
Holmes, needless to say, was English,
and, in the years between the two World
Wars, England enjoyed the so-called
golden age of detective fiction, with Ag-