In July 1799 a French officer serving in Bonaparte's army in Egypt made an interesting discovery. A granite slab unearthed near the small town of Rosetta bore texts in three different scripts - Greek, demotic Egyptian and hieroglyphs. For the first time there was a real hope of decoding Egyptian writing. The Stone was soon stolen from the French by the British Army and removed to the British Museum in London. Now began a remarkable and highly competitive intellectual adventure in which some of the best minds of the time took part. Thomas Young, a remarkable English polymath and physician, and Johann David Akerblad, a Swedish diplomat, made valiant progress towards a solution, but the code was finally cracked by the tireless French orientalist Jean-Fran?ois Champollion. The texts of Ancient Egypt could now be read again after fourteen centuries.
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Review:
The Rosetta Stone is a dense summary of the 1799 discovery in Egypt of the granite block that, by virtue of having been engraved with identical text in three different languages (Greek, demotic--or "common"--ancient Egyptian, and hieroglyphics) made possible the deciphering of the last, the long-lost language of ancient Egypt. The book follows the false starts and feuds of French and British scholars, culminating in the success of the brilliant, precocious Orientalist Jean-Francois Champollion, who came to realize in 1824 that the ideograms were a complex mix of the semantic and the phonetic. The book includes a translation of the Rosetta Stone's script and a small sampling of hieroglyphic translation. The subject matter is arcane; the book, brief and somewhat bloodless, is finally less than engaging. --H. O'Billovich
About the Author:
John Ray is Sir Herbert Thompson Professor of Egyptology at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Selwyn College. He has previously held posts in the British Museum and at the University of Birmingham, and has been a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Yale and Chicago. He is the author of Reflections of Osiris (Profile 2001) which David Starkey called 'a triumph' and Tom Holland 'the best introduction to ancient Egypt I've read' (Daily Telegraph).
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- PublisherProfile Books
- Publication date2002
- ISBN 10 1861973446
- ISBN 13 9781861973443
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages192
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