The discovery of the slab, called the Rosetta Stone after the town in which it was found, reignited the ultimate linguistic challenge: deciphering the symbols of the Pharaohs.Įdward Dolnick’s “The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone” is an engrossing account of the 20-year competition that followed. All three were dead languages, but the Greek alphabet was still in use. And the three bands of text - classical Greek, hieroglyphs and an Egyptian shorthand called Demotic - were intended to proclaim the monarch’s achievements in multiple tongues to the peoples of the empire. The nearly one-ton stela, experts determined, had come from a temple dedicated to the Greek-Egyptian King Ptolemy V in 196 B.C. Pierre-François Bouchard, the officer in charge, sensed its significance and turned it over to scholars for analysis. Amid a pile of rubble being used for a renovation project, he noticed a 4-foot-by-3-foot granite slab, covered on one side with intricate inscriptions.
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On a steamy day in July 1799, a member of a French military work detail at a tumbledown fort in the Nile Delta made an unusual discovery.
THE WRITING OF THE GODS The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone By Edward Dolnick
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