The stele of Rosetta by Joey Fatigati

The unprepared visitor of the britishi Museum in London, who enters the Egyptian statuesque on the ground floor of the magnificent building in the neoclassical style that appears on Great Russel street, dwells with perplexity and detachment before a black basalt slab displayed in the central area of the room. This attitude is natural for who, who doesn’t know of being before one of the most important and famous Egyptian archaeological finds, is overwhelmed by the mysterious charm of the impressive statues of the gods and sovereigns, by the rutilanti sculptures and by the colossal sarcophaguses that surround it. With no doubt they are instinctive sensations, induced by the appearance of the objects and finds that go back to recognizable subjects or anyway, in a certain way, that can be associated to the everyday life. The interest and the admiration are instinctively stimulated by the size, the style, by the perception of what is “different” and by other aesthetic elements. But when the component of cognizance, has a main role in the animal “man” to the identification of his existential interests, is greatly enlarged by the rational acquirement of nations and experiences, those rather primitive sensations are remarkably conditioned and the observator’s judgement is greatly charged. And it’s for this reason that the objective interest for the “Stele of Rosetta” goes well beyond the ancient sculptured stone. Beginning from these premises, and considering the visitor’s “taste” as “modifiable” and “that can be educated”, let’s go back to the statuesque in the British Museum and let’s observe again the “Rosetta stone” according to the following few information I’ve been able to get dwelling on the beautiful texts by Alan Gardiner, Ceram Cantù, Vandenberg and others. The “stele” of the approximate size of 1,10 x 0,76 m was found in 1799 by a napoleonic soldier near the rwins of a fort a few kilometers in north-west of the place called Rashid (Rosetta) on the banks of the Nile. On one of the sides it had three inscriptions, each with different characters. Although they were quite ruined, these inscriptions induced the french officer who supervised the forts in the area, named Bouchard, to move the find to Cairo for a deeper study. After the failure of the napoleonic expedition in Egypt, the stele, with many other finds, was given to the English who moved it to the Museum in London. The arrangement of the three inscriptionsand other elements indicated that on the stone, the some text had been reported in three different languages, and the fact that one of them was Greek (coptic) rekindle the hopes of those busy in the century-long problem to decipher the hyerogliphics. Nevertheless, once more, the expectations of the most famous and skilled researchers were let down; and the reason was in a great basic mistake! It was in fact the general conviction that the hieroglyphics (hieros-sacred, glyphoinscript) were a purely figurative writing and that each sign (ideogram) corresponded to a symbolic meaning. This theory seemed to be guaranteed by the texts by famous writers of the past, such as Erodoto, Strabone, Diodoro and others but, mostly, by Orapollo, the Egyptian expert of the V century AC who, in his work “Hieroglyphica” gives the interpretation of many Egyptian symbols. This interpretation, although valid and precious for the iconographical and mithological researches, was still far from resolving the problem to decipher the hyeroglyphics. Aniway for centuries and centuries, the work had been at the base of every research, inducing to mistake many generations of experts.
Alan Gardiner tells us how Rircher, in his “Lingua Aegyptiaca Restituta” (XVII century) abandons himself, on the false trace of the symbolic meanings of the figures, to absurd fantasies for which the simple name of the pharaoh “Apries” means that “The divine Osiride’s benevolence must be obtained through sacred ceremonies and chains of genes, so all the benefits of the Nile take place”.
The misunderstanding that prevented the world from entering such a great and poliedica civilization as the Egyptian one was finally cleared by the French Jean François Champollion thanks to the Stele of Rosetta. When in 1807, he saw for the first time a lithograph copy of it, the seventeen years old Jean François was already a member of the accademy in Grenoble and already knew many ancient oriental languages, already for some time he had been obsessed by the anciety to resolve the enigma of the hieroglyphics, those inscriptions on the black stone became his reason for life and gave a new vigour to his researchers. As it’s already been said, the stele has three inscriptions:the “hieroglyphic one” (or pharaonic), the “Demotic one” (or popular), which derived from contractions and changes of the first one, and finally the “Coptic one” (Greek). The latter, easily deciphered, resulted to be a sacerdotal decree to honor Tolomeo V and went back to 196 BC. About this we must observe, if a great part of the stele hasn’t be destroyed, that it’s strange that on it there isn’t the inscription in “ieratic” which was the sacerdotal writing.
The idea that the hieroglyphics, independantly from their symbolic meaning, were actually alphabetical letters, or better, phonetic signs, passed through the frenchman’s mind comparing the name Tolomeo that appeared in the coptic text with a group of hieroglyphics which were supposed to correspond to the king’s name because they were surrounded by a “royal ring”, that is a “cartouche”. It was a determinate intuition that became a certainty when Champollion, in 1822, gota a litographic copy of the Greek and hieroglyphic inscription sculptured on the base of a famous obelisk, called “of file”, which today decorates some English park in Dorset. In the Greek text (coptic) the names Tolomeo and Cleopatra were reported and he immediately noticed that in the hieroglyphic text, besides the famous “cartouche” which he supposed corresponded to the name Tolomeo, a different one appeared: certainly Cleopatra’s one! From a first comparison between the two cartouches and the two Greek names it resulted that the letters “p”, “o”, “l” and “t” of the Greek names corresponded to the same hieroglyphic signs in both certouches. Basing upon this correspondance, from the two names , Champollion deduced the alphabetical signs (phonetics) for 12 sounds. At this point he dedicated himself to decipher other royal Egyptian names available in an almost complete list in Greek language thanks to Manetone, an Egyptian historian of the III century BC. This allowed him to enrich rapidly the phonetic alphabet available. In brief, the procedure was the following one: in one of the inscriptions he noticed the circle that symbolized the sun, which in captic corresponded to “king” followed by an unknown hieroglyphic sign, and then by another sign, repeated twice, which were supposed to correspond to the “s” (King - ? – s – s ). It was so rather easy, at this point, to go back to the name “Ramses”. So to Champollion’s phonetic alphabet the letter “m” was added. In another cartouche a birol appeared, the ibis, that is the Greek “Thot”, followed by the sign that, according to the previous deciphering, should be an “m” and then by an “s”. Even in this case always referring to Manetones’ list of kings, it was easy to identify the name Tuthmosis, sovereign of the XVIII dynasty.
This way new at great horizons on the past were opened for man. Masterpieces of Art and finds, deeds and misdeeds , myths and legends, could finally be placed in the historical-cultural mosaique that is at the base of human history. Only now, taking away the flance from that modest black stone and looking at the statues and the sculptures aligned along the walls, they seem to get alive, awaiting to be questioned on their great past.

Joey Fatigati