The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of Ancient Egypt

209 Pages·2012·1.55 MB·English

by  John Ray

the rosetta stone
and the rebirth of ancient egyp t

wonders of the wo rld
THE R OSETTA ST ONE
AND THE REBIRTH OF
ANCIENT EGYP T
JOHN R AY
Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
2007
Copyright © John Ray, 2007
First published in the United Kingdom by
Proªle Books Ltd
3a Exmouth House
Pine Street
U k London EZ1R OJH, U.K.
Typeset in Caslon by MacGuru Ltd
[email protected]
Designed by Peter Campbell
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ray, J. D.
The Rosetta Stone and the rebirth of ancient Egypt / John Ray.
p. cm. — (Wonders of the World)
ISBN-13: 978-0-674-02493-9 (alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-674-02493-1 (alk. paper)
1. Rosetta stone. 2. Egyptian language—Writing.
3. Egyptology—History. I. Title.
PJ1531.R5R39 2007
493'.1—dc22 2007001834
For Sonia
‘But I don’t suppose we’ll meet’
(Luxor, January 1990)

CONTENTS
Introduction 1
chapter 1 The Fading of the Light 9
chapter 2 The Pot and the Kettle 25
chapter 3 The Man of Science 38
chapter 4 The Man of Art 56
chapter 5 ‘To Make Them Live Again’ 80
chapter 6 The Return of the Light 96
chapter 7 The Heirs of Jean-François 110
chapter 8 The Words of the Stone 132
chapter 9 Whose Loot is it Anyway? 145
The text of the stone 164
Further reading 171
List of illustrations 186
Acknowledgements 189
Index 191
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

1. The Rosetta Stone as it is today, on display in the British Museum.
INTRODUCTION
The Rosetta Stone is the most famous object in the British
Museum. According to the museum’s own fi gures, it is the
most visited item in the entire display, and perhaps the most
lingered over, although a similar claim is sometimes made for
the unwrapped mummy of a ginger tomcat which also forms
part of the Egyptian collections. The stone is one of the
world’s wonders, although it does not feature in the conven-
tional lists of Wonders of the World. It is not a monumental
building, but it attracts pilgrims in the way that imposing
ruins do. In mundane reality it was part of a mass-produced
series of stelae, a technical term for slabs of stone designed to
perpetuate the offi cial records of the Egyptian state. What it
records is a decree, the text of an agreement issued jointly by a
king and a synod of ancient Egyptian clergy. Its purpose was
to witness to the Pharaoh’s benevolence towards his people
and his piety towards the gods. It was the sort of thing a good
king was expected to do, and to go on doing.
According to the inscription on the stone, an identical
copy of the decree was to be placed in every sizeable temple
in the land. Whether this really happened is impossible to
say, but a few copies of the same trilingual decree have been
found and can be seen in other museums. The version that

we have is some 112 centimetres high and 76 centimetres
[ 1 ]