John Ray (4)

I've read two books about the Rosetta Stone and this is the better one. It sticks nicely to its subject matter and the author is knowledgeable about the subject; this can not be said of the other book by Edward Dolnick, "The Writing of the Gods", which was not actually bad but which had neither of these two virtues. "The Rosetta Stone" has a lively final chapter, "Whose Loot is it Anyway?" showing how, if you know history, the action, process, or imperative of deciding to whom something show more "actually" belongs seems more and more pointless, convoluted, wasteful, laughable, and ignorant. I started with Dolnick's book, because I had listened to it on audio, but I switched to Ray's book once I had checked it out, and finished it in short order and with much more enthusiasm. When all is said and done, Ray is also just a better writer than Dolnick. show less

The Rosetta Stone and its decipherers – Thomas Young and Jean-François Champollion – are the focus of John Ray’s book, but there’s plenty of other interesting stuff. It’s unfortunate that the friendly conflict between Young and Champollion tends to obscure Young’s other accomplishments. If anybody has heard of Young at all, he usually figures as the person who didn’t quite translate the Rosetta Stone but who was trumpeted as the equal of Champollion by English chauvinists. To show more a certain extent this is true; Young made a promising start on the stone – most notably by correctly surmising that the hieroglyphs enclosed in cartouches were royal names – but then lost interest and went on to other projects. He was quite a polymath – Young’s modulus is named after him, as is the Young experiment in optics and Young’s Principles of Life Insurance. Champollion, on the other hand, was just a linguist – but a brilliant one – and deserves the credit for being the first Egyptologist (well, at least the first since Khaemwaset).

After the discussion of the stone and its translators, Ray continues a number of only slightly germane but always interesting directions: the ongoing questions of who “owns” the Rosetta Stone, or museum collections of antiquities in general – although the return of the stone to Egypt doesn’t get quite as much press as the return of the Elgin Marbles to Greece, it’s still a propaganda touch point between Egypt and England; and a discussion of translating unknown languages in general, including a pretty good explanation of how Michael Ventris translated Linear B and Yuri Knorosov translated Mayan, neither of which had a “Rosetta Stone” multilingual inscription. (Basic principal: count the number of unique symbols; if there are thousands, your unknown language is ideographic; if hundreds, it’s a mix of ideographic and syllabic (like Egyptian or Akkadian); if in the 50-100 range, it’s syllabic; if 20-30, alphabetic. Then go to a medium and ask to speak to Michael Ventris in the beyond).

An enjoyable light read. show less