The tug of war over the Rosetta Stone

The Rosetta Stone is the icon of decipherment. As one of the most popular objects in the British Museum, its irregular shape and the once white-on-black of its three scripts — hieroglyphic, demotic, Greek — are distinctive enough to sell countless socks, keyrings and nail files in the museum shop. The stone’s marketable popularity testifies both to the allure of hieroglyphs, including a persistent orientalising idea of their ‘mystery’, and the seemingly miraculous achievement of code-breaking. The latter is most associated with the two men of The Riddle of the Rosetta’s subtitle: the ‘English polymath’ Thomas Young (1773-1829) and the ‘French polyglot’ Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832). Theirs is a story much told and much mythologised. Champollion especially has become a romantic, tragic hero whose epiphany was ‘so powerful he fainted dead away’.

One of my students, when he saw The Riddle on my desk, huffed ‘not another book on decipherment?’ I confess I initially felt the same. However, this book is different. Not only is it arguably the most meticulous and thoroughgoing account of the work of Young and Champollion, it incorporates unpublished manuscripts, including many early drafts. The result is ‘a study in contrasts’, examining in detail ‘the separate developmental arcs of their ideas’. Through their painstaking examination of these documents, which required mastery of complex archives in multiple ancient and modern scripts and languages, the authors do much to unpack the mythologies as well.

The decipherment is often told as a tale of theft and competition, with strong nationalist overtones. The stone’s rediscovery was a by-product of conflict; it was found by a French officer in 1799 at the Nile port of el-Rashid (ancient Rosetta) as the local fort was being reinforced against incoming British forces. It was later confiscated as ‘a proud trophy of the arms of Britain’, hence its current place in the British Museum.