THE ROMANCE OF EXCAVATION
THE ROMANCE OF EXCAVATION
THEROMANCE OF EXCAVATIONCHAPTER I
THE
ROMANCE OF EXCAVATION
A scientiststood in the British Museum gazing at a piece of rock. Many people passed to and fro, but never one halted to see what held his attention, never one save a little boy, who wondered what the grown-up was looking at. Those who glanced in that direction merely saw a shattered stone, and passed on unheeding.
Had the fragment of stone been the Cullinan diamond or a glowing ruby, everybody would have clustered round to gaze at it. As it was neither one nor the other, everybody walked on. Yet that fragment of stone was, and is, much more wonderful than the finest diamond or ruby ever dug out of the earth.
The fragment over which the scientist dreamed was the Rosetta Stone. It is merely a piece of black basalt 28½ inches wide and 45 inches in length.The top left corner has disappeared in the dust of centuries, and both corners on the right side have been smashed off. The remainder is one of the world’s greatest treasures, for it has given us the clue to the past, unfolded for us the romance of ancient Egypt, and enabled us to glimpse the Pharaohs in all their glory.
The Rosetta Stone is divided into three sections, each of which is covered with writing cut into the surface. The top section is composed of hieroglyphics, the curious picture-writing of ancient Egypt, the middle section is in the everyday writing of the ordinary people of ancient Egypt, known as demotic characters, and the bottom section is in Greek.
This famous stone has travelled far from its original resting-place in the Nile delta, where it may have lain for close on two thousand years. Had Napoleon not made up his mind to conquer Egypt it might never have been recovered. By chance, Napoleon managed to escape Nelson, who was searching the Mediterranean for him, and landed his expedition at Alexandria. Sweeping everything before him, Bonaparte soon dominated the country and despoiled the conquered people of the relics of the past.
Then Nelson, coming back to look for his foe, found the French fleet in Aboukir Bay, and swept it for ever from the seas. Napoleon was shaken,but hid his mortification, and in due course set off to invade Syria. Gazah, of Biblical history, fell before him, Jaffa was captured, but at Acre another British Admiral, Sir Sydney Smith, intervened. The French ships sailing along the coast with stores for Napoleon’s troops were captured, and the British sailor then threw himself heart and soul into the defence of the city. Napoleon fought desperately for weeks to capture Acre, but the Admiral was his match, and the French forces were at last compelled to retreat.
About this time a sapper was digging away in the ruins of Fort St. Julian when his pick struck against a rock. He drove the tool into the soil to see if the rock were large or small, and whether it would be difficult to remove. He quickly discovered that the rock was of no great size, and in a few minutes it was lying clear at the bottom of the trench.
Glancing idly at the stone, the Frenchman noticed it was covered with strange characters. The soldier was quite interested in his find, so interested that he cleaned the whole surface of the strange stone he had unearthed. That the characters were some sort of writing was obvious, but what it was all about was much more than he could tell. Other men might have thrown the stone aside and covered it up again, but fortunately the finder possessed intelligence and the curiousstone was added to the rest of the booty collected by the French.
That stone, unearthed in 1798, was the piece of black basalt which is now to be seen at the British Museum in London. It became known as the Rosetta Stone because it was found near Rosetta, the seaport whence Napoleon eventually fled from Egypt, and when the French were defeated it passed into our possession as one of the spoils of war.
It seems strange that two of the greatest figures in history, Nelson and Napoleon, should be connected with the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. Stranger still to think what might have happened had the soldier who found the stone smashed it to pieces or tossed it out of the way. These things might easily have occurred, as they have no doubt occurred to many valuable relics in bygone times.
Had the Rosetta Stone not come to light, one of the vital links with Egypt’s past would have been missing. We might still be groping in the dark, wondering what all the quaint picture-writing of the Egyptians meant, seeking for the clue that would tell us. Luckily the man who found the stone saw that it was something more than a broken piece of rock, and so preserved it for posterity.
By courtesy of the British MuseumTHE SHATTERED ROSETTA STONE WHICH PROVIDED THE CLUE TO THE PICTURE WRITING OF THE EGYPTIANS
By courtesy of the British MuseumTHE SHATTERED ROSETTA STONE WHICH PROVIDED THE CLUE TO THE PICTURE WRITING OF THE EGYPTIANS
By courtesy of the British Museum
THE SHATTERED ROSETTA STONE WHICH PROVIDED THE CLUE TO THE PICTURE WRITING OF THE EGYPTIANS
Many people wondered what all the strange signs meant when they first saw the stone. Men of science pored over it and racked their brains in their efforts to solve the mystery. The Greek script was soon translated, and proved to be a decree of Ptolemy V, dating about 196B.C.
The fact that there were three inscriptions seemed to indicate that it was one decree engraved in three different forms of writing in order to appeal to as many people as possible. But this was by no means certain. It might easily have been three different decrees, though in such a case no purpose could have been served by inscribing them all on one stone. It was, therefore, more than probable that the three inscriptions were one decree, and that the known writing would give a clue to the weird pictures to be found in the tombs and on the monuments scattered about Egypt.
The hieroglyphics were a mystery of the past. No one could read them. The strange pictures of men and birds and beasts might have been merely decorative. They might have had no meaning at all, or no more meaning than the pictures we place on our walls to decorate our houses.
Other signs, however, in combination with the pictures, indicated that the hieroglyphics were a form of writing. Some people think that this picture-writing of the Egyptians is actually theoldest writing in the world, and that all writings must have sprung from it. This idea, however, is not quite accurate. A child of three years old cannot draw wonderful portraits. Childish drawings of a house with four straight lines for the house, a door in the centre, and a window on each side of the door are well known.
Man in the beginning may be likened to the child, and his earliest drawings must have been cruder than the childish drawings of our own age, far cruder than anything that is preserved for us. The first man to scratch a rough line or two on a rock was the forefather of Raphael and Michael Angelo and Rembrandt, but untold ages elapsed before the art of the first primitive artist developed into that of these masters.
The Egyptian pictures in the picture-writing are cleverly drawn, and indicate true artistic perceptions. It must have taken a long time to reach the pitch of perfection that is shown. So it seems logical to assume that the hieroglyphics were the outcome of another form of writing. For years there were no proofs that this was the case, but it is now definitely established by Professor Flinders Petrie that crude signs were used in Egypt at a much earlier date than the picture-writing, and the extraordinary thing is that some of these signs may be traced in the alphabets of other countries.
An English medical man, Dr. Young, was the first to furnish a clue to the mystery of the Rosetta Stone. Happening to take a keen interest in dead languages as well as in living people, he saw among the hieroglyphics two sets of signs with a line drawn round them, and as the name of Ptolemy was twice mentioned in the Greek text he reasoned that these signs stood for the name of the ruler who made the decree. He reasoned correctly, and we learned in time that a king’s name was always enclosed in a panel, which is now generally known as a cartouche.
The deciphering of the king’s name was a happy discovery which pointed to the general significance of the cartouche in connection with royal names. But the deciphering of the rest of the hieroglyphics bristled with difficulties. No one knew whether the signs stood for sounds, letters, words or things.
Egyptians had painted these puzzling pictures, but there was not a single man in all Egypt who knew what they meant. The oldest Egyptian peasant was ignorant on the subject, the most learned Egyptian scholar had not the faintest idea of their meaning. The Egyptians had forgotten how to read the writing of their forefathers. It was the writing of a dead age, of a vanished civilization.
Dr. Young threw himself enthusiastically intothe task of deciphering the signs. The difficulty seemed to add a zest to his search. He pored over the copy of the writing on the Rosetta Stone day after day. There was absolutely nothing to guide him. Everything was sheer deduction at first, and then his deductions had to be tested and verified.
So difficult was his task that the discovery of a single letter was an event. Perhaps by great good fortune he would succeed in deciphering two signs in a week, then for a month he might study the copy until his brain reeled, and decipher nothing at all. It was a heart-breaking undertaking. On one occasion he announced that he had succeeded in translating a certain set of hieroglyphics into a word of seven or eight letters. It was afterwards proved that he was right in only one letter, and that the rest were hopelessly wrong.
He began on his project in 1814 and, after struggling with it for four years, the sum total of his labours amounted to the deciphering of just over ninety characters. His discovery thus averaged fewer than twenty-five signs a year. It meant that he had to concentrate all the power of his exceptional brain, and all his knowledge of languages, for a whole month to decipher two characters. In doing what he did, he accomplished an astounding feat. It is impossible to praiseYoung too highly for his early work on the Rosetta Stone.
At the same time that Young was wrestling with hieroglyphics in England, François Champollion was trying to solve the puzzle in France. Champollion’s interest in hieroglyphics did not spring up in a night; it was of slow growth, starting in his childhood when Egypt bulked large in the imaginations of most French boys owing to the stirring deeds of Napoleon against the Mamelukes. By the time Champollion was eleven years old, he was already taking more than an ordinary boyish interest in things Egyptian, and, as the years passed, he slowly gathered books and material bearing on the subject which he was to make peculiarly his own.
He was eager, anxious, to decipher hieroglyphics. It was the ambition of his life, the thing for which he lived, of which he dreamed. He collected every copy of the strange picture-writing that he could find in order to study it, in the hope of deciphering one more character. He was terribly handicapped by the small quantity of material on which he could work, and while his brilliant contemporary Young lay dying in England, in 1829, Champollion was leading an expedition in Egypt, gathering material for France.
Champollion found the picture-writing even more complex than any one anticipated. A singleletter might be represented by seven or eight quite different signs, and a sign might represent a whole word or part of a word. A circle with lines radiating from it might represent the sun god, or it might stand for the word “day.” A sign which ordinarily stood for a letter might represent a god if a dot or some other sign came after it.
The Egyptian hieroglyphics were indeed one of the greatest puzzles of the ages. The discovery of other inscriptions helped to verify Champollion’s work, and provide proof that he was deciphering the signs accurately. It is, nevertheless, incredible that any human being could read even a sign of this dead writing correctly. That any one could do what Champollion ultimately did is almost a miracle. He laboured at his self-appointed task with so much courage and determination that he eventually succeeded in building up a hieroglyphic dictionary—a marvellous feat.
Champollion himself did not long survive Young, for he so sapped his strength over his Egyptian expedition that he fell ill and died in 1832. He was comparatively a young man, only forty-two, yet he crowded an enormous amount of work into these few years, and it may truly be said that his love of Egyptology cost him his life.
By the aid of his dictionary, which grew directly out of the finding of the Rosetta Stone, our scholars are now able to read without muchtrouble the sacred writings of the ancient Egyptians. Thus that fragment of black basalt in the British Museum, which is passed unnoticed by so many people, is really one of the most interesting stones in the world.