The Riddle of the Rosetta: How an English Polymath and a French Polyglot Discovered the Meaning of Egyptian Hieroglyphs

by Jed Z. Buchwald, Diane Greco Josefowicz Narrated by Christopher Grove

Overview

In 1799, a French Army officer was rebuilding the defenses of a fort on the banks of the Nile when he discovered an ancient stele fragment bearing a decree inscribed in three different scripts. So begins one of the most familiar tales in Egyptology-that of the Rosetta Stone and the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs. This book draws on fresh archival evidence to provide a major new account of how the English polymath Thomas Young and the French philologist Jean-François Champollion vied to be the first to solve the riddle of the Rosetta.



Jed Buchwald and Diane Greco Josefowicz bring to life a bygone age of intellectual adventure. Much more than a decoding exercise centered on a single artifact, the race to decipher the Rosetta Stone reflected broader disputes about language, historical evidence, biblical truth, and the value of classical learning. The authors paint compelling portraits of Young and Champollion, two gifted intellects with altogether different motivations. Young disdained Egyptian culture and saw Egyptian writing as a means to greater knowledge about Greco-Roman antiquity. Champollion, swept up in the political chaos of Restoration France and fiercely opposed to the scholars aligned with throne and altar, admired ancient Egypt and was prepared to upend conventional wisdom to solve the mystery of the hieroglyphs.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"Combining exhaustive excavation of British and French archives with eclectic biographical elements, [this] valuable new book explains in unique detail . . . the twists and turns behind the perpetually fascinating decipherment."—-Andrew Robinson, British Museum Magazine

"Rarely have I seen the false starts and blind alleys, firm beliefs and 180-degree recalibrations, exhilaration and loneliness of pioneering thought captured so well. . . . If The Riddle of the Rosetta won’t be coming to screens anytime soon, its achievement is no less admirable."—-Maxwell Carter, Wall Street Journal

"Arguably the most meticulous and thoroughgoing account of the work of Young and Champollion. . . . The dazzling scholarly nimbleness of Champollion and Young is richly illustrated throughout the book — that is no myth, but it emerges as something a little more human."—-Elizabeth Frood, The Spectator

Kirkus Reviews

2020-06-06
Comprehensive account of a dense and daunting project: deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics two millennia after their composition.

Buchwald, a historian at California Institute of Technology, and writer Josefowicz put a decade’s worth of work into this book, and it shows. Their story begins with a stone tablet bearing three inscriptions, one in ancient Greek, one in hieroglyphic Egyptian, and one in demotic (or “Coptic”) script. French troops had mauled it to keep it from their British enemies during the Napoleonic Wars, but the damage wasn’t catastrophic, and the tablet was hauled off as a spoil of war, delivered to London in 1802. British scientists puzzled over the thing and then published not entirely accurate lithographs of the Rosetta Stone that found their way into scholarly journals in Britain and France. Enter Jean-François Champollion, “a fiery Bonapartist…[who] narrowly avoided incarceration and worse during the Bourbon Restoration.” An atheist and freethinker, Champollion set to work with an idea that was shared by Thomas Young, an older, pious Englishman who was much better grounded in mathematics (and thus cryptography): that the texts said the same thing, so that using the Greek, which was known, one might figure out the corresponding Egyptian characters. Both worked on their translations for years, sometimes sniping at, sometimes collaborating with each other. Buchwald and Josefowicz deliver an account that sometimes seems as if in real time, describing the blind alleys, intuitions, and thorny debates that surrounded the scholars’ investigations. For example, “Young happily conceded that orthographic shifts could and did occur as writers labored to effect accurate transcriptions…[but] maintained that Egyptian hieroglyphs had never changed from the originals, neither in shape nor in meaning.” Readers will find some grounding in linguistics to be helpful, as the authors discuss phonetics, phonemics, morphemics, and other technical matters surrounding whether the hieroglyphics in particular represented sounds, words, or concepts—the answer being “all of the above.”

Knowledgeable fans of Egyptology, cryptography, and languages will enjoy this exploration of the ancient past.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940178841761
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	02/02/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

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