Cracking Codes: The Rosetta Stone and Decipherment - Softcover

Parkinson, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520222482 ISBN 13: 9780520222489

Publisher: University of California Press, 1999

Synopsis

Publication to accompany a major 1999 exhibition at the British Museum celebrating the bicentenary of the Stone's discovery, and including a selective catalogue of the exhibits. It also examines the wider issues of script and writing in ancient Egypt and beyond, for example, the relationship between hieroglyphs and art, the social prestige of literacy, and the practical aspects of writing (scibal exquipment and training). Other issues in decipherment are also discussed, such as Linear B and Meroitic, a language which still remains to be read.

About this title

Review

In 1799, while Napoleon's troops battled the fierce Mamelukes in Egypt's Western Delta, a French engineer discovered a giant granite slab that contained strange symbols and Greek letters. Two Egyptologists, the British-born Thomas Young and the astounding young French linguistic polymath Jean-François Champollion, fought to decipher the confounding script in an epic scientific battle. In 1822 Champollion finally broke through 3,000 years of mystery and revealed the Egyptian demotic and hieroglyphic system of writing--forever changing our view of history in the process.

Cracking Codes, by Richard Parkinson, the British Museum's assistant keeper of Egyptian antiquities, is a companion volume for the museum's bicentennial exhibition of what has come to be known as the Rosetta stone. With 32 color and 200 black-and-white illustrations ranging from limestone fragments to whole statues, illustrated papyrus, and evocative wall paintings, Parkinson shows how Champollion's piercing of the mists of time has enabled the ancient Egyptians to speak to modern civilizations. Parkinson's essays on the importance of writing to human civilization and the birth of Egyptology are equally insightful. "The decipherment of the Egyptian scripts is not a single event that occurred in 1822," he writes, but "a continuous process that is repeated at every reading of a text or artifact. Like any process of reading, it is a dialogue." --Eugene Holley Jr.

About the Author

Richard Parkinson is Assistant Keeper in the Department of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum specializing in hieratic papyri and epigraphy. His publications include Voices from Ancient Egypt: An Anthology of Middle Kingdom Writings (1991), Papyrus (with S. Quirke) and The Tale of Sinuhe and Other Egyptian Poems, 1940-1640 B.C.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0520222482
• ISBN 13: 9780520222489
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208