The Rosetta Stone: The Story of the Decoding of Hieroglyphics - Hardcover

Sole, Robert; Valbelle, Dominique

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1568582269 ISBN 13: 9781568582269

Publisher: Basic Books, 2002

Synopsis

In July 1799, a French officer serving in Napoleon's Egyptian expedition unearthed a granite block bearing text in three different scripts €” Greek, demotic Egyptian, and hieroglyphics. Following the discovery, a remarkable competition ensued for possession of the stone as well as for decoding its inscription. Using all the elements of a detective thriller, the authors, a well-known novelist and a leading Egyptologist, tell the story of international intrigue surrounding the intellectual quest to crack the stone's code €” the key to reading ancient Egyptian texts for the first time in 14 centuries. Also included are reproductions of the stone and its inscriptions as well as portraits of the key figures involved in its translation.

About this title

Review:

The Rosetta Stone is a dense summary of the 1799 discovery in Egypt of the granite block that, by virtue of having been engraved with identical text in three different languages (Greek, demotic--or "common"--ancient Egyptian, and hieroglyphics) made possible the deciphering of the last, the long-lost language of ancient Egypt. The book follows the false starts and feuds of French and British scholars, culminating in the success of the brilliant, precocious Orientalist Jean-Francois Champollion, who came to realize in 1824 that the ideograms were a complex mix of the semantic and the phonetic. The book includes a translation of the Rosetta Stone's script and a small sampling of hieroglyphic translation. The subject matter is arcane; the book, brief and somewhat bloodless, is finally less than engaging. --H. O'Billovich

About the Author:

John Ray is Sir Herbert Thompson Professor of Egyptology at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Selwyn College. He has previously held posts in the British Museum and at the University of Birmingham, and has been a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Yale and Chicago. He is the author of Reflections of Osiris (Profile 2001) which David Starkey called 'a triumph' and Tom Holland 'the best introduction to ancient Egypt I've read' (Daily Telegraph).

About this edition

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1568582269
• ISBN 13: 9781568582269
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192