The Names Inside the Rings
You know what the Rosetta Stone is: one message, three scripts, and one of them a language scholars could already read.
The obvious next step is to lay the Greek alongside the hieroglyphs and match them up. That is what it sounds like should happen, and it is where everybody got stuck for another twenty years after the stone was found.
Why matching them up does not work
Try it and the problems arrive at once.
The two texts are not the same length. Greek and Egyptian do not put their words in the same order, so the fourth Greek word is not sitting above the fourth Egyptian one. Egyptian writing leaves out most of its vowels. And there are far more hieroglyphic signs on the stone than there are Greek words, so the signs cannot be standing one-for-one for words at all.
You know the two texts say the same thing. You still cannot tell which mark means which.
The idea that kept the door shut
There was a worse problem, and it was not on the stone. It was in everybody's head.
For about fourteen hundred years nobody had been able to read hieroglyphs, and the standing belief was that each sign was a picture standing for an idea. A bird sign meant a bird, or the soul, or freedom. Wise, mysterious, picture-writing.
If that were true, the Rosetta Stone would barely help. You would know a passage meant the king gave gifts to the temples, and you would still be guessing which of a hundred signs carried "gift", and whether the bird meant "soul" or "sky" or nothing much at all.
The lock was not the language. It was the assumption.
The rings
Scattered through the hieroglyphic text are little groups of signs drawn inside a long oval loop, closed off at one end with a bar. Scholars had noticed them for years and called them cartouches. Whatever they held, the Egyptians had gone to the trouble of fencing it off from everything around it.
Reading the Greek tells you what sort of thing gets fenced off in a decree like this: the king's name. Ptolemy.
And a name is a very particular kind of word.
A name cannot be translated
This is the whole crack, and it is one sentence long.
You do not translate a name. You spell it.
A Greek king called Ptolemy who rules Egypt is still called Ptolemy in Egyptian. It has to sound the same, because sounding the same is what a name is for. So Egyptian scribes had no choice: to write a foreign king's name, they had to write down sounds.
Which means the signs inside that ring cannot be pictures of ideas. They must be letters. P, T, O, L, and so on.
The test that could have failed
One name proves very little. Guess that seven signs spell P-T-O-L-M-Y-S and you have a story, not a discovery. It might be coincidence and it might be wishful thinking, and plenty of earlier guesses had been exactly that.
What turns it into knowledge is a second name that shares letters with the first.
Another carved stone, from Philae, held a cartouche its Greek named as Cleopatra. Now set the two names out the way a speller would:
- P T O L E M Y
- C L E O P A T R A
They share p, t, o, l and e, and they use them in completely different positions. So the claim becomes checkable. If the signs really are sounds, the sign standing for p at the front of Ptolemy has to turn up fifth in Cleopatra. The l sign has to be fourth in one and second in the other. Nothing about the drawings needs to match. Only the jobs need to match.
They did.
Walk the deduction the way it actually ran. At each stage, notice what would have happened if it had come out the other way.
- Some sign-groups are drawn inside a ring. Nobody knows why yet, but the Egyptians clearly meant them to stand apart from the text around them.
- The Greek says the decree honours a king called Ptolemy. A royal name is exactly the sort of thing a script fences off.
- So guess: this ring holds Ptolemy. Give each sign in it the sound it would need to have for that guess to be true.
- Now the guess has to earn its keep. Find a different name in a ring somewhere else, on a different stone: Cleopatra, from Philae.
- Ptolemy and Cleopatra share p, t, o, l and e, in different positions. Carry your sounds across and see whether the signs land where they are obliged to land.
- They land. The shared letters match, position by position. The signs are sounds, and hieroglyphs can be read.
- One sign disagrees: the two names use different signs for t. That looked like the whole idea collapsing, and it was not. Egyptian simply has more than one sign for some sounds, the way English has both c and k.
That last stage is the honest part. The test very nearly failed, and the near-miss taught something the clean version never would: a script can have two spellings for one sound and still be perfectly readable.
What the signs turned out to be
Once names had forced the door open, hieroglyphs turned out to be stranger and better than either camp had guessed. They are not pictures of ideas, and they are not an alphabet. They are both at once, plus a third thing.
- Some signs are sounds, like the letters in the rings.
- Some signs are whole words, a picture that really does mean the thing it shows.
- Some signs are silent. They sit at the end of a word and tell you which sort of word it was, so you know whether the sounds you just read mean a kind of boat or a kind of bird.
That third kind is why fourteen hundred years of guessing got nowhere. Some signs are pictures and some are letters, and only the writing itself tells you which is which.
Why could a royal name crack the script when an ordinary word could not?
- Royal names were carved larger, so they were easier to make out
- A name has to sound the same in any language, so its signs must be recording sounds rather than ideas
- Kings were the only people whose words also appeared in the Greek text
- The ring drawn around a name contained a written key to the other signs
When there is no second script
It is worth knowing what this method needs, because sometimes it simply is not there.
The Minoans on Crete wrote too, in a script we call Linear A. We have their tablets. We can copy every mark on them. And nobody can read a word of it, because no Minoan ever wrote the same text out again in a language we already know, and no ring has yet handed us a name we can spell.
That is the difference between a hard problem and a locked one. Egypt had a stone that said the same thing twice. Crete, so far, does not.