In August 1799, French sappers were digging trenches on the outskirts of Rosetta, a town near Alexandria. General Bonaparte (since 1804 - Emperor of France Napoleon I), who invaded the country, was preparing for a decisive struggle for Egypt with other invaders - Turkish and British, and his troops fortified their strongholds on the coast with feverish speed.
Suddenly, the shovel of one of the sappers clinked against the stone. It was a massive slab of black basalt covered with mysterious, well-hewn writing. The commander of the detachment ordered to clear it of dust and dirt and deliver it to the headquarters.
The French scientists accompanying Bonaparte quickly established that the writing on the slab was of three types. The bottom 54 lines were written in Greek and were easy to read and translate. They contained a decree of the Egyptian priests from 196 BC. e., glorifying the king Ptolemy V Epiphanes, who ruled in 203 -181. BC e. This king, a foreigner by birth, a Macedonian, was a calculating politician and knew how to get along with an influential priesthood. For this, the priests in their decree proclaimed him "a good god."
Above this text were depicted some bizarre icons: bows, dashes, hooks. This part of the inscription was made in colloquial Egyptian in cursive, so-called demotic (from the Greek word "demoticos" - folk) script. Even higher, in a graceful pattern, were countless drawings - men, birds, snakes, reeds, baskets, etc. (this was the oldest drawing letter of the Egyptians - hieroglyphs), and the text was written in the ancient Egyptian language, long forgotten. It was clear to the scientists that all three inscriptions contain the same text of the decree. But not a single scientist in Bonaparte's camp was able to read the ancient Egyptian signs. After all, 15 centuries have passed since the last wise men who read and understood these mysterious letters died and took their secret to the grave, as many thought then, forever.
Several years have passed. The military expedition of Napoleon Bonaparte to Egypt ended in failure. The Rosetta stone as a trophy of the British came to London and was placed in the British Museum, but a copy from it after the conclusion of the peace in 1802 was delivered to Paris. There it was subsequently studied by the young French explorer Jean Francois Champollion (1790-1832). He was a very gifted person. From childhood he became interested in the history of distant countries, especially Egypt. Later, he studied over a dozen ancient and new languages, including Coptic, which was created on the basis of ancient Egyptian (Coptic was spoken in Egypt in the Middle Ages).
Champollion decided at all costs to unravel the hieroglyphic inscription on the Rosetta stone. It seemed that it was not so difficult. After all, there was a Greek translation nearby. But in reality, the riddle turned out to be much more complicated. Many scientists from different countries have tried to solve it, but failed. Champollion himself did not immediately find the right path.
First of all, it was necessary to determine what each drawing means - a letter or a whole word. In 14 lines of the hieroglyphic text, of which only three survived completely, and the rest were badly damaged, 166 different signs were repeated in various combinations! The Egyptians could not have had so many letters! There are not so many sounds in any language.
Then, perhaps, each character conveyed a whole word consisting of several letters, as, for example, in our country the number sign means the word “number”? Such semantic signs are called ideograms. But in 14 lines, judging by the parallel Greek translation, there should be no more than 500 words, and Champollion counted 1419 hieroglyphs: each of the 166 characters was repeated several times. How can these contradictions be explained?
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After long painful hesitation, the researcher came to an original guess, which was brilliantly confirmed later. He suggested that the ancient Egyptians used semantic signs (ideograms) interspersed with letters, sometimes even resorted to repetitions, believing that they would not harm. As we sometimes, having written the word "eight" with one sign 8, just in case we repeat in brackets (eight).
But how can one figure out the meaning of individual signs? Which ones are words and which ones are letters? And what kind of sound does this or that letter mean?
The letters had to be looked for primarily in proper names, the sound of which was already known. Fortunately, the name of Ptolemy, out of respect for the king, was enclosed in an oval frame, circled by the so-called cartouche (see figure on the right). It is clear that the first sign in the oval meant "n", the second - "t", and so on. But here a new obstacle arose. Among the Greeks, the name of Ptolemy consisted of 10 letters - Ptolemaios, and the Egyptians wrote it in only 7 letters (we pronounce it "Ptolemy").
Champollion remembered that there were no vowels in the Hebrew and Arabic languages. Maybe the Egyptians didn't have them either? However, then there should be not 7, but only 5 characters inside the cartouche. Again, the ends do not meet. Finally Champollion guessed that, as a rare exception, when it was necessary to write foreign names, the Egyptians also designated some vowel sounds close to them with half-consonants. Hence, two extra signs appeared.
Having analyzed exactly the name of the king, Champollion began to analyze other words. It turned out that the word "writing", as well as the words "lord", "god" and some others, was written by one symbolic sign, depicting a writing device, that is, it was actually drawn. But the word "monument" was written in five characters, of which the last one was an illustration (the image of a semicircular stone slab).
So, gradually, word by word, with great difficulty, François Champollion began to read the ancient Egyptian inscriptions.
On September 14, 1822 Champollion was first convinced that he could read and translate any ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic text. Excited, he rushed into the office of his brother - Professor Jacques Joseph Champollion - and threw several sheets of paper on his table with a shout: "You have a discovery in your hands!" - after which he lost consciousness from overwork.
On September 27 of the same year, he already made a report on his discovery at the Paris Academy. Later, Francois Champollion read and explained a number of ancient Egyptian texts: chronicles, songs, incantations, etc. Champollion laid the foundation for a new science - Egyptology. In 1828 his cherished dream came true: he traveled to Egypt and made copies of inscriptions on the walls of temples and tombs, on statues and obelisks. But a terrible mental stress undermined his health. In the midst of his research work, only 42 years old, François Champollion died of nervous exhaustion. His work was continued by scientists from a number of countries, including the Egyptologists of our homeland. Among them are such outstanding scientists as academician B. A. Turaev, academician V. V. Struve, and others.
In addition to inscriptions on stone slabs (like the one known to us Rosetta), papyrus sheets were found. On such sheets, Egyptian scribes applied signs with a split reed, dipping it in black and red ink. The outstanding Russian Egyptologist V. S. Golenishchev brought several very valuable papyri with interesting inscriptions from Egypt to Moscow. On one of them, an Egyptian mathematics teacher who lived almost 4 millennia ago wrote down arithmetic problems and geometric theorems. On the other, you can read the account of the journey of the Egyptian Unuamon to Phenicia, made 3 thousand years ago. Many other papyri are kept in the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.