23/09/2020

In Folha, Viana recalls the discovery of the Rosetta Stone.

Napoleão Bonaparte, na campanha do Egito, foi acompanhado por grande número dos melhores cientistas do seu tempo. Imagem: Jacques Louis David/Wikimedia Commons

Reproduction of Marcelo Viana's column in Folha de S.Paulo.

In 1798, the young and ambitious French general Napoleon Bonaparte crossed the Mediterranean with his armies, heading towards the city of Alexandria. His objective was to conquer Egypt, aiming to block rival England's access to India. Despite initial successes, the expedition was a military failure. Defeated by the British and Ottoman coalition, Napoleon secretly returned to France to engage in political struggle, leaving his soldiers to return as best they could.

But on another level, the Egyptian campaign was a huge success. A man of vision, the future emperor was accompanied on the expedition by a large number of the best scientists of his time, whose discoveries had a profound impact on the science and technology of Europe.

The most famous discovery was undoubtedly that of the so-called Rosetta Stone, a fragment of a granite stele found in July 1799 by a French officer near the city of Rosetta. It contained three versions of the same text, a decree promulgated in 196 BC by Pharaoh Ptolemy V: one version in Greek and two in Egyptian, in Demotic and Hieroglyphic script.

It was the first known example of a multilingual Egyptian text and attracted enormous interest. Stone copies and plaster casts were quickly produced and circulated. When the French signed the Act of Surrender in Alexandria in 1801, one of the conditions imposed by the British was the handover of the Rosetta Stone, which was taken to London. It remains there to this day, in the British Museum, despite requests from Egyptian authorities for its return to its origin.

Knowledge of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was lost at the beginning of our era, when the country became a mere province of the Roman Empire, and by the time of the Napoleonic campaign it constituted one of the most intriguing scientific mysteries. Since ancient Greek was well known to specialists, the Rosetta Stone provided the key to solving the mystery. This was finally achieved in 1822 when the French philologist Jean-François Champollion published translations of the two Egyptian versions of the text, based on a comparison with the Greek.

Until then, it was believed that every hieroglyph was an ideogram, that is, a symbol representing, by itself, an object or an idea. But the study of the Rosetta Stone showed that the Egyptians also used phonetic symbols, like our letters. Other multilingual texts were found later, but the original Stone has a fundamental historical role. To such an extent that the expression "Rosetta Stone" is used as a synonym for the key to solving a scientific problem.

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