The Writing of the Gods - Edward Dolnick

Summary

• This is the story of how 2 men decoded the Rosetta stone - and thus came to understand how to read hieroglyphics. It is surprisingly gripping, and ties in with bible history. Strongly recommended.
• The two men were both geniuses, but totally different characters. Thomas Young was a British polymath and Jean-François Champollion loved everything to do with Egypt.

How I discovered it

• Recommended by Kerry. Thanks, Kerry!

How the book changed me

• I learned a lot about Egyptian culture, and hieroglyphs, and how hard archaeology is. It is a fascinating text.

Details

• When Napoleon tried to invade Egypt, the pyramids and temples had been famous for a long time, but nobody knew anything about them, why they were built, or by who.
• All that was known was that while Europe were living as barbarians in caves, Egyptian pharoahs were reigning a great civilization.
• Even after the rise of Rome as a world power, Egypt still outdid the Romans for class and civilization. Alexandria, the capital of Egypt was the largest city in the world. It was as Paris today: center of parks, fashion, and grandeur. Its library boasted thousands of scrolls, at a time when each one was laboriously hand copied. The greatest scholars of the time like Euclid and Archimedes were drawn to Alexandria.
• Egypt as a civilization was incredibly long lived: 26 centuries after the Great Pyramid came Cleopatra presiding over the decline of the Egyptian power.
• The Egyptians wrote down everything and hence we know much about them even thousands of years later, and all that is understood because of the Rosetta stone being deciphered.
• The two geniuses, Young and Champollion were very different. Young was versatile, being able to think in any discipline he cared to set his sights on. Champollion was single-minded and focussed entirely on Egypt.
• Thinking is hard work
• Hieroglyphs were hard to understand for a reason: Even theough they looks like pictures, they represent sounds. sometimes. Sometimes they do represent words. And sometimes they represent ideas. Sometimes they read from left to right, and sometimes from right to left.
• Of course the phonetic ones represent sounds in a dead language, just to add to the difficulty.

References

• The Rosetta stone is a stela that had 3 texts in classical greek, hieroglyphs and demotic that had the same message: proclaiming the glory of King Ptolemy V in 196BCE.