Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm editor Key and Just Gibson joined my staff writer
Speaker 1: Jane Grahams. Hey there, Jane. When you think of ancient Egypt,
Speaker 1: what comes to mind? Mummies? Yeah, I think of Pyramid
Speaker 1: and Cleopatra with her crazy black eyeliner. And I guess
Speaker 1: everyone wore a black outline and it wasn't so crazy.
Speaker 1: I think it actually helped deflect the sun, or it's
Speaker 1: sort of some sort of very practical purpose. It wasn't
Speaker 1: just cosmetic. I'm wearing mine day to look cool and
Speaker 1: super goth, not to deflict this one, not to depose
Speaker 1: it's you know, it's kind of wintry and hazy out
Speaker 1: the other day. The point being that all that we
Speaker 1: think about ancient Egypt, and all of the Egyptian lore
Speaker 1: that we know, and everything you know about mummies and
Speaker 1: farrows and tout and Clepatra and Ramsey's we take it
Speaker 1: for grant in it, I think, but there was a
Speaker 1: really long period of time that no one really knew
Speaker 1: what ancient Egypt was all about. Like they could see
Speaker 1: these things that their eyes, but they were mysteries to them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they knew this was a huge civilization obviously, but
Speaker 1: we didn't really know the secrets of what happened during
Speaker 1: the time that it rained and was so powerful because, uh,
Speaker 1: the language was sort of forgotten and the and so
Speaker 1: the inscriptions that were written about it could not be
Speaker 1: translated and language aside. It was almost like the fascination
Speaker 1: we have today with with Mars and outer space and
Speaker 1: imagining that there may be people out there. It's popular
Speaker 1: culture to us because there's no scientific or historical basis,
Speaker 1: and that's how Egypt wise, it was very much a
Speaker 1: subject of popular culture. And well that may strike you
Speaker 1: as funny if you're sitting in school today maybe and
Speaker 1: you've got a thirty minute lecture about one of the pharaohs.
Speaker 1: Um imagine that back during the time that Napoleon was
Speaker 1: in power in France, people dabbled in Egypt. People collected
Speaker 1: parts of Egypt, and they would they would buy, like
Speaker 1: collectors for collectors, items from Egypt themselves, and like the
Speaker 1: Egyptians who didn't quite know what they're worth, right exactly.
Speaker 1: And that's the thing that we should mention too, is
Speaker 1: that not even the Egyptians knew what their cultures about.
Speaker 1: It was all just just fun in games really that
Speaker 1: you could go into these pyramids and you could find gold,
Speaker 1: or you could find mummies, or you could find artifacts
Speaker 1: and and pawn it off and make some change. And
Speaker 1: and that all changed once Napoleon invaded Egypt. That's so
Speaker 1: funny to me that Egyptian France have such a strong
Speaker 1: high as fire as deciphering their history. But that's kind
Speaker 1: of how it went. Yeah, it's interesting. It's pretty cool. Actually,
Speaker 1: look at when Napoleon did, when he was trying to
Speaker 1: get power over the strategic position where Egypt was, he
Speaker 1: gathered this he had. He took his soldiers, but he
Speaker 1: also took a troop of academics basically scientists, chemists, even zoologists.
Speaker 1: And he called him up and he's like this super
Speaker 1: secret mission and just say that you're doing this really
Speaker 1: good of France and we're gonna, you know, study the
Speaker 1: culture and see what's going on. And I would just
Speaker 1: love it if like the President called me up today
Speaker 1: and was like, Jane, we need you for a secret
Speaker 1: academic mission and leave you to come to this mysterious
Speaker 1: land with this that hells this mysterious civilization and find
Speaker 1: out what it's all about. It must have been amazing.
Speaker 1: And Napoleon was nothing if not a shrewd leader, and
Speaker 1: so he didn't just plan to invade Egypt. He planned
Speaker 1: a very thorough infiltration. So this group of academics, it
Speaker 1: was called the Institute of Egypt, they set up camp
Speaker 1: alongside the soldiers, and unfortunately things went a little bad
Speaker 1: military wise, and the French were essentially cut off. All
Speaker 1: their ships were destroyed, they had no way out and
Speaker 1: they were sort of stranded in Egypt for at eighteen years. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's true. It's interesting because he went. Napoleon landed with
Speaker 1: his troops and stuff. He was successful for a little while.
Speaker 1: He captured Alexandria, he won the Battle of the Pyramids.
Speaker 1: But then um, sort of by accident, this British uh
Speaker 1: general or admiral, I should say, Horatio Nelson saw his
Speaker 1: ships off the coast and they didn't have Um Napoleon
Speaker 1: in it, but he destroyed the ships themselves. So they
Speaker 1: were stranded there. Um Napoleon and his troops and there's
Speaker 1: a lot that you could accomplish in eighteen years, and
Speaker 1: they really did. They ended up writing a multi volume
Speaker 1: work all about Egypt. But before that ever happened, they
Speaker 1: had to build reinforcements. They had to build forts, they
Speaker 1: had to build strongholds. And when the soldiers were at work,
Speaker 1: they were tearing down walls of an old temple, I think,
Speaker 1: and starting to erect a new Fortnit's place, and a
Speaker 1: soldier stumbled across this shiny piece of black basalt, and
Speaker 1: it had all of these inscriptions in it, and there
Speaker 1: were three distinct types of inscriptions, and he thought, I
Speaker 1: don't know what this is, but it looks important. So
Speaker 1: he took it over to the scholars, which was really handy,
Speaker 1: and they couldn't quite tell what it was either for
Speaker 1: a while. But they called this piece of basalt the
Speaker 1: Rosetta stone because it was found in the town of Rozetta.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't huge, but it wasn't small either. It
Speaker 1: was sort of about the size of maybe a small
Speaker 1: coffee table, and it was pretty happy because it was
Speaker 1: done maybe like a medium sized L C D television
Speaker 1: or something like that, if you think about it in
Speaker 1: those terms. So they thought they knew it was really important,
Speaker 1: even though they couldn't quite figure out why. Um. But
Speaker 1: so they wanted to hang onto it um first and
Speaker 1: foremost for Napoleon. But when the English obviously had their
Speaker 1: hold over over France in that area of the English
Speaker 1: were really adamant that they handed over. Yeah, I said,
Speaker 1: by the Treaty of Capitulation, they had to give it
Speaker 1: over to the British. But the French were pretty quick thinking,
Speaker 1: so they made some copies that first of all, and
Speaker 1: that was more really really smart. So the British had
Speaker 1: the original rosettas down, the French had copies of it,
Speaker 1: and both camps set to work trying to figure out
Speaker 1: what it was. And this is pretty it was pretty hard.
Speaker 1: Like when I when I learned about the Rosetta stom
Speaker 1: back in school. I guess I just learned the basic
Speaker 1: facts that it was the key to figuring out hieroglyphics.
Speaker 1: But it's interesting to look at the history because it
Speaker 1: actually took them quite a while to actually figure out
Speaker 1: and crack the code. It really did, and it had
Speaker 1: three different types of writing on it. That's radeed had Greek,
Speaker 1: which was relatively well known a time by academics, and
Speaker 1: Demotic and which is sort of a subset of hieroglyphics,
Speaker 1: and hieroglyphix itself. So these three different strata of languages,
Speaker 1: and we know from the Greek that was the easiest
Speaker 1: to interpret because, like you said, scholars did no Greek,
Speaker 1: and the Reverend Stephen Weston actually interpreted that. In April
Speaker 1: eighteen o two, we realized that the stone was dated
Speaker 1: from March b C. What scholars later found out is
Speaker 1: that it was one in a series of stella, essentially
Speaker 1: like a religious or governmental decree written on stone, and
Speaker 1: these were very, very common in Egypt. It was almost
Speaker 1: like the Ten Commandments being on a tablet. This was
Speaker 1: what people did. I mean, the Egyptians later have a
Speaker 1: pyr respect for the time being, you know, we're putting
Speaker 1: their writing on stone. And there were so many that
Speaker 1: this one there was that a stone really is not
Speaker 1: that significant, and then rand scheme of things. The actual
Speaker 1: message on it is not that the message on is
Speaker 1: not that riveting. I think basically it talks about how
Speaker 1: the pharaoh is a good person, the pharaoh respects the gods,
Speaker 1: the pharaoh is humble ergo, let's all honor the pharaoh.
Speaker 1: But it was the key to deciphering hieroglyphics that makes
Speaker 1: it so memorable today. So here's what happened with hieroglyphics
Speaker 1: back when Egypt was its own entity and I didn't
Speaker 1: really have any other outside parties bothering it at years
Speaker 1: the language of hieroglyphics, and this was a very spiritual
Speaker 1: and reverend sort of way of writing. So yeah, no,
Speaker 1: not everybody knew how to write hieroglyphics, Like it was
Speaker 1: reserved to like um, the particular carvers and um it
Speaker 1: had a specific purpose, like it was either for religious
Speaker 1: writing or like governmental writing, right, and then they decided
Speaker 1: they needed a more pedestrian language that everyone could use
Speaker 1: and everyone could write in. So then we have Heiradic
Speaker 1: and this was easier, right to to write on like papyrus,
Speaker 1: you know, and it was smooth to like it was
Speaker 1: sort of like a cursive version. There you go, and
Speaker 1: the same process continued, and by then we have different
Speaker 1: parties coming into Egypt and different cultures influencing them. We
Speaker 1: have Demotic, which evolves next, and that's a simplification of Herradic,
Speaker 1: simplification of hieroglyphics. And then finally when Christians start coming
Speaker 1: into Egypt and the culture and religion drastically changed, we
Speaker 1: have Coptic, and this uses Coptic uses a group of
Speaker 1: Greek alphabet mostly, but then there were some things that
Speaker 1: the Greek Greek alphabet had that Egyptian language didn't, so
Speaker 1: they incorporated some sort of hieroglyphic like characters in it exactly.
Speaker 1: So the reason that that Rosetta stone had three different
Speaker 1: languages on it is because they wanted to make sure
Speaker 1: everyone could read this stone. The decree was public for everyone,
Speaker 1: and like we said, not that interesting to decree, but
Speaker 1: very public nonetheless. So after west End translated the Greek,
Speaker 1: the next step was trying to go ahead and do
Speaker 1: the demotic, because that seems the next easiest to do.
Speaker 1: And there were two men who did that relatively contemporary
Speaker 1: of one another, and that was Johann David her Blood
Speaker 1: and Antoine sylvest To say sye, that's right. And these
Speaker 1: people sort of new Coptic relatively well, like they had
Speaker 1: studied Coptic before, and so they had an easier time
Speaker 1: translating the demonic exactly. But hieroglyphics was a very persistent mystery.
Speaker 1: And one of the reasons for that was that a
Speaker 1: fifth century scholar, a Greek scholar named Parapolo put out
Speaker 1: the idea that hieroglyphics were characters representative of symbols or allegories.
Speaker 1: And so, I mean, think about it. If someone told
Speaker 1: you that, um, little white dogs were representative of all
Speaker 1: things evil, it would be really, really hard for you
Speaker 1: to shake the idea that little white dogs were bad. Like,
Speaker 1: no matter how you tried to change your ideology in
Speaker 1: your way of thinking, you would always have in the
Speaker 1: back of your mind stay away from little white dogs.
Speaker 1: And that's what scholars were encountering as they went through
Speaker 1: this interpretation process was that hieroglyphics translated to symbols and allegories.
Speaker 1: So they took this horror Apollo's idea and ran with it.
Speaker 1: And they just assumed this was right, that that one
Speaker 1: character represents an idea basically, and it's not. They assumed
Speaker 1: that it was not like English, for instance, which had
Speaker 1: an alphabet where letters have a sound attached to them.
Speaker 1: But that's exactly what it was, and no one figured
Speaker 1: that out until years later. So running with this idea
Speaker 1: that hieroglyphics represents symbols that Thomas Young came along in
Speaker 1: eighteen fourteen and he discovered the cartouche, which was essentially
Speaker 1: a loop around a group of hieroglyphic letters. And he
Speaker 1: realized that only proper names were the ones and a cartouche,
Speaker 1: because he was able to discern the name Ptolemy, and
Speaker 1: he knew that from you know, the Ptolemic grewers who
Speaker 1: had rulers who would come in and he knew that
Speaker 1: they would have you know, some help and signified and
Speaker 1: mentioned in a governmental decree. So that's at the standard
Speaker 1: for looking for cartouche's. But he was still working on
Speaker 1: Hollapolo's um hypothesis, so he couldn't really go much further
Speaker 1: than that, right, so he was very limited. Well along
Speaker 1: time stant Pallion and he knew from a very very
Speaker 1: young age that he was destined for something great. And
Speaker 1: people knew what hieroglyphics were, and they knew that no
Speaker 1: one had mastered them. Like it was very much a
Speaker 1: challenge that I think people aspired to, sort of a
Speaker 1: patriotic challenge to because, like you said, Thomas Young he
Speaker 1: was he was actually British and so he was fighting
Speaker 1: to translate the hieroglyphics first for for England, you know,
Speaker 1: UM and Champoleion was was French and because they found it,
Speaker 1: they really wanted to translate it. First two and he
Speaker 1: was a very very serious scholar, almost like Albert Einstein
Speaker 1: of of France. At this time, he was very withdrawn,
Speaker 1: he was sort of erratic and his behavior. He was
Speaker 1: considered sort of an unusual character. And even at birth
Speaker 1: people said he looked like he was Egyptian because he had,
Speaker 1: you know, a darker skin tone, and his eyes were
Speaker 1: a little bit more and more yellowish looking. He didn't
Speaker 1: look like a Frenchman. And so he was destined for me.
Speaker 1: He was destined for this. And I think that there's
Speaker 1: some sort of legend that even a fort and teller
Speaker 1: came in during his childbirth and said he was going
Speaker 1: to do something really great having to do with Egypt.
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's true, but it's sort of
Speaker 1: fun to think about. So his whole life he knew
Speaker 1: that he was going to master hieroglyphics, and even to
Speaker 1: the point that his older brother had to care for
Speaker 1: him essentially because he wasn't feeding himself properly, he had
Speaker 1: no money, he could barely sustain his own life. And
Speaker 1: well that makes sense, no, because I heard um that
Speaker 1: he fainted when he actually translated the first thing, and
Speaker 1: he was now nourished that his brother actually was able
Speaker 1: to keep him out of military service. He said that
Speaker 1: Chimpallion was doing a greater service to his country by
Speaker 1: trying to crack hyerglyphics than he would in the military.
Speaker 1: And and good thing too, because I don't think he
Speaker 1: would have been a very good soldier. I think he've
Speaker 1: been pretty unhappy in that post. And if he's a fainter,
Speaker 1: I don't think you lest, no, not that much. So
Speaker 1: he's working off Thomas Young's cartouche and he starts to
Speaker 1: see a couple of different hieroglyphics symbols that he is
Speaker 1: parsing out, and he comes up with the idea, well,
Speaker 1: what if each symbol relates to a sound, and he
Speaker 1: discovers the name Ramsey's using just a couple of figures
Speaker 1: trailing in the ladder, and one of the first his
Speaker 1: first clues was seeing this circle with a dot in
Speaker 1: the middle, and he was like, you know what that
Speaker 1: could be the sun? It has you know, he made
Speaker 1: this this sleep of faith that you know that maybe
Speaker 1: that's the sun. And he knew that in a related
Speaker 1: language that the sun uh, the word for sun was raw,
Speaker 1: and so using the phonetic like the sound of it,
Speaker 1: he was able to eventually find out that this name
Speaker 1: was Ramsey's. And I think he saw two more characters
Speaker 1: that were very clearly meant to be s s. He
Speaker 1: had r a blank as blank ass and he knows
Speaker 1: a proper name. He knews a proper name. Who else
Speaker 1: would have been famous in Egypt at that time Ramsay's
Speaker 1: And so that was it, and he fainted, commenced painting.
Speaker 1: There you go. And that's not to say that after
Speaker 1: Champoleon essentially translated that one name from higher glyphics, this
Speaker 1: still was a very pain stanking and laborious process people
Speaker 1: had to go through, and there were many, many things
Speaker 1: to be translated. But I think that brought about a
Speaker 1: lot of excitement because now Egypt and the field of
Speaker 1: Egyptology that sprang from it, it was a sanctified field
Speaker 1: and archaeology and history and science. It wasn't just a
Speaker 1: matter of popular culture. It was kind of sad for
Speaker 1: people who realized all of a sudden, oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: I've been selling priceless mommies and here's what they mean,
Speaker 1: and who knows who has it now. I think some
Speaker 1: of them were even shipped off to Europe ground depth
Speaker 1: and um, mom if I remained swallowed, that's right, like
Speaker 1: the medieval times. Yeah, so all these these artifacts were
Speaker 1: very far flung around the world. But now at last
Speaker 1: people knew what the history was. And this you know,
Speaker 1: like you said, it was both academic and sort of
Speaker 1: a fed in social areas too, and so um, people
Speaker 1: were like obsessed with the culture now and there were
Speaker 1: fights with like the museum, Like obviously England had the
Speaker 1: Rosetta stone, and they were also getting all this stuff
Speaker 1: that that France had had gotten in Egypt, and so
Speaker 1: there was this like academic fight sort of. And even
Speaker 1: to this day people still debate who the real victor
Speaker 1: is France or England, because clearly Chambolian was, you know,
Speaker 1: the Frenchman who ultimately discovered hieroglyphics and the key behind
Speaker 1: it with the sound corresponding to the word. But on
Speaker 1: the other hand, Thomas Young, the Englishman, if he hadn't
Speaker 1: discovered the meaning of the cartouche, where the Champoleon have
Speaker 1: been without that? So um, I think they debate back
Speaker 1: and forth today. And I think that the Rosetta stone
Speaker 1: also went on display in France for a while for
Speaker 1: a celebration of its discovery, and there were rumors at
Speaker 1: the French were plotting to just steal it. And and
Speaker 1: even today I think that Egypt is opening up a
Speaker 1: museum in the not too distant future and they had
Speaker 1: wanted to bring the Rosetta Stone home to display it.
Speaker 1: That's right. I mean, it's understandable, like like you see
Speaker 1: England and France or whatever fighting over this and they're like, hey,
Speaker 1: it's kind of ours. It came from Egypt, stole it
Speaker 1: from us. But because it is so heavy and frattle
Speaker 1: and then will they would be very difficult to transport it.
Speaker 1: So I think you have discussion is still in the
Speaker 1: works and we shall see what happens in the interim.
Speaker 1: You can find out more about Ancient Egypt, modern Egypt,
Speaker 1: ancient civilizations in general, and there's other stone on how
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