Crack The Hieroglyphic Code

[Florencia Abila]

Theuse of hieroglyphics died out after the 4th century and the writing system became an enigma to scholars, making the stone an essential tool in helping researchers understand the long-forgotten language.

The artifact was originally displayed in a temple, possibly near the ancient town of Sais. Centuries later, it was moved to Rosetta and was used in the construction of Fort Julien, where it was eventually uncovered by the French. The Rosetta Stone came into the possession of the British after they defeated the French in Egypt in 1801.

The first two worksheets detail a list of common hieroglyphics and gives each of them an associated letter in the English alphabet. It also contains a list of tasks for pupils to complete, such as working out words from a sequence of hieroglyphics or writing your name.

I am writing lecture notes for a course in the history of mathematics (University of Stavanger), and am looking for easily accessible ways to type hieroglyphs. There exists a Unicode Character code chart for Egyptian hieroglyphs. Each hieroglyphic character is coded by five digits. Apparently this is not supported by Inkscape (I have version 0.48).

As you walk through our new Hall of Ancient Egypt, you might wonder how we know so much today about a civilization that thrived thousands of years ago. Here is how we got there: For most of the Middle Ages and even during the Renaissance, ancient Egypt was a vague concept in the Western world, most often associated with Biblical history. All of that changed in 1798.

The month of July 1799 was of utmost importance in the history of deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. Sometime around the middle of that month, Pierre Franois Xavier Bouchard, an officer of the Engineers, found what we now call the Rosetta stone. He was working on reinforcing the defenses of a small fort on the west bank of the Nile, near the small port of el-Rashid (the ancient Rosetta).

Bouchard realized that the stone slab he had found was part of a larger stela inscribed in three scripts. The stone was cleaned, and the ancient Greek text of the inscription translated. Among other things, the Greek text conveyed the order that the inscription be recorded in three different scripts: ancient Greek on the bottom portion, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs in the top portion. The middle portion was initially thought to have been ancient Syriac; we now know that it is demotic.

By August 31, 1801, the last French units to offer resistance surrendered in Alexandria. By then, the Rosetta Stone had been transported from Cairo to Alexandria to keep it in the hands of French explorers and out of the hands of anyone else. But it was not to be. The victorious British forces took possession of the Stone, after allowing the French scholars to make a cast of the monument. A British warship carrying the Rosetta Stone arrived in Portsmouth in February 1802. It was placed in the London-based Society of Antiquaries, where several plaster casts were made. Engravings made of the inscription were made and widely distributed throughout Europe and even the United States.

Even though the inscription is known as the Rosetta Stone, referring to the ancient settlement of Rosetta, it is most likely that the stela fragment was brought to Rosetta as construction material from a more ancient site further inland. It is also probable that it was already broken by the time it was moved to the site of its discovery (p. 26).**

Based on similar decrees of the same period, it is likely that the original shape of the Rosetta Stone included a rounded top, as can be seen in the reconstruction drawing (p.26).** The shape of the monument can also be seen toward the end of the last line of the hieroglyphic text.

The decipherment of the Rosetta stone involved the contributions of many individuals. Among these were Swedish scholar kerblad; two British men, Bankes, a collector of antiquities, and a linguist, Young. Across the Channel, there were two Frenchmen, the orientalist de Sacy and a fellow by the name of Champollion.

We all benefit from the hard work of these pioneers and those who came after them. They made it possible to read a vast corpus of ancient Egyptian texts. Texts carved in stone, like the Rosetta text, as well as those painted on pottery shards and shell, or carved in wood, are on display at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. Each in their own way lift the veil of this distant past. Their messages vary from prayers on a papyrus to a medal issued to a soldier; all help us to understand what it must have been like to walk and talk like an ancient Egyptian.

Until 200 years ago, no one in the modern era could understand Egyptian hieroglyphs; ancient Egyptian was essentially a lost language. The fact that historians can now read and understand hieroglyphic inscriptions is down to an act of archaeological prowess involving a fairly banal, but ancient legal text chiseled onto a world-famous stone.

The Rosetta Stone, a carving of a proclamation issued in 196 B.C., proved so useful in decoding Egyptian hieroglyphs because the decree was repeated three times over. The first was written in hieroglyphs and the second in the demotic script, a cursive form of ancient Egyptian similar in style to written Arabic. The third version was in ancient Greek. Because ancient Greek was understood, this provided a route to decode the ancient Egyptian language.

They looked at patterns of variation within the script to see if that could offer clues. Certain sequences of symbols only appeared on tablets that were found on the island of Crete, but not on those discovered on the Greek mainland. This led the decoders to suppose that the sequences were therefore place names on the island, which turned out to be true. From this deduction, they were able to work backwards to translate the whole text.

There are efforts to make translating ancient languages a more modern pursuit. Researchers at Macquarie University in Australia teamed up with experts from Google to use artificial intelligence with the aim of speeding up the process of translating ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs into English and Arabic.

A full immersion into understanding of Ancient Egypt will be enhanced by collateral events for LdM students, a cooking event, where participants will prepare and taste an ancient Egyptian recipe and a Treasure Hunt in the gallery aimed to decipher a hieroglyphic writing with a help of clues given by the curators of the exhibition. There will also be a special opening on Saturday October 7th on the occasion of the 19th Giornata del Contemporaneo (Contemporary Day).

Camnes is an international project of scientific excellence based in Florence that was founded in 2010 and studies the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean and Middle East. The university has established international relations with several private and public collaborators in order to further their scientific and anthropological studies of cultural heritage. Their exhibition activities aim to further their mission statement of preserving and educating the public about the history of the ancient societies through its showcased pieces of different media.

Widely viewed as one of the greatest civilizations of the Western Hemisphere, which peaked around A.D. 250-900, the Maya people of Mesoamerica are known to have been great astronomers who also developed sophisticated methods of agriculture and architecture. They built major cities with stone buildings and huge pyramid temples whose vestiges can still be found in one continuous territory that now lies in southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and the western part of Honduras.

Despite being studied for generations, there were many gaps in our knowledge of Mayan history that were not filled until the deciphering of the Maya's strange writings, whose mysteries were finally unraveled by a Soviet academic who was born near Kharkiv, 100 years ago this week.

"Yuri Knorozov was an integral part of the decipherment process of the Maya script," said Harri Kettunen, an adjunct professor of Latin American studies at the University of Helsinki and president of the European Association of Mayanists, who says the Ukrainian-born Russian linguist is now "popularly regarded as the man who single-handedly cracked the Maya code."

Knorozov, however, made a major breakthrough by providing compelling evidence that many of the Mayan glyphs were syllabic in nature, representing sounds rather than ideas and that these syllables could be used to decipher words and their meanings.

Although a combination of Cold War politics and academic rivalry meant that it took decades before his work was widely accepted, Knorozov's research is now lauded for the role it played in uncovering the secrets of the Maya.

"He was the first person to successfully demonstrate the phonetic nature of Mayan hieroglyphic writing," Kettunen told RFE/RL by e-mail. "However, it took a while before his work was acknowledged on the other side of the Iron Curtain."

Indeed, the story of how one lone scholar from the Soviet Union managed to convince the wider world that he had cracked the code of the Maya without actually setting foot in the Americas is now the stuff of academic legend, not least because -- like the ancient culture he studied -- Knorozov's life is shrouded in mystery, particularly when it comes to his formative years in Ukraine.

"From what I've learned, Knorozov wasn't the easiest student in school," said Kettunen, who interviewed the Soviet scholar one year before his death in 1999. "He had a will of his own and was described as eccentric. However, teachers apparently recognized his intelligence and artistic skills, including playing the violin and writing poetry."

Not long afterward, his studies were interrupted by the outbreak of World War II, although his fragile health meant he was deemed unfit for military service. During the German occupation of eastern Ukraine in 1941, Kettunen says Knorozov spent some time living "in his native village...and its surroundings, hiding from mobilizations, trying to provide for his family -- and immerse himself in Egyptian hieroglyphs when he could."

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