A remarkable effort but one performed by a Frenchman after the French robbed the Rosetta Stone from Egypt (and then later robbed by the English from the French). A European scholar was given the opportunity for this grand achievement while their Egyptian peers had to work from the European's notes.
OK cool, nice work. Now that you've done that... how about sending Egypt their stuff back?
Fact of the matter is, Egypt exists in an incredibly unstable place. I am friends with native Egyptians that do not go back to their home country. I’d prefer that all artifacts were returned, but I also find posts like this to be ignorant of, you know, the last eight or ten thousand years of human history where people simply pillaged and moved on. How much does it really matter that Egypt wants the Rosetta Stone back so bad, when the fact of the matter is that Egypt’s own interest in this stuff - as historical pieces for a museum, and not a quick buck - is much more recent than either of us would prefer to admit?
I'm not terribly concerned about how recent Egypt's request to have their treasures returned are. They were stolen hundreds of years ago, now they want it back. I don't see any good reason why that request should not be honored that doesn't boil down to racism. The Egyptian people have a right to their own history, and claiming that they simply can't be trusted with their own heritage is a statement only a white person would think is reasonable.
I didn't claim Egypt can't be trusted, I said your judgment of the safety therein was - don't miscontrue that. As I said, I believe all artefacts should be returned to the stated country. As I implied, Egypt mainly cares about these things for the same reason the UK does - tourism money. The Rosetta Stone only matters because of the story attached to it, there are many other copies that have been found since. Egypt only clamors for its return because it wants to cash in on the hundreds of years of marketing around this object.
Also, I just find your reasoning reductive when it comes to things that happened hundreds and thousands of years ago. You are aware that the Rosetta Stone was written by Macedonian monarchs, who lived in a brand new city found by another Macedonian, who all spoke Greek, killed any Egyptian's that didn't submit to their rule, and refused to learn their language? ... You are aware that Ancient Egypt itself subjugated untold millions, pillaged their lands, carried off valuables, raided neighbors, harbored suspicion for outsiders, and would have done the exact same thing the French did, and or the exact same thing the British did in stealing it from them, since this is how they lived? Should Italy demand the Meroe head?
I have been in Cairo post Arab spring and it's a mess. They can get the stone back when the country is not a complete disaster. Will this ever happen? Probably no. Love how you assumed we are white! I'm actually green
Feels like someone rich and powerful stealing items from the houses of poor people on the basis that the things will be better protected in their safe, and then charging money for people to come look at them including the original owners
A few things that I'd like to highlight, regarding decipherment of older languages.
You can somewhat guess which kind of script you're dealing with, by counting how many different graphemes there are. Something around 20-40 and likely got an alphabet, abjad, or similar; 100-200 and you're likely handling a syllabary; for a thousand and above, then there are at least some logograms mixed in, or the script is fully logographic. Mixed systems also pop up from time to time.
Egyptian hieroglyphs are in large logographic, and those are specially messy to recover. What Champollion did towards the phonetic part was no simple feat.
Another caveat is that sometimes a script offers more than one grapheme for each sound or syllable, or multiple sounds are associated with a single grapheme. Latin is a great example of that, with ⟨V⟩ representing /u: ʊ w ɨ/ (as in OO "boot", U in "put", W in "was", and a closed version of the A in "about"), while that /ɨ/ wasn't associated with any specific letter, sometimes being represented with ⟨V⟩ or sometimes ⟨I⟩. So you can't simply rule out a sound/sequence for a certain grapheme, just because it's already represented by another grapheme.
Living relatives of a language can give you valuable clues. For Egyptian this would be Coptic, one of its descendants; you can somewhat see things from other Afro-Asiatic languages in its grammar, but they're simply too distant to give you any sort of
You also need to take into account that languages change over time, and often diverge quite a bit from place to place. For example, that might mean that your /ka/ (kah) from one text is actually /ʃe/ (sheh) in another, so you need to be fairly certain on the time period and location of your sources.
Context is king, queen, bishop, knight, tower, and pawns. It's everything; and without that context, you will not be able to do anything. For Egyptian that context was provided by the Greek part of the Rosetta Stone, because it offered pretty much the same text translated into three versions (Greek, Demotic, Hieroglyphic), so the Greek part provided context and translation for the rest.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 46.5 ms ] threadOK cool, nice work. Now that you've done that... how about sending Egypt their stuff back?
Also, I just find your reasoning reductive when it comes to things that happened hundreds and thousands of years ago. You are aware that the Rosetta Stone was written by Macedonian monarchs, who lived in a brand new city found by another Macedonian, who all spoke Greek, killed any Egyptian's that didn't submit to their rule, and refused to learn their language? ... You are aware that Ancient Egypt itself subjugated untold millions, pillaged their lands, carried off valuables, raided neighbors, harbored suspicion for outsiders, and would have done the exact same thing the French did, and or the exact same thing the British did in stealing it from them, since this is how they lived? Should Italy demand the Meroe head?
You can somewhat guess which kind of script you're dealing with, by counting how many different graphemes there are. Something around 20-40 and likely got an alphabet, abjad, or similar; 100-200 and you're likely handling a syllabary; for a thousand and above, then there are at least some logograms mixed in, or the script is fully logographic. Mixed systems also pop up from time to time.
Egyptian hieroglyphs are in large logographic, and those are specially messy to recover. What Champollion did towards the phonetic part was no simple feat.
Another caveat is that sometimes a script offers more than one grapheme for each sound or syllable, or multiple sounds are associated with a single grapheme. Latin is a great example of that, with ⟨V⟩ representing /u: ʊ w ɨ/ (as in OO "boot", U in "put", W in "was", and a closed version of the A in "about"), while that /ɨ/ wasn't associated with any specific letter, sometimes being represented with ⟨V⟩ or sometimes ⟨I⟩. So you can't simply rule out a sound/sequence for a certain grapheme, just because it's already represented by another grapheme.
Living relatives of a language can give you valuable clues. For Egyptian this would be Coptic, one of its descendants; you can somewhat see things from other Afro-Asiatic languages in its grammar, but they're simply too distant to give you any sort of
You also need to take into account that languages change over time, and often diverge quite a bit from place to place. For example, that might mean that your /ka/ (kah) from one text is actually /ʃe/ (sheh) in another, so you need to be fairly certain on the time period and location of your sources.
Context is king, queen, bishop, knight, tower, and pawns. It's everything; and without that context, you will not be able to do anything. For Egyptian that context was provided by the Greek part of the Rosetta Stone, because it offered pretty much the same text translated into three versions (Greek, Demotic, Hieroglyphic), so the Greek part provided context and translation for the rest.