Two hundred years ago, Jean-François Champollion deciphers the Rosetta Stone | Hacker News Reader

Two hundred years ago, Jean-François Champollion deciphers the Rosetta Stone

daily.jstor.org

165 pointssamizdis78 comments

> Its text praising the divine virtues of the pharaoh Ptolemy V

Unfortunately, this article repeats this common half-truth. It neglects to mention the news that the text of the Rosetta Stone actually announces: general debt forgiveness.

If one reads past the Rosetta Stone's long-winded introduction about how royal and divine and legitimate Ptolemy V is, the text eventually gets to the point, which is an announcement of official acts:

>under his reign [and as regards the sums which were due to the royal house] from the people of Egypt, and likewise those [which were due] from every one who was in his august service, His Majesty remitted them altogether, howsoever great they were...

It goes on in detail. Of course, this act is intended to consolidate political power, but why tell any history if that's all we can say about it? It's not common knowledge that general debt amnesties were a common feature of ancient economic life, and this kind of writing is perhaps why. Reducing an official act to "propaganda" is often just a way to dismiss governance that one disagrees with.

How did a debt amnesty work? Did that put private lenders out of pocket?

It was reasonably common in the ancient (Mediterranean) world iirc, so I guess there was some understanding or expectation around it from creditors. I think they didn’t really have bankruptcy and debts were inherited so this was the only way for them to be reset. I think there was also a story about Julius Caesar preventing a popular debt-resetting by himself taking on an enormous debt and then arguing that as Rome’s most indebted citizen, he would benefit the most and so it wouldn’t be fair for himself to forgive all debts and thereby his own.

> It's not common knowledge that general debt amnesties were a common feature of ancient economic life

Is the Jubilee not generally known or do you mean that debt forgiveness was more widespread than generally known?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_(biblical)

Thanks for this.

Wonder if it used to mean that borrowing for more than 7 years wasn’t a thing?

My impression is Jubilee is not generally known. Probably knowledge varies a lot by cultural context though (for me: American, non-Jewish).

The BBC radio programme In Our Time discussed the Rosetta Stone in Feb 2021. Three academic experts discuss the history of the stone and the efforts to decode the inscription. It's a very informative discussion.

The programme can be downloaded: The Rosetta Stone: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000s2qd

Description:

> Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most famous museum objects in the world. It is a damaged, dark granite block on which you can faintly see three scripts engraved: Greek at the bottom, Demotic in the middle and Hieroglyphs at the top.

> Napoleon’s soldiers found it in a Mamluk fort at Rosetta on the Egyptian coast, and soon realised the Greek words could be used to unlock the hieroglyphs. It was another 20 years before [Jean-François] Champollion deciphered them, becoming the first to understand the hieroglyphs since they fell out of use 1500 years before and so opening up the written culture of ancient Egypt to the modern age.

Every time I go to the British Museum, I always pass by the stone. It captures the imagination, even if you know that it's just a "propaganda piece".

Also, The British Museum is one of the greatest places on earth.

> Also, The British Museum is one of the greatest places on earth.

I second that opinion, but suggest that the museum's deserved popularity - especially with tourists - can often limit enjoyment of the environment, mostly because of queues and crowds.

For those who truly enjoy the BM, as a living, evolving resource and venue to be visited regularly, I'd suggest considering membership. It's £69 a year, and grants free access to otherwise paid exhibitions/events. It also grants attendance to members-only events outside usual museum hours. There's something really special about wandering the galleries during advent, with no crowds, and listening to live music (quartets, groups of singers etc) while drinking mulled wine and eating mince pies. Attending lectures, too, in which archaelologists and others discuss their digs and finds, is tremendously engaging. There's also a members' room in which to rest up.

For those with children, Young Friends membership for eight- to 15-year-olds is worth considering; I've paid for quite a few kids, and renewed year after year because they got so much out of the activities/experiences. The museum hosts Young Friends sleep-overs - some in the Egyptian section with the mummies.

Membership info: https://www.britishmuseum.org/membership

Young Friends: https://www.britishmuseum.org/membership/young-friends

> the museum's deserved popularity - especially with tourists - can often limit enjoyment of the environment

I'm always on vacation when in London so I try to go early morning on a weekday.

> I'd suggest considering membership. It's £69 a year, and grants free access to otherwise paid exhibitions/events.

I get the membership every time, even though I only go every couple of years. Sometimes it gets me into something but it's good to support the place.

> good to support the place

British people's taxes support the place. Giving them extra money is a bit like throwing some extra cash to help support the police whenever they stop you...

I support the police via donations. I doubt it's all that unusual.

You know they already get probably 70% of your cities budget, right?

You can view this data online and it is normally the schools that take the majority of the budget, and they still don't have enough money either. I have no idea where they live but it is possible their police are in need of donations, unlike perhaps LAPD/NYPD.

Since you mentioned it, I looked it up.

The sheriff dept I donate to gets about 30% of the county budget.

The city police get just over 10% of the city budget.

It is unusual. You’re giving donations to a fully state funded entity who get to keep what they seize and have one of the strongest unions in the US? Seems like an absolute waste of money.

I donate to the state police retirement fund occasionally, and I donate to the local shop with a sheriff, which I'm actually intending to go to the kids, but of course the sheriff is all about it and the one soliciting donations.

My business actually started the shop-with-a-sheriff in this county, although the new sheriff took it over after a couple of years.

I waste plenty of money, but I don't particularly feel like I'm wasting it here. You should meet the kids, and the deputies.

I know people who donate to the police retirement fund or whatever, in order to get the bumper sticker that proclaims that to any cop who pulls them over.

I'm not British. Also, why do you care where I put my money?

I had easy access to the display in 1983. Now it's usually surrounded by visitors 6-deep, very difficult to get near.

You are not in traffic, you are traffic

> The British Museum is one of the greatest places on earth.

Where treasures looted from other cultures are displayed ?

Not that I disagree with the general sentiment, but I'd be surprised if a National Museum of any country didn't have looted treasures. I'm not sure why the British are always singled out for this, and other countries conveniently ignored.

Other countries are not ignored, it's just that their looting pales in comparison and British culture gets talked about more by virtue of being in English.

CF : the next in line offender, our French friends in the Louvre.

Where the Rosetta stone would be if the British hadn't stolen it after the battle of Trafalgar.

Oh. As a French I did not know that. Those sneaky little thieves. Stilling our hardly acquired loot.

Typical.

I would rather go to the places these antiquities were from and visit in a museum there.

Another thing worth pointing out, the British Museum was founded with the objective of proving events written in the bible were based on historical events. Let's air all this dirty laundry while we are at it.

That's fascinating.

Maybe some day the Creation Museum in Kentucky (link omitted) will have the same longevity and benefits of colonial resource extraction.

I dunno—you set out to prove something about some battle recorded in the Bible, or whatever, you're gonna end up uncovering some real history (maybe even the kind you wanted!) probably, so there's a substantial connection to reality to drive the overall process, even if there's strong bias in the mission. The evolution (har, har) of that into something like a secular museum has a clear path to follow.

You set out to prove the Earth was made in 6 days a few thousand years ago, you're... likely not gonna be coming up with much that's connected to reality, even by accident.

Though it is funny to imagine.

I've never seen that particular claim about the museum - it was set up to hold Sloane's collection alongside the Cottonian and Harleian libraries. Where is it from? Is this a misremembering of the tale about the discovery of the flood tablet?

Yes, exactly, imagine how much harder it'd be to see all that awesome stuff in one place otherwise.

Sure. But large scale Pillage like the sack of the summer palace in Bejing are just too in-excusable .

The summer palace WAS a place to see those stolen things already.

By that same token it would be ok if I stole a bunch of jewelry from a bunch of different places, as long as I wear it all together in an awesome ensemble for all to see.

No. But in 2200 years you and your jewellery collection will fair game for which ever archaeologist digs you up.

Not if the British are still around.

It’s not that simple, a lot of places in the world don’t have the means to preserve archeological artifacts. Also past a certain date I’m of the opinion it’s a shared human history (because the more we go back the more we share ancestors) that modern nations have no rights to claim exclusivity on, here for example the culture that produced the Rosetta Stone doesn’t exist anymore. Sure geographically it would make more sense, but as long as anyone can have access to it and it’s well preserved I’m fine with it.

I agree somewhat. Also, it's not always clear who the most legitimate heirs are in these cases. For example, why the Egyptian government and not, say, the Coptic Church? I don't have a source but I seem to recall reading once that Copts are genetically more similar to Ancient Egyptians than other modern Egyptian, who are predominantly of Arab descent.

Another cool ancient propaganda piece/stone inscription is the Cyrus Cylinder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_Cylinder

It is worth noting that Egypt has asked for the Rosetta stone back to be displayed in a museum there and the British have refused.

Also technically they stole it from the French

Hmmm... so, thieves who steal from other thieves may view their actions as less reprehensible than thieves who steal from the original owners?

European colonialism was just an example of a practice that dates back to prehistory, and can even be seen in the behavior of our chimpanzee cousins - 'raiding' is the word for it.

the sands of Egypt are soaked in blood of many nations, peoples and the rest

Sorry, I didn't mean to justify it. Just to point out that it wasn't only the British engaging in this behavior. Also I find it a pretty funny historical fact, large part of the British Museum's Egypt collection actually comes from French raids.

I always find these conversations strange. The stone was erected by a long dead Greek Pharaoh of an ancient civilization that happened to be located on what is now Egypt. The stone was found in 1798 by the French and taken by the British as a spoil of war and, eventually, found it's way to the British Museum.

Who has claim? The Greeks? It was ruled by a Greek at the time. The Romans who ruled later? The French? The British? The pre-revolution Egyptians? The post coup Egyptians?

Everyone involved is long dead. It's not like WWII looting where the grand child of the former owner wants their property back.

At some point this is all the ancient history of us all.

Let's not forget his big brother Jacques-Joseph, who was one of his first educators, have worked with him, and who have edited his manuscripts after his death (his egyptian dictionary & grammar). Without Jacques-Joseph, Jean-François may not have been the same man.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Joseph_Champollion-Fig...

Maybe we should leave a few stones around with code in multiple programming languages.

That assumes that, future civilizations will be even interested in understanding our current codebases. I wonder if there will be code historians?

I predict future "crypto-archaeologists" will comb over our primitive source code like Medieval manuscripts, and will run our programs in quantum computer simulators to exercise all paths, and discover bugs we never suspected.

I don’t think quantum computers get you past the halting problem.

"Why did the ancient programmers (blessed be their names), have such a proclivity for always greeting the earth?"

It’s surely a religious matter, the context is lost at this point but that our best estimate.

It is believed that ancient computersmiths were a superstitious caste. They believed in an entity known as "World", and it was custom to greet this deity as both a recognition of its power and an invocation to receive it's divine favor. Computersmiths were also known to compose poetry documenting their capabilities. It was typical for computersmiths to update this prose, commonly referred to as a 'resume', upon successfully greeting World.

Thank you, now I feel preemtively ashamed

I am almost certain there will be because we already have people intensely interested in source code from the 50s and 60s.

Yeah, a great example is this presentation[1] about the Apollo guidance computer. The guy is really, really into it and it just makes the presentation amazing.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1J2RMorJXM

"I want my warp engines, Mr. Laforge." https://abstrusegoose.com/323

Here's one stone: 99 Bottles of beer, in 1500 languages

https://www.99-bottles-of-beer.net

The Long Now Foundation has (had?) a project based on that idea. https://longnow.org/ideas/category/rosetta/ and https://rosettaproject.org

> The Rosetta Disk fits in the palm of your hand, yet it contains over 13,000 pages of information on over 1,500 human languages. The pages are microscopically etched and then electroformed in solid nickel, a process that raises the text very slightly - about 100 nanometers - off of the surface of the disk. Each page is only 400 microns across - about the width of 5 human hairs - and can be read through a microscope at 650X as clearly as you would from print in a book. Individual pages are visible at a much lower magnification of 100X. The outer ring of text reads "Languages of the World" in eight major world languages.

It uses nickel because of the high melting point and that it is really, really hard to deform nickel.

There is a project for that which is literally called Rosetta Code :) https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Knuth_shuffle

I've got the recent reprint of the "Panthéon Egyptien", Champollion's 1823 book (see the black and white edition here: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k106204z/f1.item ). It's very interesting how he's trying to connect information from Herodotus and other writings and the newly deciphered hieroglyphs.

A question for the AI / ML crowd: could we feed the stone into a computer these days and have it decipher the hieroglyphics?

I’m guessing one stone is not enough training data.

How would that be enough context and how would you backtrack the reasoning to check for correctness / completeness

That a fun and interesting question tho! I would bet on « absolutely not, get over it »

Not as such. AI isn't magic, it's fuzzy pattern matching based on existing data. We couldn't just show it some stone out of nowhere and have it "think" or "reason" about what to do with it.

If on the other hand you had a model otherwise trained on a bunch of hieroglyphics<-->English data, then sure probably.

Well I know that it can't reason. But we know two translations and hieroglyphics are the third. So how close could it get to "solving" the hieroglyphics to Greek pattern match?

It's interesting that the headline of an article about the Rosetta Stone has grammatical tense incorrect.

  "Two hundred years ago, Jean-François Champollion deciphers the Rosetta Stone"
  should be
  "Two hundred years ago, Jean-François Champollion deciphered the Rosetta Stone"

Headlines pretty much always use the historical present tense.

If this is incorrect, then so is the entire front page of the New York Times today, e.g. "Senate Passes Bill to Aid Ukraine and Avert Government Shutdown" (should it be "passed"?)

That's not true, and certainly not true enough to make such sweeping generalizations.

From the actual New York Times regarding their editing standards for writing headlines: [1]

  Headlines are written in the historical present
  tense. That means they written are in present
  tense but describe events that just happened.
  The exception to that is when you're reporting
  on something that happened quite some time
  ago."

The Rosetta Stone wasn't just deciphered.

[1] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/general...

https://youtu.be/NIxn9auks24 I can’t recommend this Royal Institute lecture about how Champollion (and others) finally cracked the code of Hieroglyphics

Can’t recommend it, or can't recommend it enough?

i could care less about this comment

Sorry, can't recommend it enough, typed that on my phone.

If you know French or German Arte also has a nice documentary on his life and the hieroglyphics: https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/104380-000-A/das-geheimnis-der...

I don't know German, how do I navigate to the French version?

there you go https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/104380-000-A/dans-le-secret-de...

ah ce n’est pas disponible dans mon pays :(

Recently discussed (different link): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32994480

Reply on news.ycombinator.com