The Rosetta Stone and language - the Philadelphia story
September 27, 2022 marks the 200th anniversary of the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone, announced in September 1822. The decipherment was the result of several attempts at translations after the "discovery" of the stone in July 1799 found in the city of Rosetta (modern name of el Rashid) in Egypt by Napoleon's expedition of scientists and archaeologists. Several people attempted to understand the text on the stone and two scholars were successful in deciphering the decree: Thomas Young, a British polymath whose work was expanded on by Jean-Francois Champollion, who has been credited as the principal translator. Much has been written about this saga which is well summarized in this essay. The Rosetta Stone provides an interesting pathway to see how knowledge about the Stone and its message has flowed from Egypt to the rest of the world. Following the story of the decipherment allows one to track how information about language has traveled through time.
By 1858, news of the discovery and translation reached America and was embraced by the Philomathean Society of the University of Pennsylvania who published the first complete English translation of the Rosetta Stone in America. This task was accomplished by three undergraduate students who were working from a plaster facsimile of the Stone that had been presented to the University of Pennsylvania. The resulting rare publication is a tour de force offering copies in their own hand of the original inscriptions of hieroglyphics, hieratic and Greek text. Each member of the Committee - Charles Hale, S. Huntington Jones and Henry Morton - contributed text and images to create a volume of Egyptian inspired designs and motifs produced entirely by lithography requiring more than 400 lithographic stones. Lithography—a printing process whereby an image in oil-based ink is transferred from stone—was developed in the late-18th century. Color lithography was in its early stages of development when this book appeared in December 1858.
The first edition offered 400 copies which were sold out immediately and a second edition was ordered by the Society created with the remaining lithographic stones. The two editions are known today as landmarks in the history of American scholarship and in the field of chromolithography. Here is a digital copy of the first edition compliments of the University of Pennsylvania. It is worth looking at each page especially page 54 that describes the plates.
Language, translation and transcription continues to be areas of great interest to many especially to artists working today. One good example is a contemporary artist based in Philadelphia - Marianne Dages. Her interest in language and history is beautifully illustrated in Objects of Unknown Use, published in 2017, a story of a nameless traveler referring to the language of objects and systems of belief. To quote from her website, the book is inspired by the simultaneous reading of three texts; a UFO encounter blog, a catalog of The Egyptian Museum of Antiquities, and R.O. Faulkner's translation of The Egyptian Book of the Dead, the book merges past and future timelines into a science fiction poetic text. I included this book in the Walt Whitman exhibition organized in 2019 for the Center for Book Arts as it illustrated text and images of Ancient Egypt which Whitman referred to in his writings. Continuing to look at her newer books such as Rain Words addressing language for upcoming projects, I am intrigued by her work that beautifully represents the intersection of languages across time.