07/15/2022
The British Museum has one of the greatest collections of “Mind if we steal this?” in the world. For my visit, one such object stood out as most mesmerizing: The Rosetta Stone. But the Brits weren’t the first to thieve it. Napoleon did that.
--On This Day in History, S**t Went Down: July 15, 1799--
In the movie Arrival, Amy Adams plays a linguist tasked with deciphering an alien language. Despite what the History Channel would have you believe, the Great Pyramids of Giza were not built by aliens. But the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs were an alien language that no one had understood for 15 centuries. On July 15, 1799, a key would be discovered that opened the book on a long-dead empire.
It wasn’t just Europe that Napoleon terrorized. He had a three-year campaign in Egypt beginning in 1798. One thing Europeans loved to do was study those they invaded, because it made vanquishing easier and the “It’s for science!” proclamations made the subjugation and genocide of others seem more palatable. That’s why Napoleon brought a team of 167 science-type folks on his military expedition.
Appropriately, the aforementioned stone was found while fortifying the port city of Rosetta, today called Rashid. Lieutenant As-French-A-Name-As-It-Gets Pierre* François Bouchard saw it and said, “Cool f**kin’ rock, dudes.” The British thought so too. They showed up in Egypt in 1801, kicked some French ass, and took the stone home. It’s been in the aforementioned British Museum since 1802 on near-continuous display, and is the Royal Institute of We Stole that S**t’s most visited object.
I mentioned a key. The stone was inscribed with three scripts: Ancient Greek, Demotic (Ancient Egyptian lowly peasant script), and hieroglyphs (Ancient Egyptian fancy priest script). It took some time to decipher it all, but experts were able to figure out the Ancient Greek by 1803, and since it was the same message in all three languages, the Egyptian scripts were figured out in 1822, allowing other Egyptian artifacts to be read. What did the stone say? It was a message from 196 BCE and was a priestly decree saying 13-year-old Pharaoh Ptolemy V is a righteous dude and we love him.
Egypt asked for it back in 2003, but the Brits are all “Ha-HA. Nope. Have this fake-ass one we made out of fiberglass instead.”
*Fun Fact: Pierre means “stone” in French.
Get the book ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY S**T WENT DOWN at JamesFell.com/books.
