Lucy's Bones, Sacred Stones, & Einstein's Brain

by Harvey Rachlin

  Returning to the Old Testament: Sennacherib was on his way with a huge Assyrian army to annihilate ancient Jerusalem. But the Lord would not permit it to happen, saying he would defend the city for his sake and his servant David’s: “And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the Lord went forth, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians a hundred fourscore and five thousand [185,000] men; and when men arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses” (2 Kings 19:35). Sennacherib departed and never returned, and Jerusalem, for the time being at least, was saved, as was the tunnel and its glorious inscription.

  LOCATION: Archaeological Museum, Istanbul, Turkey.

  THE ROSETTA STONE

  DATE: 196 b.c.

  WHAT IT IS: A stone tablet bearing three inscriptions in two languages. It became the key for unlocking the lost language of hieroglyphs and provided a portal to the ancient world of Egypt.

  WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: It is a black basalt slab that measures almost 45 inches in height, 28½ inches in width, and 11 inches in thickness. Its weight is estimated to be 1,676 pounds. It is largely but not wholly intact, with portions of the upper left, upper right, and lower right missing.

  In the final years of the eighteenth century, France had a new hero, a young warrior who had demonstrated military virtuosity leading conquests in Italy. Now at home and restless, Napoleon Bonaparte was seeking another campaign. He wanted further to secure the support of his compatriots but was also wary of his own personal safety. France was in the hands of a corrupt government, the Directory, and conspiracies abounded.

  Napoleon wanted to strike at France’s great enemy, England. A direct attack on the island would be futile, however, for the English navy was far superior to France’s. Where to land a blow against England? Egypt.

  Napoleon believed that English trade, which encroached upon French merchants, would be disrupted. In addition, Egypt, which was part of the Ottoman Empire, could provide a strategic point from which to attack England’s prized colony, India (the British governor of India had just signed a trade treaty with the beys, or local governors, in Egypt).

  With the approval of the Directory—which quietly hoped the campaign would cause the demise of this potential usurper of power—Napoleon prepared for this complex venture. As he pondered the destiny of his military machinations, he could not have imagined that the expedition would yield this by-product: a priceless treasure discovered by the French, which, in one of the great ironies of archaeology, would be whisked away by the enemy with nary a drop of blood spilled, as exasperated French soldiers looked on helplessly.

  Shortly after sunrise on May 19, 1798, several hundred French warships sailed out of Toulon. More than fifty thousand soldiers embarked on the voyage, along with hundreds of horses. On board the vessels also was the Commission of Science and Art, an elite corps of engineers, geologists, antiquarians, mathematicians, and poets, handpicked by Napoleon to conduct an exhaustive survey of the historical and mysterious land of Egypt, as well as to edify its impoverished citizens.

  On July 1, 1798, in the darkness of the early morning hours, several thousand French soldiers disembarked at Marabout, eight miles west of Alexandria, and on the following day, July 2, stormed the port city. On the way to Cairo, near the pyramids, the French encountered thousands of Mamelukes, a renowned Egyptian cavalry of professionally trained soldiers, awaiting them.

  Before going into battle, Napoleon rode his horse through the ranks of his men, standing at attention in the golden sand as the blistering sun beat down on them. After scrutinizing his troops, the general pointed to the ancient structures, weather-beaten but resplendent in the near distance, and issued his famous declaration: “Soldiers, from the heights of the pyramids, forty centuries are looking down on you.” The French, outnumbered but better equipped than their foe, cut down the Mamelukes. Napoleon continued to sweep through Egypt, rejoicing in victory, until Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson destroyed the French fleet in the Mediterranean in the Battle of the Nile.

  Trapped in the northeast African land, the soldiers worked to fortify their positions, and Napoleon’s band of savants toiled assiduously on a variety of projects. Despite the long history of Egypt, little was actually known about the area, and the French civilians set themselves to investigating its resources scientifically.

  In August 1799, just over a year after Napoleon launched his invasion of Egypt at Alexandria, a great discovery was made. French soldiers were building up their defenses around the area of Fort St. Julien, near the northern city of Rosetta, or Rashid (which is near the mouth of the western branch of the Nile), when a soldier or engineer found in the ruins an ancient stone. With its cryptic inscriptions, it was immediately recognized as an object of great importance. It was sent to Cairo, where it was housed in the Institut d’Egypte. Members of Napoleon’s special civilian corps dispersed around the country were requested to go there at once. Perhaps this mysterious stone held great secrets of the distant past.

  On the stone were three parallel inscriptions. The top two, hieroglyphic and demotic (a form of cursive writing), were in the Egyptian language; the bottom one was Greek. Although the number of lines of each inscription varied, increasing in each section going down the stone, the three sections of inscriptions were roughly the same size. Could they bear the same message? Greek was known, but hieroglyphs had fallen into oblivion some thirteen centuries earlier. Scholars hoped the Greek could be used as the basis to translate the hieroglyphs. An alphabet and grammar could be established, and the meaning of hieroglyphic inscriptions on other antiquities could finally be derived. The ramifications were astounding. Great secrets of the past and new stories of the Bible would be unraveled, all by virtue of this single stone!

  Intense excitement about the stone swiftly traveled to Europe. Napoleon himself saw the “Pierre de Rosette,” as the French called it, and marveled. Two printers, Marc Aurel and Jean Joseph Marcel, made impressions, and a member of the Commission of Science and Art made casts—all for distribution to scholars in Europe.

  Although all the lines of the Greek (as well as the other inscriptions) exhibited some damage, the Greek text on the stone was readily translated. The stone was presumably one of several that had been inscribed following an assembly of priests at Memphis around 200 B.C. The priests had passed a decree on the ninth anniversary of the reign of Ptolemy V Epiphanes, who had succeeded his father as king. Under the decree, recorded in the inscription, the deeds that Ptolemy, not yet thirteen but ruling under the tutelage of wise counselors, had performed during his reign to bring prosperity to Egypt were to be “inscribed upon stelae of hard stone in holy, and native, and Greek characters and set up in each of the temples of the first, second and third class close to the image of the King.” The benefactions of Ptolemy V included adorning and repairing temples, freeing prisoners, stopping impressment into the navy, using a system of equal justice, preventing floods by building dams, and destroying impious individuals.

  The initial high hopes that the Rosetta Stone would be a long-awaited key to ancient languages were thwarted for some time. Because some portions of the stone were missing, translating the hieroglyphic and demotic texts by comparing them with the Greek would be difficult. It was still not certain that the three texts bore the same message. Hieroglyphic, or pictorial, script was the most ancient form of Egyptian writing. It was usually chiseled into stone. As papyrus came to be used as the writing medium, it was succeeded by other forms of writing: hieratic, a cursive form, which eventually led to demotic, a simpler cursive form.

  Efforts to unravel the philological mystery of ancient Egyptian writing did not begin with the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. Since the sixteenth century, scholars had made dedicated attempts to decipher hieroglyphs. The German Jesuit Anthonasius Kircher, the English bishop William Warburton, and the French scholar Nicolas Freret were among the most prominent early Egyptologists. Because of the mistakenly held view that hieroglyphs were simply and purely a system of picture writing, h
owever, they came up with rather far-fetched translations.

  Hieroglyphic writing, which consists of various kinds of symbols, strained the minds of the Egyptologists. Some pictures were apparent, like those of animals, but others, having strange shapes, were mysterious and unknown. Furthermore, for the familiar pictures or symbols, were their meanings what they seemed to be?

  Did a single symbol express a simple thought? Or could several symbols represent a single idea? In which direction were the characters read? By what logic did the ancient scribes set down symbols to express their thoughts and ideas?

  One of the first to take up the challenge of deciphering the demotic inscription of the Rosetta Stone was a renowned Orientalist, Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy of France. He uncovered some proper names mentioned in the text. Later, in 1802, the Swedish scholar Johan David Acherblad identified more names, as well as some Coptic-style words. Acherblad’s findings ended here; the words he identified were alphabetical, and he held the view that demotic writing was purely alphabetical. This view would eventually be shown to be false, but a complete translation of the demotic inscription wouldn’t be made public for about half a century.

  The enigmatic stone reposed quietly for years in the British Museum—how it got there is a process we shall return to in a moment—while the general public continued to speculate on the substance of its inscrutable hieroglyphic writing, and scholars labored assiduously to break the code. The first breakthrough came around 1816 from a British physicist and medical doctor who had been examining a copy of the Rosetta Stone.

  Thomas Young advanced the idea that hieroglyphic characters could have a phonetic value—that is, the symbols represented sounds of the language. This was not a novel idea but one of which he may not have previously been aware, and he made a convincing argument for it. It was commonly believed that in hieroglyphic writing the elliptical figures in which symbols were enclosed, called cartouches, represented royal names. Young attempted to identify the phonetic value of the symbols in the single cartouche that appears several times in the hieroglyphs of the Rosetta, which he believed to signify the name Ptolemy, and successfully identified several of them.

  It wasn’t until the French scholar Jean-Francois Champollion set himself to the task of deciphering the Rosetta Stone that the riddle of hieroglyphs was finally solved. Champollion had developed a zealous interest in Egyptology as a student. When he was seventeen he studied Oriental languages in Paris and started compiling a Coptic dictionary, which he maintained was a later form of the Egyptian language using Greek characters. In 1812, at the age of twenty-two, he was made a professor.

  Using Young’s work, his own knowledge of the Coptic language, and other hieroglyphic inscriptions, Champollion was able to determine the phonetic values of other hieroglyphic characters and decipher other royal names. Champollion determined that in a cartouche certain symbols represented one or two different letters and that a particular symbol was used after a female name. The value of unknown symbols in the cartouches of royal names could be deduced with accuracy by guessing their Greek letter equivalent.

  Champollion concluded that the ancient Egyptian language had three forms—hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic—and that hieroglyphs were not just symbols signifying ideas but phonetic as well. His assertions were published in 1822 in his Lettre à M. Dacier, relative à l‘alphabet des hieroglyphes phonétiques. Champollion’s remarkable accomplishment, made with only fourteen incomplete lines of hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone, opened the alphabet of ancient Egypt and all the hieroglyphic writings of the people.

  In early 1799, after more than half a year in Egypt, Napoleon faced a great military challenge. A massive Turkish army had gathered in Syria, preparing to seize control of Egypt from France. Confronting Turkey’s army was something Napoleon wanted to avoid; in fact, a precondition of his Egyptian campaign was to secure a promise from the French minister of foreign affairs, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, to go to Turkey and negotiate peaceful relations between the two countries. But Talleyrand deceived him, and Napoleon was forced to confront this dire situation.

  In an effort to thwart the Turkish invasion, Napoleon led thousands of French soldiers to the Turks. On his way to Acre the French defeated contingents at El ‘Arish, Gaza, and Jaffa. At Acre awaited tens of thousands of Turkish soldiers whose ranks were supplemented by English troops. The Turks repelled the French advance and forced Napoleon to retreat. Eight thousand French soldiers began the trek back through the Sinai Desert. Healthy soldiers carried sick ones, many so ravaged by the plague that Napoleon wanted them euthanized with opium, although the expedition’s surgeon objected. Shortly after, the Turks invaded Aboukir by sea but in a fierce battle they were defeated by the French.

  With sweeping changes now taking place in Europe—several countries had declared war on France, and France itself was in a desperate state of affairs—and Egypt now a dead-end stop, Napoleon decided to return home. In August 1799 he quietly boarded the Muiron, not even conferring with General Jean-Baptiste Kléber, who would assume control of the French army in Egypt after he left. The Muiron and another ship managed to slip through the British men-of-war, setting the stage for sweeping changes in French history.

  As Napoleon, who had been greeted upon his arrival with hysterical cheers, led a coup d’état to expel the Directory, the English and Turks mounted assaults on the French that were to end their occupation in Egypt. During the siege, the Rosetta Stone was transported from Cairo to Alexandria to prevent the British from seizing it. But under the terms of the Alexandria capitulation treaty, in which the French surrendered to the British, the French in that city were forced to turn over the antiquities they had collected in Egypt. The Rosetta Stone, the prized French discovery, had by now caused a sensation throughout Europe and was, needless to say, coveted by the English.

  The French at first refused to deliver the antiquities, but then relented. General J. F. Menou, who had the stone carefully preserved in his house, wrote the following to the British lieutenant-colonel Christopher Hely-Hutchinson: “You want it Monsieur le genéral? You can have it since you are the stronger of us two—. You may pick it up whenever you please.”

  In September 1801 English brevet colonel Tomkyns Hilgrove Turner, who had fought at Aboukir Bay and Alexandria, went to visit Menou to procure the stone. Turner cited the sixteenth article of the treaty, and General Menou handed it over grudgingly.

  A squad of artillerymen seized the stone without resistance. As they carted the magnificent ancient treasure through Alexandria, French soldiers and civilians collected on the streets and sputtered insults at them.

  In the spasmodic voyage from Egypt to England, many of the Egyptian antiquities were damaged. Because of the importance of the Rosetta Stone, however, Colonel Turner personally accompanied this precious cargo on its journey aboard a frigate. The Rosetta Stone left Egypt from Alexandria and sailed into the English Channel in February 1802.

  The Rosetta Stone

  At Deptford the stone was placed in a small boat and taken through customs. It was lodged at the quarters of the Society of Antiquaries so it could be examined by experts before being dispatched to its permanent station of public exhibition, where, Turner later wrote, “I trust it will long remain, a most valuable relic of antiquity, the feeble but only yet discovered link of the Egyptian to the known languages, a proud trophy of the arms of Britain (I could almost say spolia opima), not plundered from defenceless inhabitants, but honourably acquired by the fortune of war.”

  LOCATION: British Museum, London, England.

  THE PORTLAND VASE

  DATE: Circa the end of the first century B.C. to the beginning of the first century A.D.

  WHAT IT IS: A glass amphora made during the rule of the first Roman emperor, Augustus Caesar. It is one of the most famous artistic glass vessels ever created.

  WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The vase has a cobalt blue background with opaque white human and imaginative figures and objects
cut in a cameo relief. It is almost 10 inches high.

  Around the start of the common era, the greatest craftsmen of ancient Rome toiled hard in their workshop to create a magnificent glass vase embodying serene scenes of white figures and objects against a striking dark blue background. It is probably safe to say that these artisans could hardly have imagined that this fragile vessel would survive thousands of years into the future, be owned by a succession of distinguished people, be smashed into hundreds of pieces on more than one occasion and painstakingly restored to almost its original splendor, and be assiduously studied for centuries by scholars trying to determine its original utilitarian purpose and the perplexing meaning of its idyllic scenes. Yet these events are all part of the extraordinary heritage of the so-called Portland Vase, which, for all its beauty and grandeur, remains today an artistic mystery of the ages.

  The technology of glassmaking began somewhere in the Near East twenty-five hundred to three thousand years before the start of the common era, advancing from all-glass beads and rods to intricately made decorative vessels by Augustus’s time. Early craftsmen discovered a few ways to combine the basic ingredients of sand, soda, lime, silica, and wood fuel into glass, but it wasn’t until glassblowing was invented around 50 B.C. that production developed into a fine art.

  With glassblowing, glassmakers could shape objects artistically, and production was less expensive. Other techniques such as painting and making clear glass (because of impurities, glass in ancient times was normally colored) enabled artisans to produce many marvelous pieces. Perhaps the most famous of these is the Portland Vase.

  The Portland Vase is an example of glass sculpted in cameo style. It was probably made by taking a gather of cobalt blue glass and partially dipping it into a crucible of molten white glass before blowing and fashioning the whole into the desired shape. The outlines of the design were no doubt incised first, before all the background white glass was carved away and the figures and motifs modeled in detail. The result was a design of white figures and objects against a dark blue background.