The Rosetta Stone Is a Tax Receipt

The most famous object in the British Museum is a tax receipt. That is close to a literal description of what is carved on it. The text on the Rosetta Stone is a decree issued by a council of Egyptian priests meeting at Memphis in March of 196 BCE, in the ninth regnal year of the boy-king Ptolemy V Epiphanes. It records, at length and in triplicate, the tax remissions, debt cancellations, prisoner releases and temple grants the young king had extended to the country, and it lists what the priests would do for him in return: a statue in every temple, festivals on his birthday and coronation day, a golden shrine, and the title of a god. Nobody who inscribed it thought they were producing a wonder of the world. They were producing paperwork, and the paperwork is the point. What made the Rosetta Stone the key to a lost civilisation was precisely that it was boring, formulaic, repetitive, and administrative — the kind of document whose structure a patient reader can parse even before a single word yields its meaning.

The story we tell about decipherment is a romance: a genius, a flash of insight, a lost world unlocked. The story the evidence supports is about formats. Thomas Young and Jean-François Champollion did not read the Rosetta Stone the way you read a poem. They reverse-engineered it the way an engineer reverse-engineers a file whose specification has been lost, working from repetition, from fixed positions, from the one field they already understood.

What the priests actually wrote

Start with the object. It is a slab of dark granodiorite — for most of the nineteenth century it was called basalt, which it is not — about 112 centimetres tall, three-quarters of a metre wide, and roughly three-quarters of a tonne in weight.¹ It is broken. The top, which would once have carried a rounded lunette with a winged sun-disk and a scene of the king before the gods, is gone entirely; of the hieroglyphic text only fourteen fragmentary lines survive. Below that are thirty-two lines of Demotic, the cursive everyday script of Ptolemaic Egypt, and below that fifty-four lines of Greek, the language of the ruling dynasty and its administration.¹

The Greek was legible to any educated European in 1799, and translations were in circulation within three years of the stone's arrival in London.² What it says is what scholars now call the Memphis Decree, one of a whole family of Ptolemaic priestly decrees that includes the Canopus Decree of 238 BCE and the Raphia Decree of 217 BCE. The genre has a fixed shape. It opens with a long dating formula and the full titulary of the king. It then recites the king's benefactions to Egypt in a string of "whereas" clauses. It then resolves, in the name of the assembled priesthood, on the honours to be paid in return. It closes with instructions for publication.³

The benefactions on the Rosetta Stone are worth listing, because they are the substance of the "receipt". Ptolemy V, or the regents acting for him, had remitted certain taxes and reduced others; had cancelled arrears owed to the crown; had released people held in prison; had lowered the levy of fine linen the temples owed to the royal house; had confirmed the temples' revenues and the priests' exemption from an annual journey to Alexandria; had put down a revolt in the Delta town of Lycopolis and dealt with the rebels; and had spent money on the temples and on the sacred animals.³ Egypt in the 190s BCE was in serious trouble; a native rebellion had held Upper Egypt for two decades under rival pharaohs, and the Delta was restive. The Ptolemaic state needed the priesthood, and the priesthood knew what it could charge. The decree is the invoice.

Then the honours. A statue of Ptolemy under his new cult title, god Epiphanes Eucharistos, is to be set up in every temple in the most prominent place, with the local chief god handing him a sword of victory. A wooden shrine with a golden image of the king is to be placed in the sanctuary and carried in procession with the other gods. Priests are to add his name to their own titles. Festivals are appointed. And — this is the clause that matters for us — the decree is to be inscribed on a stela of hard stone in three kinds of writing, named, in my paraphrase of Quirke and Andrews, as the sacred characters, the characters of the country, and the Greek, and set up in every temple of the first, second and third rank beside the statue of the king.³

That last instruction tells you two things. First, the Rosetta Stone was never unique; it was one copy of a mass mailing, and fragments of other copies have since turned up, including a stela from Nubayrah and inscriptions at Philae that helped fill the gaps in the broken hieroglyphic section.¹ Second, and more important, the three texts were designed by their authors to say the same thing. They are not three related documents. They are one document rendered in three encodings, and the priests told us so in the last line.

The three texts were designed by their authors to say the same thing. They are not three related documents. They are one document rendered in three encodings.

How you read a document you cannot read

Suppose you are handed a file with three sections. The third is plain text you can read. The first two are in unknown encodings, but a note at the bottom assures you that all three carry the same content.

You do not begin with meaning. You begin with structure. You look for things in the known section that must appear in the unknown ones — proper names, numbers, dates, repeated fixed phrases — and you look for corresponding patterns in the unknown sections at corresponding positions. You count. You look for boundaries and delimiters. Only when you have anchored a handful of correspondences do you start guessing at values, and each guess is then checked against every other occurrence in the file. This is how the Rosetta Stone was actually read.

Look at what a decree of this kind hands you for free. The royal name "Ptolemy" occurs again and again in the Greek. Any script that encodes the same text must contain a corresponding sequence with the same frequency. In the hieroglyphic section a small group of signs recurs inside an oval ring, and the Danish scholar Georg Zoëga had already suggested, in 1797, that such rings — cartouches, the French called them, from the resemblance to a gun cartridge — enclosed royal names.⁴ The frequency, the position and the ring converge on a single hypothesis: this cartouche is Ptolemy. That is a format inference, not a linguistic one, and it was available before anyone knew what a single hieroglyph sounded like.

The Demotic gave up its structure first, because it was the most obviously alphabetic-looking of the two. In 1802 the French orientalist Silvestre de Sacy and the Swedish diplomat Johan David Åkerblad each worked on it; Åkerblad in particular matched Greek proper names — Ptolemy, Alexander, Arsinoe, Berenice — to groups of Demotic signs at the corresponding places and proposed values for a couple of dozen characters.⁵ He got a good deal right and then went wrong by assuming the whole script was alphabetic. It was not, and the assumption stalled him. But notice what he was doing: aligning the known field against the unknown by position and repetition. Parsing.

Young: the numbers, the plurals, the cartouche

Thomas Young came to the stone in 1814, a physician and physicist who had already done foundational work on the wave theory of light and who treated the Rosetta inscription, as Andrew Robinson has emphasised, essentially as a puzzle in pattern recognition.⁶ Young worked mainly on the Demotic and then carried what he found upward into the hieroglyphs. His method was almost entirely structural. He counted the occurrences of Greek words and hunted for Demotic groups with matching counts. He established that Demotic and hieroglyphic were not two unrelated systems, as everyone assumed, but that Demotic was a cursive descendant of hieroglyphic — a claim you can only make by laying the two out side by side and watching shapes degrade in the same order. He identified the sign for plurality (three strokes), a set of numerals, and the direction in which the hieroglyphs should be read.⁶

And he attacked the Ptolemy cartouche. Because "Ptolemaios" was a foreign name, Young reasoned that the Egyptians would have had to spell it phonetically rather than write it with native word-signs, and he assigned sound values to the signs inside the ring — several of them correctly. He published all of this, in a famously compressed and anonymous form, in the article "Egypt" in the supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1819.⁶

Then he stopped, or nearly stopped, and the reason is instructive. Young held to the old view that hieroglyphs were fundamentally symbolic — signs for ideas — and that the phonetic spelling was a special device wheeled out only for foreign names that had no native ideogram. He had found the exception and could not see that it was the rule.⁶

Champollion: the Philae obelisk and the count that broke the model

Champollion, seventeen years Young's junior, had one thing Young lacked: Coptic. He had learned it — the last stage of the Egyptian language, written in a Greek-derived alphabet and still used liturgically by Egyptian Christians — as a teenager, on the bet that it was the living descendant of what the hieroglyphs recorded.⁷ That bet is what turned parsing into reading. But the parsing came first, and it came, again, from a formulaic document.

The decisive additional document was not from Rosetta at all. It was an obelisk from the island of Philae, removed by the English collector William John Bankes, shipped to England in 1821, and later erected at his estate at Kingston Lacy in Dorset, where it still stands.⁸ Its base carried a Greek inscription that mentioned a Ptolemy and a Cleopatra; its shaft carried hieroglyphic cartouches. Bankes himself pencilled the identification of the Cleopatra cartouche on the lithographs he circulated, and one of those lithographs reached Champollion.⁸

Ptolemaios and Kleopatra share letters: p, t, o, l. If the cartouches spell those names phonetically, the shared letters should appear as shared signs, in the predictable positions. They do. The sign Champollion took as p stands first in Ptolemy and fifth in Cleopatra; the l is fourth in one and second in the other; the o falls where it should. Where the names diverge — the t in Cleopatra was written with a different sign than the t in Ptolemy — he inferred homophones. Two documents, both routine, both dated and formulaic, cross-checked by position, produced an alphabet of a dozen signs.⁷ Champollion extended it across further Greek and Roman cartouches — Alexander, Berenice, the imperial title Autocrator — on other monuments.

Two documents, both routine, both dated and formulaic, cross-checked by position, produced an alphabet of a dozen signs.

Where Champollion broke past Young was arithmetic. He counted the surviving hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone against the Greek words they corresponded to and found the ratio absurd for a purely ideographic script: on his reckoning, roughly 1,400 hieroglyphic signs stood against fewer than 500 Greek words.⁷ If each hieroglyph were an idea, the Egyptian would be three times as verbose as the Greek. The far more likely explanation was that many signs were spelling sounds even in native words. In September 1822, working from copies of cartouches from Abu Simbel and elsewhere, he read a name that ended in the sign he already knew as s, opened with a sun-disc — Coptic rē, the sun, Ra — and had in the middle a sign he took for the verb to give birth, Coptic mise. Ra-mes-es. Ramesses. A native pharaoh, spelled by sound.⁷

He set out the phonetic alphabet in the Lettre à M. Dacier, read to the Académie des Inscriptions on 27 September 1822, and the full mixed model — a script that combines sound-signs, word-signs and silent classifiers in the same line — in the Précis du système hiéroglyphique of 1824.⁷ The story that he ran to his brother's office, announced that he had it, and collapsed for days is repeated in almost every account; it comes from family tradition and I would not build anything on it.

The priority dispute, fairly stated

Who deserves the credit is genuinely contested, and it has been since 1822. Young believed, and said in print, that Champollion had built on his 1819 article without acknowledging it; Champollion insisted his phonetic results were his own and treated Young's contribution as marginal.⁶ Modern historians line up on a spectrum. Andrew Robinson, who has written biographies of both men, argues that Young's structural discoveries were real, prior and undercredited, and that Champollion was less than generous.⁶ John Ray and Richard Parkinson, both curators with long practice in the material, allow Young his priority on several points while holding that the intellectual leap — seeing that the phonetic principle ran through the whole script, and having the Coptic to cash it out — was Champollion's and was decisive.¹ Nationalism has coloured the argument on both sides of the Channel for two centuries and still does.

My own reading, for what it is worth, is that the dispute is only interesting because we insist on a single hero. If you think of decipherment as parsing, the sequence is obvious and nobody's honour is at stake. Zoëga saw the delimiter. Åkerblad and de Sacy aligned the first proper names. Young established the relationship between the two Egyptian scripts, the numerals, the plural, the direction of reading and the phonetic Ptolemy. Bankes supplied the second document with a name that overlapped the first. Champollion did the cross-check, did the count, and had the language to turn a table of sound values into sentences. Each step is a step in a method, and each was made possible by the fact that the underlying document was standardised, redundant and dull.

Why formulaic beats beautiful

Consider how bad a poem would have been for this purpose. A literary text has few repeated phrases, few proper names, no dates in fixed positions and no obligation to say the same thing twice. Its whole art is variation. A priestly decree is the opposite: it is legally obliged to repeat the full royal titulary, to date itself by three separate calendars, to name the king every few lines, to enumerate benefactions in parallel clauses and honours in parallel clauses, and to close with a publication formula that other decrees of the same genre also close with. Redundancy is what lets a decoder check a guess. Every recurrence of "Ptolemy" is a test case.

The Egyptians did not intend this. They wrote in three scripts because they were writing to three audiences: the temples' gods and priests in the "sacred" script, the literate Egyptian public in the "native" one, and the Greek administration in Greek. Their goal was to make the terms of the deal between throne and temples a matter of permanent public record. That is a legal instinct, and it produced a legal form. Anyone who has read the stela of Hammurabi will recognise the family resemblance: a durable stone, a fixed structure, a king's benefactions catalogued and a public told to look. Anyone who has read the Book of the Dead will recognise something else — that Egyptian scribes were entirely comfortable producing standardised text in bulk, from templates, with blanks left for the name of the customer. The Memphis Decree is a template too, filled in for one king in one year.

Formats are what survive. The decree of 196 BCE mattered to almost no one within a generation; Ptolemy V died in 180, and the cult of Epiphanes Eucharistos faded like the others. But the format outlived its content by two thousand years and, when the content was finally recovered, the format was the ladder we climbed down. The same is true of the accountancy tablets that gave us cuneiform, and it is instructive that the Greek alphabet the decree's third section is written in was itself, on the usual account, adapted from a Phoenician trading script — a point I have made from the other side in writing about Hesiod and Homer. Writing systems are carried by commerce and administration and only afterwards by poets.

Whose stone

The stone came to London by the fortunes of war. French soldiers rebuilding a fort near Rashid, the town Europeans called Rosetta, uncovered it in July 1799 during Napoleon's Egyptian expedition; the officer usually credited is Pierre-François Bouchard. When the French army in Egypt capitulated to the British in 1801, the antiquities it had collected were surrendered under the terms of the agreement, and the stone reached the British Museum in 1802, where it has been on display, war years excepted, ever since.¹

Whether it should stay there is now an open public argument. Egyptian scholars and officials, most prominently the archaeologist Zahi Hawass, have called for its return on the ground that it was taken as spoils of war from a country that had no say in the matter, and that Egypt now has institutions — including the new Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza — fully able to house it. The British Museum's position is that the stone was acquired lawfully under a treaty of the period and that it is held on behalf of a worldwide public, and that under its governing legislation the trustees are in any case constrained from deaccessioning.⁹ Reasonable people, including reasonable Egyptologists, disagree, and the disagreement is less about the stone's history than about what a museum is for. It would be odd to write about the object and not say that its ownership is disputed; an essay about scripts is not the place to settle it.

What I do think is this. The Rosetta Stone did not become important because someone found a beautiful thing in the mud. It became important because a committee of priests, in a bad year for the monarchy, insisted on getting the terms of their deal with the crown written down three ways in hard stone and posted in every temple — and because, two thousand years later, a handful of readers had the patience to treat that paperwork as paperwork: to align its fields, count its signs, and check every guess against every repetition. The romance of decipherment is real enough, but it sits on top of a duller and more durable truth: what we recovered from Egypt, we recovered by parsing its forms. The tax receipt was the key because tax receipts are written to be checked.