A former science writer for The Boston Globe and the author of books about Isaac Newton and a Dutch art forger who duped the Nazis, Dolnick here conjures up another intricate intellectual caper. The discovery of the slab, called the Rosetta Stone after the town in which it was found, reignited the ultimate linguistic challenge: deciphering the symbols of the Pharaohs.Įdward Dolnick’s “The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone” is an engrossing account of the 20-year competition that followed. All three were dead languages, but the Greek alphabet was still in use. And the three bands of text - classical Greek, hieroglyphs and an Egyptian shorthand called Demotic - were intended to proclaim the monarch’s achievements in multiple tongues to the peoples of the empire. The nearly one-ton stela, experts determined, had come from a temple dedicated to the Greek-Egyptian King Ptolemy V in 196 B.C. Pierre-François Bouchard, the officer in charge, sensed its significance and turned it over to scholars for analysis. Amid a pile of rubble being used for a renovation project, he noticed a 4-foot-by-3-foot granite slab, covered on one side with intricate inscriptions. On a steamy day in July 1799, a member of a French military work detail at a tumbledown fort in the Nile Delta made an unusual discovery.
THE WRITING OF THE GODS The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone By Edward Dolnick
