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London: From a military point of view, the French invasion of Egypt in 1798, in an attempt to disrupt British trade and influence in North Africa and India, was a complete failure. However, for the world’s knowledge of 3,000 years of ancient Egyptian history, this would prove to be a serendipitous victory.

Napoleon Bonaparte landed at Alexandria with an army of 50,000 men on July 2, 1798, and over the next three years the French army achieved a series of victories and occasional defeats in Egypt and Syria.

But after the British navy sank Napoleon’s fleet in the Gulf of Abu Kil at the Battle of the Nile on July 25, 1799, the dwindling and disease-stricken French army, pursued by Ottoman and British forces, found Trapped in an unfamiliar land full of hostility. There is no way out, and no opportunity for reinforcement, the outcome is inevitable.

Napoleon knew this well, and on the night of August 22, 1799, he abandoned his army and slipped back to Paris, where his ultimate fate was – in 1804, he would be crowned Emperor of France.

Even after the assassination of Napoleon’s successor commander, his troops in Egypt held their ground until their surrender to Britain at Alexandria on September 2, 1801.

As part of the expedition, Napoleon ordered a large number of looted artifacts to be brought back to France. However, after the surrender of France, most of it fell into the hands of the British. Among the loot returned to the British Museum was a polished stone inscribed with writing in three different languages ​​- Ancient Greek, Prutian and Egyptian hieroglyphics.

The object, later known as the Rosetta Stone, was discovered in July 1799 by a French Army engineer fortifying a 15th-century Ottoman fortress near Rosetta on the west bank of the Nile.

This will prove to be the key to understanding ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Although many European scholars are proficient in ancient Greek, it will take more than two decades to crack the Rosetta code. When they do, it’s a landmark moment in Egyptology, and the British Museum is celebrating a major new exhibition this month, which brings together more than 240 objects, including the Rosetta Stone.

The exhibition Hieroglyphics: Unlocking Ancient Egypt coincides with the 200th anniversary of the final breakthrough of French linguist and orientalist Jean-François Champollion in 1822.

“Deciphering the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone opened 3,000 years of Egyptian history,” Ilona Regulski, curator of Egyptian script culture at the British Museum, told Arab News.

“Until then, no one knew how far back the ancient Egyptian civilization went, or how long it lasted. But after his breakthrough, Champollion was able to translate the king’s name and established a civilization that dates back more than anyone had realized before. The Royal Chronology of Further Time.

“Soon, people also realised that this was a complex civilization, it had relations with its neighbors, sometimes peaceful, sometimes violent, and we gradually got a better understanding of this society.

“Greek historians report some of the practices they saw, and we know the ancient Egyptians mummified their dead. But we don’t really know how these people lived and experienced their world.”

Cracking the Rosetta Code is a complex task that tests the minds of European scholars. Although there are three translations of the same decree on this stone, they are not word for word.

“Champollion and others first looked at Greek texts and identified frequently occurring words, such as the word for a temple, or the title basileus (a term for a monarch),” Regulski said. “They looked at the plain text to see if there was a bunch of signs in more or less the same place.”

It was a reasonable start, but a frustrating process, but didn’t initially realize that neither ancient Egyptian nor colloquial were alphabet-based scripts, and that any one word could be used in many different languages ​​within the same document. way to spell.

Eventually, a list of symbols was created, a sort of ancient Egyptian dictionary, “but not sufficient to understand the entire text, or use it to read other inscription objects,” Regulski said.

Champollion eventually discovered that hieroglyphs were a hybrid system.

“There are letter symbols, and there are single symbols that represent two or three letters, or even whole words,” Regulski said. “Some are silent signs, which we call ‘determinants’ in Egyptology. You don’t read them in any way, but they indicate the meaning of the preceding word, telling you whether it’s a verb or a noun.”

Basically, hieroglyph “seems to be a very simple, symbol-based language, but it’s a lot more complicated than that, and it’s much more complicated than alphabetic script, and it takes a long time to figure out.”

The text on the Rosetta Stone turned out to be a decree written by a priest at Memphis in 196 BC, recognizing the authority of Ptolemaic Pharaoh Ptolemy V​​​. It was originally written on papyrus, and copies were distributed across the kingdom so the text could be inscribed on slate or “stele” for display in temples across Egypt.

Nine other partial copies of the decree will be found throughout Egypt over the next few decades. But the Rosetta Stone is the most complete, and without it, such as the “discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb” excavated by British archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922, “would look very different,” Regulski said. .

“Carter had a hard time identifying the king, which was very critical, and his place in the 18th Dynasty chronology. We’re just going to have a beautiful tomb with beautiful things in it.”

The Rosetta Stone is not that old by ancient Egyptian standards. “For us Egyptologists,” Regulsky said, “this stone appears around 200 B.C., very late in the hieroglyphic story. The writing system first used for left and right”

In 200 BC, hieroglyphics were already on the road to elimination.

“The first really important change in Egypt was the use of Greek as the administrative language,” Regulski said.

“People were already speaking Greek when Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332 BC. The language has been in vogue since the eighth century due to trade and a large number of Greek mercenaries who fought in the Egyptian army and settled in the country .

“But starting with Alexander the Great, especially in the time of Ptolemy, Greek became the administrative language and slowly drove the Egyptians out of the market.”

Regardless of the historical context in which the Rosetta Stone was discovered and its seizure by the British, “for the field of Egyptology and for Egypt, it’s definitely something to celebrate,” Regulski said.

“Today, there are many Egyptologists in the world, including our colleagues in Egypt, working together, a huge community trying to perfect our knowledge of ancient Egypt, and it all comes from this adventure.”

Regulski, who spent two years working with his Egyptian colleagues at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, could not understand the vexing topic of whether the Rosetta Stone should be returned to its country of origin.

More than 100,000 artifacts from Egypt’s rich history will be housed in the Great Egyptian Museum, which is currently nearing completion at a site west of Cairo near the Pyramids of Giza.

These include the 5,400 treasures buried with Tutankhamun over 3,300 years ago, including his iconic death mask, which will finally rest in their place after decades of touring the world.

However, the Rosetta Stone, the key to understanding it all, will remain in the UK.

When the stone was brought back to England from the French in 1801, British generals chose to regard it and 20 other stones as “the proud trophies of British weapons – not plundered from the hands of the defenseless inhabitants, but by the luck of war. Gloriously obtained.”

The British Museum’s exhibition will feature French surrender documents on loan from the National Archives in the UK, and will be on display for the first time. A spokesman for the British Museum said it was “a legal agreement which includes the transfer of the Rosetta Stone to the UK…as a diplomatic gift…signed by all parties; representatives of the Egyptian, French and British governments.”

Today, the Egyptian government may have reason to question the depiction of Ottoman army officers as the legitimate custodians of Egypt’s heritage.

Of course, there was no consideration at the time as to whether the Rosetta Stone and other antiquities should remain in Egypt, a question that is increasingly acute today in an era of mounting pressure on Western institutions such as the British Museum. Return the spoils of imperial wars and adventures.

“The only thing I would say is that working closely with the museum’s Egyptian curators was not a priority for many of them,” Regulski said. “I find it a little sad that our relationship is structured in this way, about whether to return the item, because our relationship with our Egyptian colleagues is so much more than individual items going to this place or that.

“This is a celebration of ancient Egypt, where there is still so much to do, so much to learn, research and collaborate on, which is a positive thing to watch.”

The public’s fascination with ancient Egypt stemmed from the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, the most visited object in the British Museum, and “the strong visual appeal of a culture that has left behind such a well-preserved, monumental presence,” This is something that some other ancient cultures did not have.

“I think the average visitor to the museum is drawn to this highly visual art culture, including the writing system itself. For example, if you compare it to cuneiform, you would prefer hieroglyphics because it’s so beautiful , so visually appealing. I think that’s what draws people in and encourages them to learn more about the culture.”

Of course, the British Museum hopes this exhibition will be one of its most popular to date, and it will chart the journey from the initial efforts of medieval Arab travelers and Renaissance scholars to deciphering hieroglyphs, to Champollion’s victory in 1822 .

Hieroglyphics: Unlocking Ancient Egypt is on view at the British Museum from 13 October 2022 to 19 February 2023.