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Two hundred years ago, Jean-François Champollion deciphers the Rosetta Stone
- tsm 4y agoRecently discussed (different link): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32994480 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32994480
- open-source-ux 4y agoThe BBC radio programme In Our Time discussed the Rosetta Stone in Feb 2021. Three academic experts discuss the history of the stone and the efforts to decode the inscription. It's a very informative discussion. The programme can be downloaded: The Rosetta Stone: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000s2qd https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000s2qd Description: > Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most famous museum objects in the world. It is a damaged, dark granite block on which you can faintly see three scripts engraved: Greek at the bottom, Demotic in the middle and Hieroglyphs at the top. > Napoleon’s soldiers found it in a Mamluk fort at Rosetta on the Egyptian coast, and soon realised the Greek words could be used to unlock the hieroglyphs. It was another 20 years before [Jean-François] Champollion deciphered them, becoming the first to understand the hieroglyphs since they fell out of use 1500 years before and so opening up the written culture of ancient Egypt to the modern age.
- Ensorceled 4y agoEvery time I go to the British Museum, I always pass by the stone. It captures the imagination, even if you know that it's just a "propaganda piece". Also, The British Museum is one of the greatest places on earth.
- samizdis 4y ago> Also, The British Museum is one of the greatest places on earth. I second that opinion, but suggest that the museum's deserved popularity - especially with tourists - can often limit enjoyment of the environment, mostly because of queues and crowds. For those who truly enjoy the BM, as a living, evolving resource and venue to be visited regularly, I'd suggest considering membership. It's £69 a year, and grants free access to otherwise paid exhibitions/events. It also grants attendance to members-only events outside usual museum hours. There's something really special about wandering the galleries during advent, with no crowds, and listening to live music (quartets, groups of singers etc) while drinking mulled wine and eating mince pies. Attending lectures, too, in which archaelologists and others discuss their digs and finds, is tremendously engaging. There's also a members' room in which to rest up. For those with children, Young Friends membership for eight- to 15-year-olds is worth considering; I've paid for quite a few kids, and renewed year after year because they got so much out of the activities/experiences. The museum hosts Young Friends sleep-overs - some in the Egyptian section with the mummies. Membership info: https://www.britishmuseum.org/membership https://www.britishmuseum.org/membership Young Friends: https://www.britishmuseum.org/membership/young-friends https://www.britishmuseum.org/membership/young-friends
- Ensorceled 4y ago> the museum's deserved popularity - especially with tourists - can often limit enjoyment of the environment I'm always on vacation when in London so I try to go early morning on a weekday. > I'd suggest considering membership. It's £69 a year, and grants free access to otherwise paid exhibitions/events. I get the membership every time, even though I only go every couple of years. Sometimes it gets me into something but it's good to support the place.
- londons_explore 4y ago> good to support the place British people's taxes support the place. Giving them extra money is a bit like throwing some extra cash to help support the police whenever they stop you...
- mod 4y agoI support the police via donations. I doubt it's all that unusual.
- walls 4y agoYou know they already get probably 70% of your cities budget, right?
- cyberlurker 4y agoYou can view this data online and it is normally the schools that take the majority of the budget, and they still don't have enough money either. I have no idea where they live but it is possible their police are in need of donations, unlike perhaps LAPD/NYPD.
- mod 4y agoSince you mentioned it, I looked it up. The sheriff dept I donate to gets about 30% of the county budget. The city police get just over 10% of the city budget.
- GnarfGnarf 4y agoI had easy access to the display in 1983. Now it's usually surrounded by visitors 6-deep, very difficult to get near.
- Bakary 4y agoYou are not in traffic, you are traffic
- qazpot 4y ago> The British Museum is one of the greatest places on earth. Where treasures looted from other cultures are displayed ?
- Accacin 4y agoNot that I disagree with the general sentiment, but I'd be surprised if a National Museum of any country didn't have looted treasures. I'm not sure why the British are always singled out for this, and other countries conveniently ignored.
- Bakary 4y agoOther countries are not ignored, it's just that their looting pales in comparison and British culture gets talked about more by virtue of being in English.
- dopidopHN 4y agoCF : the next in line offender, our French friends in the Louvre.
- TremendousJudge 4y agoWhere the Rosetta stone would be if the British hadn't stolen it after the battle of Trafalgar.
- dopidopHN 4y agoOh. As a French I did not know that. Those sneaky little thieves. Stilling our hardly acquired loot. Typical.
- UI_at_80x24 4y agoI would rather go to the places these antiquities were from and visit in a museum there. Another thing worth pointing out, the British Museum was founded with the objective of proving events written in the bible were based on historical events. Let's air all this dirty laundry while we are at it.
- pazimzadeh 4y agoAnother cool ancient propaganda piece/stone inscription is the Cyrus Cylinder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_Cylinder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_Cylinder
- Ozzie_osman 4y agoIt is worth noting that Egypt has asked for the Rosetta stone back to be displayed in a museum there and the British have refused.
- TremendousJudge 4y agoAlso technically they stole it from the French
- photochemsyn 4y agoHmmm... so, thieves who steal from other thieves may view their actions as less reprehensible than thieves who steal from the original owners? European colonialism was just an example of a practice that dates back to prehistory, and can even be seen in the behavior of our chimpanzee cousins - 'raiding' is the word for it.
- mistrial9 4y agothe sands of Egypt are soaked in blood of many nations, peoples and the rest
- TremendousJudge 4y agoSorry, I didn't mean to justify it. Just to point out that it wasn't only the British engaging in this behavior. Also I find it a pretty funny historical fact, large part of the British Museum's Egypt collection actually comes from French raids.
- Ensorceled 4y agoI always find these conversations strange. The stone was erected by a long dead Greek Pharaoh of an ancient civilization that happened to be located on what is now Egypt. The stone was found in 1798 by the French and taken by the British as a spoil of war and, eventually, found it's way to the British Museum. Who has claim? The Greeks? It was ruled by a Greek at the time. The Romans who ruled later? The French? The British? The pre-revolution Egyptians? The post coup Egyptians? Everyone involved is long dead. It's not like WWII looting where the grand child of the former owner wants their property back. At some point this is all the ancient history of us all.
- ape4 4y agoMaybe we should leave a few stones around with code in multiple programming languages.
- badpun 4y agoThat assumes that, future civilizations will be even interested in understanding our current codebases. I wonder if there will be code historians?
- GnarfGnarf 4y agoI predict future "crypto-archaeologists" will comb over our primitive source code like Medieval manuscripts, and will run our programs in quantum computer simulators to exercise all paths, and discover bugs we never suspected.
- naveen99 4y agoI don’t think quantum computers get you past the halting problem.
- sizzzzlerz 4y ago"Why did the ancient programmers (blessed be their names), have such a proclivity for always greeting the earth?"
- dopidopHN 4y agoIt’s surely a religious matter, the context is lost at this point but that our best estimate.
- BitwiseFool 4y agoIt is believed that ancient computersmiths were a superstitious caste. They believed in an entity known as "World", and it was custom to greet this deity as both a recognition of its power and an invocation to receive it's divine favor. Computersmiths were also known to compose poetry documenting their capabilities. It was typical for computersmiths to update this prose, commonly referred to as a 'resume', upon successfully greeting World.
- kaesar14 4y agohttps://youtu.be/NIxn9auks24 https://youtu.be/NIxn9auks24 I can’t recommend this Royal Institute lecture about how Champollion (and others) finally cracked the code of Hieroglyphics
- aarondf 4y agoCan’t recommend it, or can't recommend it enough?
- kaesar14 4y agoSorry, can't recommend it enough, typed that on my phone.
- nh23423fefe 4y agoi could care less about this comment
- shellfishgene 4y agoIf you know French or German Arte also has a nice documentary on his life and the hieroglyphics: https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/104380-000-A/das-geheimnis-der-hieroglyphen/ https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/104380-000-A/das-geheimnis-der...
- wazoox 4y agoI've got the recent reprint of the "Panthéon Egyptien", Champollion's 1823 book (see the black and white edition here: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k106204z/f1.item https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k106204z/f1.item ). It's very interesting how he's trying to connect information from Herodotus and other writings and the newly deciphered hieroglyphs.
- meetingthrower 4y agoA question for the AI / ML crowd: could we feed the stone into a computer these days and have it decipher the hieroglyphics?
- nelsondev 4y agoI’m guessing one stone is not enough training data.
- dopidopHN 4y agoHow would that be enough context and how would you backtrack the reasoning to check for correctness / completeness That a fun and interesting question tho! I would bet on « absolutely not, get over it »
- nighthawk454 4y agoNot as such. AI isn't magic, it's fuzzy pattern matching based on existing data. We couldn't just show it some stone out of nowhere and have it "think" or "reason" about what to do with it. If on the other hand you had a model otherwise trained on a bunch of hieroglyphics<-->English data, then sure probably.
- meetingthrower 4y agoWell I know that it can't reason. But we know two translations and hieroglyphics are the third. So how close could it get to "solving" the hieroglyphics to Greek pattern match?
- miniwark 4y agoLet's not forget his big brother Jacques-Joseph, who was one of his first educators, have worked with him, and who have edited his manuscripts after his death (his egyptian dictionary & grammar). Without Jacques-Joseph, Jean-François may not have been the same man. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Joseph_Champollion-Figeac https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Joseph_Champollion-Fig...
- drueter 4y ago> Its text praising the divine virtues of the pharaoh Ptolemy V Unfortunately, this article repeats this common half-truth. It neglects to mention the news that the text of the Rosetta Stone actually announces: general debt forgiveness. If one reads past the Rosetta Stone's long-winded introduction about how royal and divine and legitimate Ptolemy V is, the text eventually gets to the point, which is an announcement of official acts: >under his reign [and as regards the sums which were due to the royal house] from the people of Egypt, and likewise those [which were due] from every one who was in his august service, His Majesty remitted them altogether, howsoever great they were... It goes on in detail. Of course, this act is intended to consolidate political power, but why tell any history if that's all we can say about it? It's not common knowledge that general debt amnesties were a common feature of ancient economic life, and this kind of writing is perhaps why. Reducing an official act to "propaganda" is often just a way to dismiss governance that one disagrees with.
- jl6 4y agoHow did a debt amnesty work? Did that put private lenders out of pocket?
- dan-robertson 4y agoIt was reasonably common in the ancient (Mediterranean) world iirc, so I guess there was some understanding or expectation around it from creditors. I think they didn’t really have bankruptcy and debts were inherited so this was the only way for them to be reset. I think there was also a story about Julius Caesar preventing a popular debt-resetting by himself taking on an enormous debt and then arguing that as Rome’s most indebted citizen, he would benefit the most and so it wouldn’t be fair for himself to forgive all debts and thereby his own.
- ask_b123 4y ago> It's not common knowledge that general debt amnesties were a common feature of ancient economic life Is the Jubilee not generally known or do you mean that debt forgiveness was more widespread than generally known? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_(biblical) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_(biblical)
- IncRnd 4y agoIt's interesting that the headline of an article about the Rosetta Stone has grammatical tense incorrect. "Two hundred years ago, Jean-François Champollion deciphers the Rosetta Stone" should be "Two hundred years ago, Jean-François Champollion deciphered the Rosetta Stone"
- kweingar 4y agoHeadlines pretty much always use the historical present tense. If this is incorrect, then so is the entire front page of the New York Times today, e.g. "Senate Passes Bill to Aid Ukraine and Avert Government Shutdown" (should it be "passed"?)
- IncRnd 4y agoThat's not true, and certainly not true enough to make such sweeping generalizations. From the actual New York Times regarding their editing standards for writing headlines: [1] Headlines are written in the historical present tense. That means they written are in present tense but describe events that just happened. The exception to that is when you're reporting on something that happened quite some time ago." The Rosetta Stone wasn't just deciphered. [1] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/general/weblines/521.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/general...