“The Rosetta Stone”: Can Material Culture be Read?
"The subject matter of Archaeology is threefold – the Oral, the Written and the Monumental" (Charles Thomas Newton 2010, pg. 3), because of this structure nothing, writing included, can be taken as pure fact. History can be convoluted in many ways, and cannot be taken at face value, even at the best of times. There will always be a missing piece to the puzzle, some link that has not yet been discovered. This argument even assumes that there is a written record to be found, while much of archaeological research takes place in prehistory, loosely defined as before there was writing. This looks at each cultural entity as being separate from each other, because as an example the Ancient Sumerians developed their writing system first around 34 c. BCE (Kaniewski 2011) while the Olmec, in Mesoamerica, had not developed writing until around 650 cal. BCE (Pohl 2002). The main discrepancy is the time-period, the delay of which was taken for humans to colonize the western hemisphere of the planet. The written word is a monumental benchmark that many cultures around the world did not need, and therefore never developed, however, this does not imply that they were less advanced or civilized than any other culture or that their history is less important to studying humans’ past. Just in terms of this paper, those cultures will not be focused on. Writing, is a form of material culture that took on another form, as history shows time and again, it is the natural world and art that becomes the written word, be it within Sumer, Egypt, China, or Mesoamerica; symbols are often the first step to written language. In this paper, however, I will discuss why writing cannot be simply read and taken as fact. While material culture, and by extension, the written word are important keys to unlocking the past, it takes more to ‘read’ the history of us. Using the world-renowned Rosetta Stone as my case study I will prove using; translation, missing information, bias, and graffiti, that text cannot and should not be read as a be-all, end-all, statement of fact while investigating the past.
Not only a modern issue, translation errors in texts, whether ancient or contemporary, are an enormous struggle for archaeologists to get through. With any language, there will be idioms, sayings, and cultural references that we today could not possibly know nor understand. When translating ancient languages, everything must be translated at first in the most literal way possible, then compared to cultures that may have followed it. Making this more difficult would be if a language might not show a connection to any others, it may be impossible to ever work out how it is put together or the sounds the symbols have, let alone the complete meaning of a phrase. The finding of the Rosetta stone was extremely lucky for this type of case, before it was found the carvings of hieroglyphs had next to no meaning, almost indecipherable (Figure 1). Since the Stone was first found in 1799, it took years of study and work by many linguists and historians, and Jean-François Champollion finally deciphered the meaning of the text in 1822. It was a huge milestone and the only reason why it was possible was because in the late Ptolemaic period in Egypt, the hieroglyph texts were only for the elite to be able to read and understand, it was Coptic that was for the people to read, and the Greeks who had taken power in Egypt at this time had Greek written on the bottom. The carvers had taken the first step; they already translated the piece for us, it was just up to the future historians to recognize that it was the same text three times and work from there.
Figure 1. The Rosetta Stone (The British Museum).
Luckily for archaeologists, in this case, the Rosetta Stone is meant to be literal, the text does have some language, which today we may call ‘flowery’, but it is not a poem, it was written to praise the pharaoh (Greek word for Egyptian king, from Egyptian word “pr-‘o ” meaning ‘great house’), Ptolemaios V, which sounded similar if not the same in Egyptian using the phonetic characters of ‘p t o l m e s’ or in modern transliteration ‘p t w l m y s’. This section seemed to be more important by scholars in the 1800s because the name was inside a cartouche (Figure 2). But, even the name had to be translated into another language. Archaeologists cannot take this one case to be an overall example, most written sources will not have three languages to transliterate (Figures 1 & 3).
Figure 2. The ancient hieroglyphic script deciphered with the help of the Greek text below (Stickings 2022).
Figure 3. The possible shape of the original Rosetta Stone (Jeff Dahl 2010).
Missing pieces are both a literal nuisance and next to impossible feat to work around. In the case of the Rosetta Stone, we are missing a moderately unknown amount of the hieroglyphs from the top section. So, while we know what the text should say because of the mostly complete Coptic and Greek sections we don’t and will most likely never know if there was anything more to the hieroglyphs that we can’t work out, or just an ‘for the more traditional Egyptians eyes only’ piece of text. That is just an example, but the point is still valid. The main argument for the fact that there were originally many more lines of text, which have since broken off is from the fact that not all the text lines up and the present shape of the stele is not how the original would have looked based on the other stele, which was commonly made during this time-period. According to Callimahos, in the unclassified article from his 1970 lecture, the original stele would have stood between five and six feet high and would have contained more lines of both Egyptian hieroglyphs, the full Coptic text, and more lines of Greek than have survived (Callimahos 1970) (Figure 3). It was because of the names of the kings, which were inscribed on the stone, that made it possible to find common ground however sometimes evidence of missing text from statues and temples because later rulers tried to scrub predecessors from history.
Again, however, this means that we have been extremely lucky in finding as complete pieces as we have when it came to the Rosetta stone. Many large statues and walls have lost the outside text, which would have shared much new information, whether a bias presented itself or not. Because material culture can be anything that humans make, including art and writing. While writing is one of the easiest ways of getting a point across that can survive the people and the culture who created it, it does not provide the entire story, nor should be readily accepted as “reading” the past. The simplest argument that has been truthfully passed down so long that it is a clique, which more people should consider more often, is that ‘history is written by the winners’, therefore the writing that has survived this long had been either: written by people of whom still have enough power, have little to no effect on the present day power struggles, or were lost/buried long enough so they were protected from the changing times even if they were against whoever took power during the interim.
Figure 4. Graffiti dating back to 1400 and 1821 scratched into the wall stones in the Temple of Philae (Whitehouse 2016).
Figure 5. Close up view of graffiti spanning centuries at the Temple of Philae, Egypt (Whitehouse 2016).
Figure 6. Close up view of graffiti from “JB, 19th RLU… 1886” at the Temple of Philae, Egypt (Whitehouse 2016).
Figure 7. The face of Hatshepsut with the kingly beard at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Egypt (Whitehouse 2016).
At times this written altering can be changed again, graffiti (Figures 4-6), whether or not malicious in intent will supersede the originally written text and make transcribing and translating much more difficult. Looking at the more ancient examples, rulers like Hatshepsut and the later Cleopatra were almost scratched out of history because their reigns were considered dark and shameful periods of Egyptian history. For Hatshepsut, this was done after her death by her husband Thutmose III and her son, Amenhotep II, who became Egypt’s next ruler, literally chiselling her name and likeness off of walls (Gardiner, 1964). In Figure 4, there are examples of more modern graffiti within the most ancient of temples. It seems that no matter which century one is living in someone wants to make his or her special mark. This can cause many issues looking back over the centuries, as future archaeologists may not know the explanation behind a name and date. The most monumental example is the largest of the Great Pyramids in Giza; the reason archaeologists have long attributed the building of it to the fourth dynasty king Khufu/Cheops is because his name was scratched into an inner wall within the text of “the friends of Khufu gang” leading to the thought that the people who had worked on the project took pride in their work and wanted to be remembered for it (PBS 1997). We do not have issues like this when discussing the Rosetta stone, but while looking at the larger cultural and historical picture we must make sure that changes from graffiti are looked into most diligently.
All of this is part of the argument against post-structuralism; that while we can literally read a text, we cannot ‘read’ the material culture given by the piece of text. Archaeologists have argued for and against the nature of us to place our meanings onto artifacts for decades, as it cannot possibly take all of the information into account and there will always be a sort of ‘spin’ on what is found, based on the authors’ background. This is a reality that we can be mindful of and acknowledge that it exists, however, that does not mean that we should not attempt to find the meanings of artifacts. After all, the written word is only a small amount of what can be found, and whether or not it had been carved on a rock, painted on a wall, or scribbled in a journal, it is part of a person’s life and they, therefore, have their own agency of meaning.
As shown in this paper whether in text or more abstractly, material culture cannot be read from directly to form a full picture of history. Problems that arise from translation; from the major word-for-word literal translations to the smallest symbolic nuances in cultural idioms and slang, writing with geopolitical, religious, sexist, or general historical biases, and missing or lost information (whether by accident or on purpose). There is no way to know that a single piece of writing is giving us the whole story, especially since there are too many points of view to count in every event in history, and without every record we can never hope to know it all. The closest we can get are fairy tales of a sort; as Doug Scott said, “History may be accurate, but archaeology is precise”. We cannot prove one story over another; we must stick with only the facts and understand that archaeology is the science behind the stories, which are what can inevitably teach us the abstract lessons and morals which we can bring into the present and future.
Work Cited
Callimahos, Lambros D. “The Rosetta Stone and Its Decipherment.” 9 Nov. 1970, NSA Crypto-Mathematics Institute, NSA Crypto-Mathematics Institute, www.nsa.gov/news-features/declassified-documents/tech-journals/assets/files/rosetta-stone.pdf.
"Doug Scott." AZQuotes.com. Wind and Fly LTD, 2018. 07 August 2018.
Gardiner, Alan. Egypt of the Pharaohs, (1964). Oxford University Press, pg. 198.
Kaniewski D, Van Campo E, Van Lerberghe K, Boiy T, Vansteenhuyse K, Jans G, et al. (2011). The Sea Peoples, from Cuneiform Tablets to Carbon Dating.
Newton, Charles T., (2010)“Essays on Art and Archaeology”. Cambridge University Press. pg 3.
PBS, Public Broadcasting Service. “Who Built the Pyramids?”. 4 Feb. 1997, www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/who-built-the-pyramids.html.
Pohl, Mary ED, Kevin O. Pope, and Christopher von Nagy. "Olmec origins of Mesoamerican writing." Science 298.5600 (2002): 1984-1987.
Stickings, T. (2022, August 19). What is the Rosetta Stone? All you need to know as British Museum faces claim from Egypt. The National. https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/2022/08/19/what-is-the-rosetta-stone-all-you-need-to-know-as-british-museum-faces-claim-from-egypt/
