Napoleon Stumbles upon a Rock

How a Short Emperor's Blunder Helped Us Decipher the Hieroglyphics

Napoleon

Napoleon Bonaparte was a short, young, reckless, proud, and French general. He conquered the Italians and the Austrians, but that wasn't enough for him... he wanted to conquer the Egyptians. In 1798, after dodging Admiral Horatio Nelson's British warships stationed in the Mediterranean, he landed his army at the mouth of the Nile.

Napoleon set about marching his sweating army up the Nile towards Cairo, but before reaching their destination, they met a considerable force of Egyptian cavalry and camelry. Obviously, the locals weren't too happy with a foreign army messing up their landscape with millions of footprints. What occurred next must have been a most spectacular sight: French soldiers in their red and blue uniforms battling Egyptians mounted on horses and camels... at the foot of pyramids!

"The Battle of the Pyramids"

Napoleon was the victor and marched the streets of Cairo. But what happened next was quite unfortunate. Horatio Nelson, who didn't like the fact that Napoleon's fleet had slipped by him, sailed up the Nile and burned all of Napoleon's ships. Thus, Napoleon was stranded. Not one to sit and rot in Cairo the rest of his life, he decided to make the best use of his time by marching towards Constantinople with the intent of crushing the Ottoman Turks (who had just declared war on France) and anyone else foolish enough to get in his way.

Their march across the desert was a failure. The wool uniforms issued to his soldiers turned out to be impractical for desert conditions so 5,000 soldiers died along the march. But upon his return to Cairo, Napoleon -- always the optimist -- reported to his superiors in France that his Egyptian campaign was a rousing success and arranged a way to get himself back home (since he was getting bored with sand and ancient architecture).

At the beginning of his Egyptian campaign, Napoleon had instructed his soldiers to report any unusual archeological finds And just as he was on the brink of his return to France, word of a very interesting discovery by an officer in his engineer corps was brought to him.

It was a large slab of basalt almost a foot thick, about four feet high and two and a half feet across, which was decked out with inscriptions in hieroglyphics, something that appeared to be gibberish, and some Greek. Part of the top right corner was broken off (or missing - if you have an adventurous mind.)

This rock slab contained the key to understanding the Egyptians' mysterious system of writing in pictures, which archeologists had been trying to decipher for years.

Because the rock slab was excavated near the town of Rosetta, we know it today as the Rosetta stone, even though the name it was given by its French discoverers was something much longer, and in French.

The stone remained in Egypt after Napoleon's return to France in August 1799, but various technical experts devised ways to copy the inscriptions on the stone so replicas could be transported to Paris, for analysis by scholars.

The French troops left behind by Napoleon were in a sticky situation. Not only were they stuck in a hot foreign land, they had to fend off attacks from the British and the Ottomans. Probably to their relief, after 18 months of this, they were overcome by the British in March, 1801. To make a long story short, or shorter, the British transported the Rosetta Stone back to England where it remains to this day.

There are inscriptions in three different languages on the Rosetta Stone: Egyptian hieroglyphics, something like cursive Coptic, called Demotic text, and Greek. Thank goodness for the Greek -- this was the language that would enable the French philologist, Jean-Francois Champollion, to solve the riddle of hieroglyphics which had mystified archeologists and scholars for hundreds of years. The Greek text served Champollion as a guide which he compared to the hieroglyphics. Finally, he figured it out, published a pamphlet on the results of his work and that's how we are able to understand hieroglyphics.

Today, the Rosetta stone can be found in the British Museum sitting alongside lots of other artifacts from Egypt. If it wasn't for Napoleon's expedition to Egypt, and his engineer's discovery of the Rosetta stone, we may not have the understanding of the Egyptians that we have today.

So, after all that effort, what do the mysterious inscriptions on the stone actually say?

The Rosetta Stone text was a declaration by Egyptian priests to commemorate the crowning of Ptolemy V Epiphanes, the king of Egypt.

For more articles and information on Egypt, ancient and modern, check out WWW.NavigatingHistory.com