490-499: All Those Other Languages

Was Melville Dewey a genuinely unpleasant person, or just a product of his times, as we all are? I don't know or even care any more. What I do know is that the more I use the Dewey Decimal System, the more I see how arbitrary it is. In the 200s, Christianity gets 9/10ths of the numbers. In the 400s, many European languages get 10 full digits, while all the languages native to all the other continents are left to smash into this area, 490-499. Of course, through the magic of decimals, it's not hard to create a classification for Tagalog, but it's not going to be 407. (It's 499.211, by the way. Nearby are Vietnamese, 495.922, and Lenape, 497.3.) The problem is that to make a substantive revision to the system, thousands of poor assistants and pages would have to scrape millions of numbers off book spines, so we just keep lumping along.

Speaking of lumping along, in the local library I have most ready access to, the only volumes in the 490-499 range are Russian dictionaries, and I think I've mentioned before how much I am not going to read a dictionary, even in the service of my noble quest. Oh well-- when in doubt, I resort to the children's section. (Hey, look-- last time this happened was at the beginning of the 400s!) That's where I found something on a topic I could actually get behind: The Rosetta Stone!

The Riddle of the Rosetta Stone: Key to Ancient Egypt, by James Cross Giblin, is just what it sounds like: a summary of the discovery and importance of the Rosetta Stone. It is beautifully and generously illustrated with photos of hieroglyphic and hieratic (demotic) Egyptian writing. If you don't know the significance of the Rosetta Stone, here's what happened:

In the 7th century AD, Greek scholars began to get curious about the meaning of the carvings they saw all over tombs and statues, which they called "hieroglyphs," meaning "sacred writing." They asked around, but by this time Egypt had been conquered by the Arabs, and anyone who had used this formal script was long gone. That didn't prevent people from forming theories, of course, but it wasn't until the 1700s that CJ De Guignes made an astute observation (that certain patterns of hieroglyphs were often enclosed in a border, which he called a cartouche), followed by an accurate and useful guess: that these patterns represented names. This insight proved to be one of the keys to the Rosetta Stone, which, in turn, unlocked both forms of Egyptian written records and enabled us to have all the Egyptian history we know and love today. 

Because the Egyptians intersected with other groups that kept written historical records, such as the Jews and the Greeks, and, I suppose, because they must have had their own oral history about the spectacular artifacts amongst which they lived, it's not like nothing was known. But it really wasn't until Napoleon's armies ran across this inscription that contained the same decree in three scripts, two mostly unknown and one extremely familiar, that the writings so generously provided on and in every statue and tomb in Egypt could be deciphered and a detailed history of that ancient civilization pieced together. 

One thing that takes this book to the next level, in my opinion, is that it provides extensive excerpts from the translated text of said decree. The style is not actually very gripping, any more than the ones we write today proclaiming "National Jam Day" or whatever, but the content is a bit startling to modern ears. It basically boils down to the idea that King Ptolemy is really great, has done a lot of good things, will hereafter be known as "the well-favored God revealed on Earth," and welcomes the worship of all people. I don't know how much of that he got, but he certainly deserves our thanks for leaving behind this handy linguistic breadcrumb trail!