The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone

Truly, an incredible sequence of events in the de-coding of theRosetta Stone. This is remarkably well written and researched.I recently read Down the Great Unknown by this author and was very impressedwith his style of writing. That book, too, was very well researched, truthful, and accurate.

This is almost three books in one. It’s a history of human language and writing, a history of deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics and a theory of code-breaking. All these are both fascinating and well written, though one frequently wants the author to “Get back to the main story!” I found only one error: his statement that human language is only 50,000 years old. The great majority of experts think human language is at least 100’s of thousands of years old and could well be millions of years old. Language ability is hard-wired in the human brain and that takes a long time.

(SLIGHT SPOILER ALERT BELOW, second paragraph) Wow, I really enjoyed this book. I've always wondered how we were able to decode the Rosetta stone, and now I know. But the technical part of the story is only the beginning. Dolnick really enriched the basic part of the story - the decoding - with some wonderful side stories. The decoding thread alone could have been dry and academic, but it was very interesting. How could anyone decode a dead language? If someone in the future saw our language, how could they possibly figure it out? Even if they figured our our alphabet stands for sounds, they would have no idea what those sounds meant. So "cat" stands for the "k" sound with the "a" sound with a "t" sound... how would they ever know we meant the felines who lived with us? And how much would "c" sometimes sounding like a "k" and other times sounding like an "s" throw them off? It really was a herculean effort to decode Egyptian, which is not just alphabetic. The comparisons between Egyptian hieroglyphs and other languages illustrate the difficulties Young and Champollion encountered very well. The historical asides added excitement to the already interesting description of how these two decoded the text. I had no idea Napoleon's troops discovered the Rosetta stone, or that the British took possession of it after Napoleon's failures in Egypt. I also was unaware of the Egyptomania that swept through the world in the early 1800s, inspiring even the design of US currency. And Dolnick pointed out the incredible feat of the Egyptians and put it in context: their empire lasted 30 centuries. They didn't even have the wheel, but they had perhaps the longest-lasting empire in history. (The US has only been around for two centuries and some change!)The characters are real-life Indiana Jones types: explorers, wealthy dilettantes, con men, and struggling academics. The sub story about Hatshepsut and her incredible monuments could inspire a movie.SPOILER ALERT: The language itself is fascinating, a combination of childish rebuses, symbols, and alphabetical characters. Honestly, it resembles no other language I'm aware of more closely than text messaging today, with its emojis and puns and slang.I do wish Dolnick had added a bit about where the pharaohs came from. My understanding is that they were Greek and, until Cleopatra, none of them spoke Egyptian. How did the Greeks rule the longest lasting empire? I suspect it was by brutal domination. How did the Greek rulers in Egypt outlive their own empire in the Mediterranean? Did they consider themselves Greek? Did they have regular contact with the ancestral homeland? Why didn't they defend Greece from Rome? Why did the pharaohs not import technology from the European Romans and Greeks? How on earth did the Egyptians avoid being conquered by the technologically advanced Roman army for so long? I guess I'll need to read some more books to find out, and I wouldn't be inspired to if it weren't for this book.Highly recommended!

It's a fascinating story, and it is told every so well. The author knows how to illustrate his point via current day examples. And the drawings and pictures are terrific.

The book describes how two scholars tried over decades to make progress on the translation. It is a wonderful read, especially if you have interest in ancient Egypt, like solving codes and puzzles, want to hear about mathematicians behaving badly, or just interested in a fascinating description about life back in the day when colonial powers ruled the world and could just appropriate artifacts with never a care. Dolnick brings the puzzles of the stone to life for me, showing us the pure thirst for knowledge and showing the drive that these two men had in trying to figure out what was going on with the three languages written on that piece of rock.The hardest part about the stone was the hieroglyphics, because they can play the role of symbols, letters of the alphabet, and grouped together to form ideas or other concepts. Figuring out the Rosetta Stone had a major problem: you first had to find the context and get into the heads of the ancients without really any idea of what their lives were like or what they did. It is one thing to be solving a puzzle with contemporary references. It is another thing to try to reconstruct a dead language with no known speakers, and to do so by using yet another dead language.

This nonfiction book exploring the story of the race to translate the Rosetta Stone makes for a light and interesting read. The author makes great effort to explain the historical understand of hieroglyphs and composes an interesting narrative as the mystery is slowly unraveled. I learned a lot of things I previously did not know about the Egyptian writing system and the history of the Rosetta Stone.The main criticisms I can level at the book is that the early framing of the tale somewhat oversells the drama and intrigue of the actual events as they are eventually told, and that the telling of the story can become somewhat meandering as the author often devotes whole chapters to tangents—often interesting tangents, but tangents nonetheless.The book is still a quick and compelling read, however and whatever flaws may emerge in the telling are more than made up by the approachable delivery and fascinating subject matter.

A great read if you are interested in Egyptian history. Beautifully written. I just finished it and will read it again. It almost feels like a novel, but impregnated with historical facts. Your brain will thank you as you read this book. Enjoy.

I will buy more books of this author.