The Rosetta Stone and its decipherers – Thomas Young and Jean-François Champollion – are the focus of John Ray’s book, but there’s plenty of other interesting stuff. It’s unfortunate that the friendly conflict between Young and Champollion tends to obscure Young’s other accomplishments. If anybody has heard of Young at all, he usually figures as the person who didn’t quite translate the Rosetta Stone but who was trumpeted as the equal of Champollion by English chauvinists. To a certain extent this is true; Young made a promising start on the stone – most notably by correctly surmising that the hieroglyphs enclosed in cartouches were royal names – but then lost interest and went on to other projects. He was quite a polymath – Young’s modulus is named after him, as is the Young experiment in optics and Young’s Principles of Life Insurance. Champollion, on the other hand, was just a linguist – but a brilliant one – and deserves the credit for being the first Egyptologist (well, at least the first since Khaemwaset).

After the discussion of the stone and its translators, Ray continues a number of only slightly germane but always interesting directions: the ongoing questions of who “owns” the Rosetta Stone, or museum collections of antiquities in general – although the return of the stone to Egypt doesn’t get quite as much press as the return of the Elgin Marbles to Greece, it’s still a propaganda touch point between Egypt and England; and a discussion of translating unknown languages in general, including a pretty good explanation of how Michael Ventris translated Linear B and Yuri Knorosov translated Mayan, neither of which had a “Rosetta Stone” multilingual inscription. (Basic principal: count the number of unique symbols; if there are thousands, your unknown language is ideographic; if hundreds, it’s a mix of ideographic and syllabic (like Egyptian or Akkadian); if in the 50-100 range, it’s syllabic; if 20-30, alphabetic. Then go to a medium and ask to speak to Michael Ventris in the beyond).

An enjoyable light read. ( )