The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone by Edward Dolnick

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

• 
  Beata

  Clearly written and easy to follow. I knew the general facts behind the Rosetta Stone and it was a good refreshing read.
• 
  Nancy

  This book has so much going for it, it’s hard to say what I enjoyed most!
  
  The story of the Egyptian civilization which lasted 3,000 years? How Bonaparte brought not only an army of warriors, but an army of savants to Egypt? How ancient Egypt spurred the imagination of Europeans, with collectors and amateur Egyptologists scrambling to discover and buy up ancient artifacts?
  
  The story of the Rosetta stone with its three sections of ancient languages, and how brilliant, eccentric scholars vied to be the first to decode it?
  
  The history of writing, from mercantile records to historic records to literature, and from symbols to the alphabet?
  
  The history of decoding?
  
  The Writing of the Gods by Edward Dolnick covers it all, wrapped in an engaging and accessible book.
  
  Ancient Egyptian was a dead language when the Rosetta stone was found. The writing on the stone included Egyptian hieroglyphs, Greek, and an unknown section which turned out to be an ancient Egyptian shorthand for the hieroglyphics.
  
  Ancient Egypt had been a stable society with few changes. The hieroglyphics did not change, unlike, say English. I can’t pick up Beowulf (circa 1000 AD) and read it without translation. The Egyptians knew about the wheel, but were not inspired to create a cart. All those pyramids were built without wheels! They made ramps of sand and pushed those stones into place! Christianity and the Mamelukes and the bubonic plague came along, and Egypt became a has-been. By the time Bonaparte arrived, magnificent temples were used for garbage dumps and sand buried the Sphinx up to her chin.
  
  Dolnick leads readers step by step to understand how the hieroglyphics were decoded. It had long been believed that they were symbols not representative of spoken language. Two scholars with different backgrounds and approaches took up the challenge of decoding the stone. First, the cartouches were considered, believing they were the names of the pharaohs seen in the Greek section of the Rosetta stone. These pharaohs were Greek, for Greece had conquered Egypt. Perhaps the symbols stood for sounds of the Greek names. The symbols were connected to sounds; the lion symbol stood for the sound “l’ in Ptolemy and Cleopatra, for instance. One scholar believed that Coptic was born out of ancient Egyptian and he determined to learn it although it was nearly a dead language, only surviving in the Coptic Church. This aided in understanding how the letters were pronounced.
  
  Cracking the names of the pharaohs in the cartouches was just the beginning of the long process of decoding hieroglyphs.
  
  Utterly fascinating and always engaging, I much enjoyed this book.
  
  I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.
• 
  Barbara K.

  I suppose it was only logical that I should read this book after finishing
  The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code. After all, the books are similar in that each describes the challenges surrounding the decryption of an ancient script, a topic that is clearly of interest to me. (Why else would I already own copies of both books? Oh yes, that's right, I'm a sucker for that shiny thing called a book-on-sale.)
  
  The immediate juxtaposition means that I have struggled to write a review of
  The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone without comparing it with the Riddle of the Labyrinth. So shall it be.
  
  The books are different in significant ways. Although at the time the Rosetta Stone was unearthed and the attempts to decipher the hieroglyphics began, no details were known about the earliest Egyptian cultures but there was at least some continuity with the present. The age of the pharaohs overlapped with the Greeks and the Romans, after all, whereas the connections between the Minoan and later Greek cultures was doubted by scholars into the 20th century. We still know far less about those peoples than the early Egyptians.
  
  All that known culture and history lend themselves to a great deal more background within which to set the story of the Rosetta Stone decoding. Attempts to decipher hieroglyphics (though not the Rosetta Stone) had been ongoing for a thousand years. Then when the Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799, Napoleon, Wellington and the "savants" (the scholars Napoleon brought with him as he set out to conquer Egypt), provided additional colorful elements to the story.
  
  So the story of the Rosetta Stone is in many ways far more glamorous and accessible than that of Linear B. Although Dolnick describes the struggles of both British polymath Thomas Young and French Egyptologist Jean-Francois Champollion to find the connections among the stone's Greek, Demotic and hieroglyphic inscriptions, that is only one part of his story. By contrast, the intellectual problems attendant on decoding Linear B are the primary focus of The Riddle of the Labryinth.
  
  In short, this is an entertaining read, particularly for those new to the topic. It is not a deep dive into the decryption of the hieroglyphs.
  
  Aside #1: The mystique of the Rosetta Stone is not lost on me. When I visited the British Museum for the first time, I gasped at the realization that this, right here in front of me, was the actual Rosetta Stone.
  
  Aside #2: I chuckled when Dolnick quoted Egyptologist Barbara Mertz, probably better known to GR members as Elizabeth Peters, author of the delightful Amelia Peabody mysteries.
  
  Aside #3: I really didn't care for the narrator. Can't pinpoint the issue other than that his cadence would be more appropriate for a novel than non-fiction.
  
  Aside #4: Dolnick cites The Riddle of the Labyrinth in this book, but gives all credit for the decryption of Linear B to Michael Ventris, pretty much completely ignoring Alice Kober's contributions. Sigh.
• 
  Shahin Keusch

  I saw the Rosetta Stone a few times while I was living in London. It was always impressive as I knew that this Stone was the reason we knew anything about ancient Egypt. And it is all so much more impressive now that I know what it took and how long it took to actually decode the hieroglyphs. 
  
  This book was such an entertaining and easy read. It just flew by and was very hard to put down. I would recommend this to anyone. 
• 
  Evelina | AvalinahsBooks

  How I read this: Free ebook copy received through Edelweiss
  3.5 stars, rounded to 4
  
  The Writing of the Gods is incredibly easily readable and instantly draws you in. It’s very easy to jump into even if you have never read anything of the like before. This is a great thing for nonfiction, because quite a few nonfiction authors fail to make their books accessible to non-academics. In fact, I may have not noticed this, if I wasn’t reading another nonfiction book at the same time as this one (
  Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art – a book about Neanderthals), and found them in stark difference of accessibility. Where Kindred fails to explain cryptic terms, The Writing of the Gods doesn’t even use them where it can be avoided, therefore making your reading experience natural and accessible.
  
  That said, one thing I noticed was that this book was a little repetitive. It sometimes comes back to the same bits of history and glances over them again, almost as if there was not enough material and it’s trying to fill out the book? Then again, at the end the details on furthering the efforts of decoding after Champollion and Young’s deaths were nearly glossed over in just a couple of pages, and I found that odd as well, so maybe it’s just the chosen pacing, which I wasn’t sure I liked so much. There’s also not a whole lot about the deciphering of the script in general, at least not until the very end.
  
  Anyway, if this was the only book I’d read about deciphering, then maybe I wouldn’t be saying it – but my bar is set extremely high, as a year or two ago I read
  The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code – the story of deciphering Linear B. It seems you can’t write a thrilling story about that sort of thing, but you totally can, and the author of The Riddle of the Labyrinth proved this – I was glued to the pages, reading it like some high-stakes adventure novel. The Writing of the Gods is a great book, but it’s nowhere near The Riddle of the Labyrinth.
  
  Anyway, I had more thoughts about this book, you can read them here in the full review:
  
  https://avalinahsbooks.space/writing-...
  
  
  [image error]
• 
  Adam Morris

  OMG could this man describe anything without following it with an analogy, simile, metaphor or occasionally bizarre example? Although there was much of interest in this book it was, for me, overshadowed by this annoying and often gratuitous use of comparisons throughout. At one point (I don’t have the exact quote) he was discussing someone straining to hold a complex series of ideas in their mind for long periods as akin to clenching your fist for a really long time. Please! I almost gave up several times but there was a good story in amongst all the extraneous crap.
  Additionally, the subtitle of the book “the race to decode the Rosetta Stone” is somewhat misleading. There really was no race and the competition between the two principal protagonists feels like it was exaggerated to try to spice things up. The Englishman proposed that the hieroglyphs were more than just a bunch of pictures and the Frenchman figured out what they actually meant. As the author himself finally admits, neither would have been successful without the other.
  The author also all but dismisses the ancient Egyptian civilization as rather backward, ritualistic and superstitious. He asserts that the long-standing belief that they made important discoveries in the fields of science and medicine are wrong. I am not an expert on ancient civilizations but the impression I have from other sources is that there were a number of areas where they were quite knowledgeable about the world and it’s operation.
  As always, I am satisfied with reading that teaches me something new. Just a bit disappointed in the way it was presented.
• 
  Andy

  The decoding of the Rosetta Stone and the unlocking of Ancient Egyptian culture is a fascinating puzzle-solving story. Overall, the book does a pretty good job informing the reader on this. Unfortunately, not that much of the book is about that.
  Overall, the book is framed as a race between a British scholar named Young and the French scholar Champollion. This seems somewhat phony. Everyone agrees almost all of the decoding was done by Champollion. And even according to this book, " ...to the last, [Young] rejected Champollion's most important conclusion. Champollion had shown that, in ordinary words and not just in spelling out foreign names, hieroglyphs stood for sounds. With almost his last breath, Young denied it." In other words, Young completely missed the boat on the Egyptian alphabet, so it's not clear how one can even talk about a "race." The only potential bit of controversy is whether Young was the first to have the insight that foreign (non-Egyptian) names were the place to start. According to the book, we don't know whether Champollion had the idea independently of Young or not. So this whole frame for the book seemed annoyingly artificial, if not jingoistic.
  In addition, there's an awful lot of filler about the related history.
• 
  Christopher

  This one ticked all the boxes of a great read for me: Nonfiction, languages, travel, translation. Will be reading again soon.
• 
  Anmiryam

  My father told me the tale of the Rosetta Stone when I was maybe ten or so. He didn't share details and I'm not sure he knew them, though he knew a great many things so perhaps he simplified the story for my sake. All I knew was that because of the stone scholars had been able to finally unravel the meanings of hieroglyphs that had been a mystery since before the fall of Rome.
  
  In my interpretation, this was a simple task. Read the Greek, now it's easy to read the Egyptian. Hardly. It took nearly three decades before Thomas Young made some initial discoveries which Jean-Francois Champollion used to finally decipher the strange pictograms that had so fascinated explorers for centuries.
  
  Edward Dolnick's recounting of the saga of the stone and the men who were entranced by it is a short book, chock full of interesting tidbits, but it is often repetitive as if he was looking for a way to make the book longer. He tries to create suspense, but in doing so he muddies his narrative and relies on clumsy cliff hangers.
  
  Then, in the final third, we get to the meat of the story and the book takes off. Dolnick's explication of how hieroglyphs work and what it took to discover their meaning is fascinating, clear and will make anyone with the slightest interest in language and puzzles turn pages anxious to learn more. Made me wish I had the dedication and energy to learn Ancient Egyptian, and while that may never be, I am very glad that others spent their lives looking to bring a lost civilization into the history books with greater clarity.
• 
  Lynn

  Loved Loved This Book
  
  I read it carefully and took it as much information as I could. I loved this account of finding out how the Ancient Egyptian script was discovered after a thousand years of not being read. The author ventured into the history of writing and insights into scripts that I wasn’t aware of before. Well written and clear.
• 
  Carmel Rietveld

  Possibly my favorite book of the year so far. Everything a non-fiction book should be- just the right blend of storytelling and facts, a complicated subject simplified for the average person, tons of photos and drawings to aid with understanding, and countless “rabbit trails” of fascinating things to scribble down and learn more about later.
• 
  Katie Goodman

  Super interesting dive into discovery and translation of the Rosetta Stone, as well as the crazy for Egyptology in 1800s Europe. Wasn’t crazy for the writing style at times but was a good high-level take on a topic I didn’t know a lot about.
• 
  Annie Jacobs

  An exercise in innumerable tangents, but not all totally uninteresting.
• 
  Ben

  Another fascinating story of decoding a script, like Margalit Fox's "The Riddle of the Labyrinth" on Linear B.
  
  > Egyptians knew about wheels, which had been in use in neighboring empires for five centuries. They chose not to use them. (About a thousand years after the pyramid era, they began building war chariots.) We might think we understand the appeal of tradition and the fear of change, but Egyptian culture was conservative to a degree we can scarcely fathom. Art highlights the point. The same drawings turn up again and again in temples built two thousand years apart. Here the pharaoh grabs his enemies by the hair with one hand and raises the other to strike a mighty blow, and there—a thousand miles and a thousand years away—the identical image recurs. … “When you go into a museum,” Brier continues, “you can look at a statue from 2500 BC, and 1500 BC, and 500 BC, and they’re not really different. And that’s why you can recognize Egyptian art at a glance, because it didn’t change.”
  
  > Some archaeologists believe that we overestimate how much thought Egyptians gave to death. In ancient Egypt, towns typically rose up on wet, fertile ground, while tombs and cemeteries were relegated to the desert’s edge. As a result, the most abundant and best-preserved relics are those associated with death. “This has given us a very distorted view of the culture,” writes the Egyptologist Richard Parkinson. “Imagine if only municipal cemeteries were preserved from Victorian Britain.”
  
  > Most of the trouble arose from a single root: the ruling family were outsiders. They were not Egyptian but Greek. Alexander the Great had conquered Egypt in 332 BC; after his death, one of his generals became pharaoh, and Ptolemy was a descendant of that general. … None of the rulers in the Ptolemaic line bothered to learn the local language. On the evening before one battle, Ptolemy IV (the father of the Rosetta Stone’s Ptolemy) delivered a speech meant to rally the troops in “band of brothers” fashion. But the speech fell flat because an interpreter had to translate the pharaoh’s Greek into Egyptian.
  
  > The heyday of Coptic dated from around the third century AD until shortly after the Arabs conquered Egypt in 642 AD. Within the following few centuries, Islam would displace Christianity and Arabic would displace Coptic. By the 1600s, a once-thriving language had become a relic. … Coptic had one crucial feature that set it apart from Egyptian. It was written not with hieroglyphs but using the Greek alphabet, augmented by half a dozen symbols for sounds not found in Greek.
  
  > A decade later, after Napoleon had been defeated and the looted texts returned to the Vatican, one scholar found Champollion’s scribbled notes in the margins. “ I think there are few Coptic books in Europe he has not examined… There is no book in the Vatican in that language that has not remarks of Champollion in almost every page, which he made when the manuscripts were at Paris.”
  
  > Demotic looks like “row upon row of agitated commas,” one modern Egyptologist observes. “It is perfectly dreadful stuff to read.”
  
  > Nowadays starting with names is standard practice for decipherers. … Young had made a conceptual breakthrough. By deciphering Ptolemy on the Rosetta Stone, he had shown that hieroglyphs sometimes stood for sounds.
  
  > According to the myth, Minos’s daughter Ariadne gave Theseus a ball of string—a clewe, in Middle English—so that, after he had slain the Minotaur, he could follow the string and find his way back out of the labyrinth. Eventually the word clewe became clue, still retaining its original sense of a hint to unraveling a mystery. The usage is so deeply embedded in the language that to this day we talk about “following the thread” of a difficult explanation.
  
  > During World War II he served as a navigator for the Royal Air Force. When he flew back to base from bombing raids over Germany, one journalist wrote, “Ventris would set course and then, clearing a space on the navigator’s table, happily set to work on his Linear B documents, while the aircraft groaned its way home, searchlights stretched up their probing fingers, and bursts of flak shook the bomber.”
  
  > "Hieroglyphics" was not discovered until 1419, a thousand years after Horapollo’s death, when an Italian monk happened on a Greek translation. Where the book had been in the meantime and how it had come to be translated in the first place, no one knows. But as soon as it was unearthed, the work was hailed as the key to hieroglyphs, and it retained that status for four centuries. … Horapollo hammered home his central theme—hieroglyphs were emblems and allegories, and they conveyed symbolic messages. “When [Egyptians] wish to symbolize a god, or something sublime,” he wrote, “… they draw a hawk.” Why a hawk in particular? Because “other birds, when they wish to fly, proceed on a slant, it being impossible for them to rise directly. Only the hawk flies straight upwards.”
  
  > A Greek historian named Diodorus Siculus had visited Egypt in the first century BC and reported that Egyptian writing was different from all others; it was not based on letters or syllables but on pictures that carried metaphoric meaning. A crocodile stood for evil, for instance, and an eye for justice. In around 120 AD Plutarch, a Greek historian far more prominent than Diodorus, had explained that a hieroglyph of a fish symbolized hatred because the sea, which teems with fish, devours the Nile, which provides life. A hippopotamus stood for violence and immorality because male hippos kill their fathers and mate with their mothers.
  
  > Like ciphers in wartime, the experts insisted, hieroglyphs were designed to be difficult. That belief, all but universal until the 1800s, sent would-be decipherers in the wrong direction. Rather than burrow into the ground in search of mundane meanings behind the cryptic symbols, they sailed aloft into ever more far-fetched realms of hot air and learned silliness. With hindsight, it seems bewildering that deep thinkers insisted even into the Age of Science that hieroglyphs concealed mystic truths behind elaborate masks. The trouble began with misplaced faith. Plutarch and Horapollo and the others were names to reckon with
  
  > in the 1950s, when scholars were still wrestling futilely with Mayan glyphs. That New World picture-writing was finally deciphered in the 1970s, in one of the great linguistic and archaeological triumphs of modern times. The story is told thrillingly (by one of the participants) in Michael Coe’s Breaking the Maya Code. The story has uncanny echoes of the Egyptian tale, although there was no Mayan counterpart of the Rosetta Stone.
  
  > Isaac Newton, who lived more than a thousand years after Horapollo, fervently believed that ancient Egyptians had grasped all the secrets of nature’s cosmic choreography. The task of modern thinkers, Newton and his peers believed, was not to break new ground but to recover those ancient insights. … he insisted that the ancient Egyptians had made all his most important discoveries thousands of years before him. They had known the law of gravitation and all the other secrets of the cosmos; the point of hieroglyphs was to hide that knowledge from the unworthy. “The Egyptians,” Newton wrote, “concealed mysteries that were above the capacity of the common herd under the veil of religious rites and hieroglyphic symbols.” … The view that thinkers who lived thousands of years ago knew more than we do, even about scientific matters, upends everything that we believe today. But in the 1600s and 1700s, it was common sense. The doctrine was called “the wisdom of the ancients.” In ancient days thinkers had been privy to nature’s secrets, scholars proclaimed, but then corrupt and sinning humankind had fumbled away those divine gifts. As the world decayed intellectually and morally, countless truths vanished.
  
  > The key bit of good fortune was that Ptolemy and Cleopatra contained several letters in common, namely P, T, O, and L. Young had guessed years before that the Rosetta cartouches spelled out Ptolemy (actually the Greek form of the name, Ptolemaios) in hieroglyphs. Now Champollion did the same.
  
  > The Cleopatra cartouche had helped speed Champollion on his way. For Young, the same cartouche represented an enormous missed chance. Bankes had sent him his obelisk inscriptions, too, and Young had immediately spotted something odd. He knew, from the Greek inscription, that Bankes’s second cartouche likely spelled out Cleopatra. (The first cartouche spelled out Ptolemy, which Young recognized from the Rosetta Stone.) But the copyist who had recorded the hieroglyphs had made a mistake—the first symbol in Cleopatra’s name should have been a hieroglyph that stood for the sound k, but instead the copyist had written the hieroglyph for t. Young had frowned and put the inscriptions aside. “As I had not leisure at the time to enter into a very minute comparison of the name with other authorities, I suffered myself to be discouraged with respect to the application of my alphabet to its analysis.” Young had tripped over a typo.
  
  > It was fire, the destroyer of libraries ever since Alexandria, that saved the texts from the earliest libraries, which were written not on paper or papyrus but on clay. “When in wars and invasions the great Mesopotamian cities were burned down,” writes the historian Stephen Greenblatt, “the sun-dried tablets in the libraries and royal archives were in effect baked into durable form. In their death agonies, the palace and the temples had become kilns.”
  
  > sometimes there were errors in the originals, because the craftsmen who carved hieroglyphs into stone or painted them on walls and monuments were seldom literate; they worked from texts written by scribes, but they could not read what they were copying. In contrast, texts on papyrus were written by the scribes themselves and therefore far less likely to contain mistakes.
  
  > The Incas were the exception to the rule—the only known example of an empire that made no use of a writing system. The knotted cords the Incas called quipu did provide a sophisticated way of recording numbers (but apparently not words).
  
  > In Assyria, for instance, thousands upon thousands of inscriptions and carvings depict tortures and massacres in careful detail. This royal reminiscence, from a king named Sennacherib who ruled around 700 BC, is typical: “I cut their throats like lambs… With the bodies of their warriors, I filled the plain, like grass. Their testicles I cut off, and tore out their privates like the seeds of cucumbers.”
  
  > Each pharaoh had several names, including a birth name and a throne name chosen when the king’s reign began. Ozymandias was a Greek version of Ramesses’s throne name
  
  > As a teenager Champollion had boasted, “I give myself up entirely to Coptic,” and “I dream in Coptic.” By 1822 he had been steeping in Coptic for more than a decade. Now, it seems likely, Champollion rolled the pharaohs’ names across his tongue, drawing out the syllables. Ra-mes-ses. Toth-mes. And he thought of the Coptic word mise (pronounced me-say), which meant birth. So Ramesses and Tothmes were not merely names, but names with meanings. Born of Ra, the Sun God. Born of Toth, the God of Writing.
  
  > The Bible never specifies just what kind of fruit grew on the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Genesis refers only to a generic fruit. The apple didn’t come along until around 400 AD, when Saint Jerome produced a new Latin translation of the Bible. Because the Latin word malum happens to mean both apple and evil, Jerome had the bright idea of placing a pun at the heart of one of the Western world’s founding myths.
  
  > a given hieroglyph could change roles without warning. A duck might mean son in one context; in another setting it might mean an ordinary, quacking duck, such as you might see on any pond; and still elsewhere it could mean the sound sa, the sound of the Egyptian word for duck.
  
  > Champollion’s task was to find every hieroglyphic text he could lay his hands on and read it aloud while listening intently for words that sounded like Coptic.
  
  > Roughly speaking, it was as if English were written with consonants only and scholars had to decide whether crt meant carrot or create. For Champollion, the lack of vowels brought an unexpected difficulty in its wake. In ancient Egypt, the notion of “homonym” was broader than it is for us—so long as the consonants in two words matched, that would do. You could draw a picture of one to stand for the other. The words might have sounded the same, but they might not have. A scribe might have drawn a pear to mean pair, but a pear could equally well have meant any of a host of words with the consonants pr—it might have meant pier or peer or poor or pour or pore or pry or even pyre.
  
  > Characters in old novels were always wandering into pubs with names like Ye Fox and Hounds. In past eras, ye was pronounced the. The use of Y for Th was just a typographical convention (like f for s in we hold these truths to be felf-evident).
  
  > One of the most familiar verses in the Bible—Give us this day our daily bread—contains a word that has tormented writers and translators since ancient times. The Greek word epiousios, which is customarily translated as daily, occurs in the Lord’s Prayer and nowhere else in the Bible or in Greek literature. (The original language of the New Testament was Greek.) No one knows for sure what it meant, and Greek had a perfectly ordinary word for daily
  
  > Shakespeare in vented thousands of words, including many that are now familiar, such as horrid, vast, and lonely. But some words occur only once, and in phrases where context does not come to the rescue. In one of the history plays, for instance, Shakespeare refers to soldiers killed in battle and says they were “balk’d in their own blood.” No one knows what he meant. One theory is that balk’d was a typo for baked.
  
  > Little to do with Egyptian determinatives was simple. Determinatives for verbs were often harder to decode than those for nouns, for instance, because actions were hard to capture in pictures. A determinative that showed a pair of walking legs meant hunt and go and hurry (and also linger and even stop). Ideas were harder still. Even so, there was a determinative—a picture—for things that cannot be pictured. A drawing of a rolled-up papyrus scroll signaled an abstraction, like writing. … A hieroglyph might look exactly like any other hieroglyph but function solely as a silent guide to the meaning of other hieroglyphs. And, if Champollion had it right, determinatives were not exotic features that turned up only in rare settings. They were everywhere, and until you had made sense of them, every text you looked at would trip you up.
  
  > Another eighty-odd hieroglyphs stand for two consonants. A hieroglyph that looks like a bowl, for instance, stands for the letters nb (pronounced, by convention, as neb). That is decidedly odd, because the alphabet already has perfectly fine hieroglyphs for n and b … Some hieroglyphs stand for three consonants. (The ankh symbol— —is one.
  
  > The word snake in hieroglyphs. The first four signs stand for sounds. The long, bent snake represents the sound j (as in jail), the hand is d, the horned viper is f, and the half-loaf of bread stands for t. (The word was pronounced, roughly, djedfet.) The third, wriggly snake is a determinative, a silent reminder that the entire string of symbols represents snake.
  
  > the complexity of the hieroglyphic system never counted against it in the minds of its Egyptian users. The reason was that ease was never the point. Reading and writing were specialized skills in ancient Egypt, and those who had mastered those arts saw no reason to hand down a ladder so that others might climb to the same heights. The difficulty of the hieroglyphic script was a feature, not a bug.
  
  > Young’s problem was partly that he had run out of ideas, and partly that so many subjects fascinated him. In the winter of 1816, he sent a note to the editor of theEncyclopedia Britannica, who had asked Young if he would write an essay on acoustics. Young took that assignment and added some ideas of his own. “I would also suggest Alphabet, Annuities, Attraction, Capillary Action, Cohesion, Colour, Dew, Egypt, Forms, Friction, Halo, Hieroglyphic, Hydraulics, Motion, Resistance, Ship, Strength, Tides, and Waves,” and “anything of a medical nature.” Over the next half-dozen years, Young wrote sixty-three articles for the Britannica, including his groundbreaking “Egypt” essay.
  
  > In the ruins of the ancient city of Tanis, near Alexandria—Tanis was the sand-buried city in Raiders of the Lost Ark—Lepsius discovered a counterpart of the Rosetta Stone. Until Lepsius unearthed it, no one had any idea that it existed. This new stone contained a long passage in Greek and the same passage written out in demotic and in hieroglyphs. The message, which was composed a few decades earlier than the Rosetta Stone, is nothing special—it praises the pharaoh and talks about fixing glitches in the calendar. But the message wasn’t the point. The point of the Canopus Stone (it was named for the city where it was written) was that its text differed from that of the Rosetta Stone.
  
  > Napoleon brought artists and scientists with him to Egypt. When they returned home in the early 1800s, their accounts of the wonders they had seen triggered a craze for all things Egyptian. The frenzy, called Egyptomania, lasted for decades and extended to America as well as Europe. (That is why the Washington Monument is an obelisk.)
• 
  Malte

  Alles fing mit einer ARTE-Doku (von denen ich alle möglichen empfehlen kann!) mit dem Titel „Die Entschlüsselung der Hieroglyphen“ an. Ich wurde innerhalb dieser 1 1/2 Stunden so von dem Thema Ägypten und Hieroglyphen eingenommen, dass ich mich kurzerhand für ein gleichnamiges Buch entschieden habe, das - wie es der Zufall so will - erst kurz vorher erschienen war.
  
  Grundzüge der Sprachwissenschaft wurden erläutert, Exkurse zu anderen Sprachrätseln unternommen und natürlich das Leben von Thomas Young und Jean-François Champollion in einzelnen Aspekten gezeigt. Dennoch waren es gerade diese einzelnen Aspekte, die mich am Ende zu einer Bewertung mit drei Sternen geführt hatten. Ich wurde das Gefühl nicht los, dass die Entschlüsselung der Hieroglyphen an sich recht knapp über die Kapitel verteilt und mit zahllosen (mitunter sehr ausschweifenden Exkursen) gespickt wurde. Der Rest des Lebens von Champollion und seiner umfangreichen Ägyptischen Grammatik wurde leider nur auf den letzten fünf Seiten erläutert.
  
  Ohne Frage, wer ein breit gefächertes Interesse an den unterschiedlichsten sprach-/historischen Themen hat, für den- oder diejenige(n) ist das Buch mehr als geschaffen. Wer allerdings rein an der Entschlüsselung der Hieroglyphen interessiert ist und ein gewisses sprachliches / sprachwissenschaftliches Grundwissen besitzt, der / die sollte sich eher an einem reinen Fachbuch oder der - wie bereits erwähnt - sehr empfehlenswerten ARTE-Dokumentation probieren.
• 
  Susan Tunis

  Lately, I've been reading full books on subjects I belatedly realize I only have the barest and most superficial knowledge of. The Rosetta Stone definitely falls under that category.
  
  What was great about this book was, that not only did it provide a thorough lesson in the decades-long struggle to decipher an important archeological mystery, it also got seriously down and dirty into the mechanics of language. I can't honestly say it's a page-turner, but for a word nerd like me,it was pretty fascinating.
  
  In the end, this important and hard-won knowledge was obtained by far more than two men. And in the wake of reading this book, I find myself wondering what the modern world would be like if they had not succeeded. An interesting though experiment.
  
  I don't know that every reader will have enough interest to read a book that goes into this level of minutiae, but I'm delighted to have a deeper understanding of an artifact that changed our view of the ancient world.
• 
  Mary

  "The Writing of the Gods" is the third book by Edward Dolnick that I've read in 2022, all of which, including this one, have been fascinating.
• 
  Erika

  As a former linguistics/archaeology doctoral student (who specialized in Maya hieroglyphs, no less!) I couldn't wait to get my hands on this book. Within two pages, I realized that Dolnick and his editor had decided to take a tired, crusty, patriarchal angle on this book.
  
  Yes, it's well-researched. Parts are well-written (though I find it ironic that the descriptor "breathless" came to mind -- wow, does the author try hard to make his writing zingy -- right before Dolnick used that word himself to describe the 18th-century obsession with Egypt). What's frustrating, though, is how entrenched Dolnick is in Old School Ways: the text is peppered with obsolete language ("mankind"? PLEASE. Get with the 21st century program) and dating systems (no serious academic uses BC instead of BCE).
  
  Antiquated language has consequences: it communicates either laziness, stubbornness, or both, about broadening ones perspective: about imagining who one's audience is, why inclusion should matter, and -- this is the gravest concern I have -- questioning whether an author might bring cultural bias to his research, and how critically he reviews his data.
  
  In other words, I'm not (just) a cranky feminist irritated to no end by an author's blatant sexism and ethnocentricism; I'm also suggesting that Dolnick's writing choices -- unchecked by his editor? why? -- undermine his own authority, sour an otherwise engaging reading experience, and leave this reader LONGING for the day when non-fiction no longer assumes that straight, white, Boomer men are at the center of the universe.
• 
  Louise Bergin

  For centuries, England and France have competed with each other resulting in wars, both as allies and enemies, athletic contests, and scientific discoveries. One competitive area was which country would be the first to decode the Rosetta Stone. Edward Dolnick details the rivalry in The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone.
  
  The Stone was discovered in 1799, during Napoleon's invasion of Egypt. He not only brought his army along, but also 160 "scientists, artists, and scholars." These savants wouldn't fight; their role was to take measurements, study, and observe. One of the things discovered was the Rosetta Stone.
  
  I saw it once in the British Museum. It's a huge stone but the writing is actually very small. The message is in three different languages: Greek, Egyptian demotic, and Egyptian hieroglyphics. If the message was the same in all three languages, scholars hoped this would be the key to learning the hieroglyphics.
  
  The problem was at the time, no one knew either the hieroglyphic OR the demotic text.
  
  The author gives a thorough and understanding look at the problems of learning a "dead" language that no one has known for thousands of years. Do you read left to right or right to left? Up and down? Or maybe each line is read one way first with the next one the opposite. It didn't help that ancient hieroglyphics were written without vowels. CRT could mean create or cart.
  
  There were two geniuses striving to crack the code and bring the honor of doing so to their countries. English Thomas Young and French Jean-Francois Champollion.
  
  Young's intelligence leaped from project to project with results, while Champollion devoted his life to Egyptian hieroglyphics. He even learned the Coptic language. Coptic is a descendant of ancient Egyptian and by the 1800's was nearly a dead language itself.
  
  The clue came in the cartouches, which are the oval circles around the pharaoh's names. The book describes the fascinating thinking and testing of theories before Champollion had his breakthrough on September 14, 1822.
  
  He eventually wrote his life work Egyptian Grammar.
  
  Too many fascinating tidbits in this book to share here. I highly recommend you read it.
• 
  William Schram

  The Rosetta Stone is a tablet that contains the same message in three different scripts. It was instrumental in solving ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Right now it is in the British Museum. First, a small aside; hieroglyphs is the proper way of referring to the writing system. Hieroglyphics is wrong.
  
  That is all I knew about the Rosetta Stone going into The Writing of the Gods. Author Edward Dolnick does a fantastic job weaving the tale of rival geniuses competing to translate the Rosetta Stone and gain international fame.
  
  The first thing to know about Egypt is that it's old, very ancient, one of the most antique cultures in the world. The Pyramids and Sphinx predate Stonehenge. Although the cuneiform from Sumeria is slightly older, we had nothing to go on with Hieroglyphs. No one used them for centuries, mainly due to Christianity and its Monotheism. Furthermore, Archaeology did not have a history of respect for the cultures they dug up at first.
  
  The book's story focuses on the rivalry between Thomas Young and Jean-Francois Champollion. Both men were brilliant and determined. Thomas Young figured out the secret of the cartouches and how they might denote a person's name. Champollion extended that effort and realized the actual system of speaking the hieroglyphs.
  
  The story reads like a mystery, with plenty of twists and turns. Dolnick discusses the dead ends reached and does a wonderful job of putting the achievements in perspective. It would be like if English became a lost language and all you had to go on was the writing on a few monuments and one of those restaurant placemats.
  
  Thanks for reading my review, and see you next time.
• 
  Marks54

  This book provides an historical accounts of the efforts to decode the meaning of the Rosetta Stone. The story is styled as a “race” between an Englishman, Thomas Young, and a Frenchman, Jean-Francois Champoillion, to attempt a translation and explanation of the hieroglyphs in the Rosetta Stone - and of hieroglyphics in general.
  
  I have known of the Rosetta Stone for a long time and actually saw it at the British Museum. It never occurred to me the challenge faced by early archaeologists in trying to interpret the hieroglyphs on the stone. How to come to grips with a totally foreign language that had been dead for a millennium? Edward Dolnick is a fine writer and has framed the decoding process as a race between national champions, with both making critical contributions but perhaps with the Frenchman winning out. Given the way that modern archaeology developed out of initial treasure hunting, along with changes in global politics, as well as changes in technology and methods, it is a wonder that the decoding process was successful at all. Dolnick seems on target by presenting his story in terms of coed breakers such as were involved in the Ultra decryptions in WW2.
  
  The story is engaging and well told. There are lots of illustrations and graphics. It is fun book and well worth the time. This will be good pre-reading for my next trip to the British Museum.
• 
  Kemp

  An early candidate for my best read of 2023!
  
  Great story of the challenges faced to decipher and understand hieroglyphic language. I found the processes used by both Thomas Young and Jean-François Champollion interesting. Dolnick does a great job explaining their thought process as each made headway in understanding the hieroglyphics.
  
  But its more than that challenge – as interesting as I found it. It also warmed me to the Egyptian culture as various pharaohs, their tombs, and Egyptian live is explored.
  
  I especially liked how Champollion learned how Mandarin characters are used as both an object/idea and as a sound. Learning of this opened Champollion’s mind to the same possibility with the hieroglyphics and, I think, was a key learning leading to successful translation.
  
  The best of the book is that combination of the translation challenge with ancient Egypt. It inspires me to seek out more books on Egypt.
  
  My only regret is that I didn’t read this book before visiting the British Museum with the express purpose of seeing the Rosetta Stone.
• 
  Audrey H. (audreyapproved)

  This is less a pointed history on just the Rosetta Stone and more of a broader dive into Egyptian culture, archaeology, linguistics, hieroglyphs and historical obsession (how many other countries have a whole -ology study devoted to the history of that single country?). Along the way, we follow two intellectuals vying to be the first to decipher hieroglyphic writing. I found their history and competitiveness less interesting than the linguistics lessons, and I am now eager to read more nonfiction about language. It is mind blowing that hieroglyphs acted as figurative, symbolic AND phonetic representations, sometimes all at once!
  
  I really enjoyed my time with The Writing of the Gods due to the interesting subject manner and compelling/accessible writing. Along the way, Dolnick makes a ton of comparisons to modern language and English phrases, which I found super useful to help understand the complexities of both deciphering and reading hieroglyphs. Partway through I switched from audiobook to ebook, and I'd highly recommend consuming with your eyeballs so you don't miss all the hieroglyph breakdowns!
• 
  Ann Otto

  Described as the story of two rival geniuses who want to decode the Rosetta Stone circa 1800, the book is actually a wealth of information on many ancient cultures in addition to those primarily covered, Egypt and Greece. The importance of written language, the influence of France and England's disputes during the time, and the importance of various religions are only a few of the topics Dolnick covers in the work. He adds modern comparisons which make interesting and enjoyable reading of what could be rote history.
• 
  Eric

  This was an exceptionally entertaining look at a serious subject - unlocking the history of one of the most successful series of dynasties of all time. And yet, when all is said and done I question whether we really know all that much about what made the Egyptians successful. We see the remains of their temples and burial grounds plus thousands of hieroglyphs, yet they set out to removed all evidence of the most famous of their female pharoahs and we know not why. Enigmatic to say the least.
• 
  Suanne Laqueur

  Wow, what a dive into something you take for granted. Major kudos for being way more interesting and engaging than I anticipated. I thought I’d tap out after getting the basic gist, but was compelled to hang in until the end, thoroughly entertained and with twelve browser tabs open on Wikipedia. I listened to the audiobook and even without visuals, it was easy to envision what was being described.
• 
  Erica

  This is one of a handful of amazing non fiction books I've enjoyed. The topics covered range from hieroglyphics, Egypt over the ages, Napoleon, cyphers, language, archaeology, and so much more. The author provides examples that clearly illustrate difficult concepts, often with some gentle humor. I learned so many different things and it was a fun and interesting ride the whole way.
• 
  Mag

  4.5/5