Community Translation and Modern Philosophy

The Rosetta Stele and African Orthographies

Abstract

The Rosetta Stele, an inscribed stone slab, was discovered in July 1799 near the town of Rashid, ancient Rosetta, which is situated in the western part of the Nile delta of Egypt, by soldiers of Napoleon Bonaparte’s invading army. After the French surrender of Egypt in 1801, the stele passed into British hands and is now in the British Museum in London. The commemorative stele contains three versions of the same text (in Egyptian hieroglyphic, Egyptian Demotic and ancient Greek script, representing two varieties of the ancient Egyptian language and the ancient Greek language). It recounts a decree issued on 27 March 196 BCE by Egyptian priests during the Ptolemaic dynasty on behalf of Ptolemy V Epiphanes to commemorate his crowning. It took more than 20 years and various attempts by scholars to decipher the Demotic and hieroglyphic Egyptian texts. This was done by utilising the mechanisms of modern philology, which had been established as a field early in the 1800s. Standing on the shoulders of his predecessors, Jean-François Champollion was the first Egyptologist to crack the code of hieroglyphic writing by realising that some of the signs were alphabetic, some syllabic, and some determinative. The discovery and decipherment of the Rosetta Stele put multilingualism and the practice of translation and interpreting during the Ptolemaic reign over Egypt into focus. In this essay we describe the rediscovery, as well as the emergence and growth of new knowledge, that was unlocked by the decipherment of the Rosetta Stele, including its implications for African orthographies.