How The Rosetta Stone Unlocked Hieroglyphics
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- Опубліковано 22 лис 2015
- Thanks to the British Museum! Go help choose their first UA-cam series: • Choose the British Mus...
The Rosetta Stone is one of the most famous archaeological finds in history: and it was the key to cracking Egyptian hieroglyphics. And while it took scholars years to work it out, there was one clue in there that helped unlock everything that followed. After hours in the British Museum, I went to explain...
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That simple French infantryman who realized the stone's significance is one of history's biggest unsung heroes.
Could have been a general or something I guess.
Perhaps even a Modern Major General! If they can write a washing bill in babylonic cuneiform, after all... q:
Emperor!
Fa lalala la lah... lah lah laaaa...
The thief, robber and probably rapist
No wonder it was never totally destroyed. Nations rise and fall, but debts are eternal.
+David North this made my day!
+Kenneth Huang You're welcome!
Just like the Centuries-Old Debt That's Still Paying Interest.
"'Tis impossible to be sure of any thing but Death and Taxes"
I laughed so hard
It's funny to think that the person carving the text more than two thousand years ago was probably thinking that it was such a lame job to carve tax paper work instead of having the privilege of doing the inside of a tomb.
+Aravzil Well... tax stonework anyway :D
+Aravzil Tax lawyer for either the government or some cult? I bet he was making absolute bank.
+Aravzil If he knew how to read and write in three languages he was probably well paid though. Still, can you imagine chiseling all that text by hand?! It must have been a pretty important piece of tax code to chisel it into stone and not write it on papyrus.
"Damn, I hate my job! Other people are actually making something that changes the world..."
fireyf Well mister fireyf, I'm afraid your tax agreement is set in stone.
Maybe my DVD instruction manual could be useful in 10,000 years, it has the same instructons in 20 languages
good point, you may have to do something to preserve it really well though. What could we photocopy it onto that'll last that long?
+Autotrope *facepalm* Stone!
how doth one without a DVD player, TV, the correct 240v/50hz AC power supply and knowledge of plugs (something even we get wrong often enough) play a DVD?
You should carve it in stone.
Huh that's actually a good point. Global consumer products shipped with one book in many languages (because making a unique package for every region is a waste of time effort and money) may be what saves any of our languages from going dead.
As long as the paper doesn't rot, I suppose.
bold to throw shade at Napoleon for "acquiring" artifacts while standing in the British museum
😂😂😂😂
The British Empire wasn't a nationalistic conquest like the Napoleonic French Empire. It was a bunch of massive corporations realising they could exploit resources beyond Europe and make loads of money. It was still terrible, but it wasn't just imperialistic expansion for the sake of it, it was driven by capitalism. In fact, the "American empire" does very much the same thing today, most of its large corporations operate the majority of their factories in Asia where labour is cheap, which has led to the destruction of communities and many violations of human rights. Most artefacts in the British museum where purchased or traded, not plundered.
@Bertrum Arthur odd that you prefer "artifact" over "artefact" yet "misspelt" over "misspelled". theres some irony in being a language descriptivist who does not hold fast to one standard of spelling in the same sentence
to the topic of discussion, I would say that theres nothing wrong about throwing shade in a joking manner over actions that happened in history that don't align with modern ethics. maybe check to see if the nationalism goggles are on a bit too tight?
@Bertrum Arthur sorry, my language ability isnt good enough to decipher your message. I think I have said all I meant to say already though. cheers!
@Bertrum Arthur While I do agree that any form of imperialism is inherently wrong, the other guy is still correct abut most artefacts in the British museum being purchased, not stolen.
Also artefact is the correct spelling in British English and Australian English. Artifact is US and Canadian English.
Which is a bit of an amusing quirk considering 'misspelt' is a British English thing whereas the US English spelling is 'misspelled'.
*slaps rosetta stone* this badboy can fit so much history in it.
Slaps your comment
“This bad boy can fit so many memes in it”
This badboy can fit so much taxpaperwork into it
Thicc. Absolute unit
*slaps you* this bad boy is so underrated.
Over here is the Rosetta stone. It was the key to understanding Egyptian hyeroglyphs...
*pat pat*
and it is one of the most precious and valuable posession of the British Museum.
*rub*
ah
@Savage Cabbage They have the real one also...
@@MultiJejje behind glass that no one can pat or rub.
"It REALLY is quite valuable"
* Pulls out rock hammer *
whynottalklikeapirat ... doesn’t look like a gargoyle to me
“Nothing is certain except death and taxes.” -Benjamin Franklin
+AlphaOmega And political corruption.
Nothing is certain.
richard "Reg" pickering Except death and that no person can earn their way into heaven on good deeds.
"How do we know it's real when we are not real?" - Jade Smith
At least death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets!
Amazing how the managed to do this with so much of the stone missing.
+Will Parkinson That's a really good point - and actually, I should have mentioned that in my script. What you see are only the last few lines of the hieroglyphics: there should be much more at the top!
+Tom Scott That stood out to me, too; the hieroglyphics make up the smallest part of the text. So did they decipher the entire language using only a couple sentences? How much of the Egyptian alphabet and vocabulary is represented in that short excerpt?
+Pseudo Nym Enough! Once you've started to crack a small part of it, you've got a way in -- maybe not just from the Stone, but in other places, in other contexts. That's one of the reasons it took twenty years! But before the Rosetta Stone, there wasn't that one starting point to work from.
+Tom Scott Are there other parts/chunks of the stone from the original digging grounds? Or other stones like this? I have the tourist magnet sitting on my computer in front of me, but I often wondered as well if there have been recovered languages like this as well. Fantastic video as always.
+Will Parkinson Once you figured out a few of the words, the rest is basically a crossword puzzle: obviously this is an oversimplification of things, but with every word you figured out, the rest of the words are easier to figure out from the context.
Legend has it that the Rosetta Stone manages to still be easier to understand than a W-4 form.
😅
Tax paperwork! (stonework?) No wonder no one ever mentions what's actually *on* the stone.
I actually find it more interesting than any great secrets it could have held. That something as mundane as taxes, which are seen everywhere, unknowingly became a vital piece of history for future civilizations is somewhat poetic to me.
and it's only a vital part thanks to capitalism, thank you very much
@@ceri-potat Capitalism was only invented after the Industrial revolution bro
@@mossyrocktv4629 That depends on how pedantic you are really. You can argue that basic currency-based exchange is capitalism.
I'd say "paperwork" is a figure of speech at this point. You might do "paperwork" on a computer, so it represents forming and maintaining documents in general.
Just like they said in V for Vendetta, "One thing is true of all governments - their most reliable records are tax records."
R for Rosetta
So true 😂
Old video, but I felt compelled to say that I actually find it quite comforting to know that it's tax work. That's very human. And it's endearing to see that people are people across time and space. At least on these very long and incredibly short scales.
*two languages, three scripts. Demotic and Hieroglyphic are two different ways of writing the ancient Egyptian language; the other language is ancient Greek.
oo ur hard
You acually fooled me to think the one you where toutching and slapping was the real one (since you where allowed in after-hours, i tought you had a special permit), damn, got me so good
+Jim Eriksson Same! I was flinching! XD
+Jim Eriksson Same, until I heard the hollow sound.
Apparently the real one is leaning against the wall of someone’s office in the basement.
maybe he is a janitor there
Jim, you are crazy if you think this is real
I like to think at the end of the 20 years or however long you said, they just screamed 'TAX! IT WAS TAX FORMS!'
+TheMad Gerk Well, no, like he said, the people translating already knew Ancient Greek, and the text in Ancient Greek was broadly the same. They'd have known it was tax forms pretty quickly :P
tommykl
You ruined it for me!
What if the reason they did that, was to express the language and numbers. Maybe telling a story doesn’t utilize all of the languages. Or they just really wanted everyone to know Egypt was ruled by Britain.
@@Stefan-xr8lh Not really. Imagine a Greek scholar reading through the Ancient Greek part saying "Oh God! It's f-ing tax forms. Well-- if it's the only way to crack what those Heiroglyphs mean, there's nothing we can do. Ugh..."
Loved the "touching ancient artifact"-gag: you really had me wondering why it was THAT accessible. Well done.
In the future, someone is going to find "rosettas flash drive" and decipher the dead language of emoji...
They will then promptly wish they hadn't.
"So Professor, you're saying that the eggplant means... oh. And you spent half your career on that. oh."
Granted, ancient writing wasn't any less stupid.
they'll find all the memes.
that's why i have great hopes on sun flare :) smth like carrington event 1859 if i remember correctly. (check it out in wikip) all things electric and electronic will be destroyed. including tax files!!! :D but about the latter i guess they keep hard copies, jus in case. so's to collect taxes after sun flare from survivors. sun flare does not kill people, they'll do it themselves when all electric things are not working, like, pumps for water supply and so on.
@@p1rgit Records are still being printed.
The way you looked disappointed when you asked "what's on it" made me immediately go "it's gonna have something to do with taxes".
Touching something that had been touched by thousands of visitors that day feels weird nowadays.
Indeed 😂
Tom, you make some of the highest quality videos on UA-cam. Never disappoints!
Agree!
Indeed. 4K videos back in 2015.
the fact they wrote that much in a straight line is really impressive.
With tomb writings they drew straight lines with their equivalent of a ruler and then wiped the lines off once they finished writing so I imagine the writers of the rosetta stone did the same thing
@@o.a.m9515 What is this parties you speak of :P
@@o.a.m9515 it's the same thing we do now idk why that's so hard to imagine, they drew a guide line in pencil or chalk or whatever lmao
O.A.M that was the lamest opportunity for you to say that ever
@@o.a.m9515 the original comment wasnt even a joke, so your reply doesn't make sense
I angrily yelled at the screen when you touched the top of the stone. By the time you started sliding your hand across I started thinking "this is just a replica". You got me good.
yeah, if he had actually rubbed the real one I would have cried.
Shrek
Did your parents stared at you menancingly after that?
"I'm simplifying massively" - a line super-smart people like Tom Scott find themselves saying quite often ...
He makes learning things thrilling - it's a rare gift.
+Nillie That's when you get to play the tough-but-dumb guy, slap on some sunglasses, punch the table and yell "Put it in English!"
Or what people say when they want to sound smarter
Blox117
Only a thorough research needed. But still, i appreciate that effort
I too find it hard being so smart. I usually have to use my "normal people vocabulary" when talking to friends and family. Sigh.
Older American here. Want to say thanks for your videos. It's great to see someone breaking down all manner of material and subjects into smaller, bitesize pieces that might awaken curiosity in youth around the globe. You're doing great work here. It's hopefully not thankless, and absolutely worth every second you spend making these.
From your friend(s) across the pond, thanks. May Britain last another thousand years, and may they and the US always be friends.
sometimes i forget that it really is a loud minority of Americans still burning with hatred of the British, it's nice to be reminded that people can appreciate century long friendships.
The British Museum is awesome. My friend also sent me the wooden Rosetta Stone postcard with a message written in hieroglyphics, it was the greatest post I've ever received.
When I was a kid, I heard people tell me that pre-Napoleon theory of heiroglyphics you talked about in the beginning. I guess it really takes a long time for new scientific discoveries to reach public knowledge.
You should say pre-Champollion
Depends on the country
Imagine having to carve your tax forms into stone every year.
Even worse is the cost of the postage!😂🤣🤣😂
Talk to Prof Finkel about Cuneiform!
and have to file schedule a, b ,c and form 10k, they have to make 2 copies as well. yikes
What if you made an error, a "typo"?
AND do it in 3 different languages
I know this is a quickie, but no mention of Jean-François Champollion, the man who cracked it?
British Museum after hours. You, sir, are living the dream!
It’s cool that a language learning site has a famous rock named after it
They should have realised it was a tax form from the beginning, it's in triplicate!
Lessons from Ancient Egypt: Do your tax paperwork
After about 10 seconds I thought to myself: "What, you can just touch it?" Heh, you got me
I always thought it was a shame to remove artifacts from where they were found, but a lot of ancient Egyptian temples were destroyed for their stone, England and France saved a lot of it. Some will argue but it is true
I know I’m several years late, but I want to point out something: "Hieroglyphic" isn’t a noun. It’s an adjective. The noun is "hieroglyph." The stone is covered in hieroglyphs, not hieroglyphics. The writing is hieroglyphic writing, but the noun for what’s written there is hieroglyphs.
The first time I went to the British Museum I had no idea they had the Rosetta Stone. It always seemed almost like a mythical object. I figured if it existed it would be in Egypt or somewhere exotic like that. When I came across it I was speechless. The British Museum is the most amazing museum I've ever been to (and I've been to a lot), and the Rosetta Stone has to be one of the most amazing objects in there.
What’s sad is most Egyptians will never get to see this since a plane ticket to London costs hundreds of dollars. It’d make more sense if Egyptians could access their history more easily than the British do.
@@asurvivor6150 why the modern Egyptian state has very little in common with ancient Egypt. Makes just as much cultural sense to remain in the British museum where it was studied.
@@jackhopewell1745 its part of Egypt's history, imo they have a right to their past
@@gemavaliente7675 modern Egypt's only relation to ancient Egypt is its geographic location otherwise there is not a single similarity. For example, famous Egyptian ruler Cleopatra lived closer to the modern era than when the Pyramids were built. It would be like saying that only Italy has a right to all of the Roman artifacts even though Rome and modern-day Italy hold no real connection in any way except their geographic location. Britain has a far better claim to the Rosetta stone since it is a hallmark in British history where they revived a long-dead and and remembered a once forgotten language.
@@a-drewg1716 Actually it was a French soldier who noticed it. So French have a better claim. But seriously UK will one day have to return these artefacts to their ex-colonies. Your type of thinking is dying out and as UK becomes more multicultural and the post colonies become more dominant they will demand a return of their goods and the UK will have to comply. At least there will be some justice then.
And there are valid reasons for the Egyptians to host this. This item is from that area. And it ties in with the rest of ancient Egypt which is too big for the UK to loot. The tourism revenue from people visiting this stone would help the Egyptian society prosper meanwhile the UK is already rich enough and does not need more, especially not based on something not made by their own people.
I always like to compare this to breaking World War 2 cipher text by finding a crib. The crib in this case was a name, and that gave linguists a start. Imagine puzzling all the pieces together for many many years. Amazing work!
“It is one of the most precious-“
*slap slap*
“And valuable treasures-“
*slap*
“Of the British museum”
*stroke*
Hola vendo enpanadas
@@psicopaticduck tiene con aji?
No, ya solo me quedan de (leer con voz de pueblerino) Pehelagalto
Great video Tom! Brilliant summary of what would be an hour long TV documentary
Taxes, why is it always taxes?!? Great civilisations rise and fall, and all the documents that are left are the tax paperwork :L
"nothing is certain except death and taxes" Benjamin Franklin
Someone always has to pay the rent, it seems.
Thank you to the person who carved this. We owe you so much, i hope you had a wonderful and happy life when you were alive. Amen.
Best one yet. You answered a bunch of questions I didn't realise that I didn't know the answers to. Spot on job Tom!
Enjoyed your talk today tremendously, thank you Tom.
How did it end up in the British museum? Did we pilfer it as the spoils of war after Napoleon's defeat? Or did it just arrive in the post? Ebay?
+Peckingbird craigslist
+EresirThe1st can't say I blame him. I wouldn't wanna give it up.
EresirThe1st I'd rather the French have it than the British as they found it.
+EresirThe1st By that argument it should go to Egypt.
EresirThe1st You snooze you lose, besides Britain temporarily lost control of the land.
Back in the mid-nineties my mother knew one of the senior curators of the British museum, and she decided to take me and my older brother. So, me a 7 year old. And my brother had a beautifully tailored lecture by a person who is arguably the most knowledgeable about the subject matter. After hours. It was pretty amazing. I loved it. One of my favourite museum experiences.
Actually! More memorable... My mother, perhaps against her better judgement, but with a babysitter flaking out. Taking me to Sensation, the famous exhibition at the Royal Academy... More memorable perhaps, because my mother tried to explain the concept of murder to a 6-7 year old. It was quite a wonder. In relation to the hand painting of Myra Hindley.
And the pretty mind blowing Hirst shark in the tank.
What can i say, i went on to an arts degree, and that was the tipping point perhaps.
well done Tom, yet another fascinating topic explained so eloquently and succinctly
Whenever your videos are in my subscription list, I always watch them first. Keep making videos, because they are always great.
"Ancient Egyptian Tax Paperwork" sounds like the kind of joke LittleKuriboh would stick into an Abridged Series episode.
I wonder what happens to the leftover replicas. Would be pretty awesome to have one.
Joshua Pearce if you have the space for ut. I'm surprised by how massive it is. From pictures I saw I assumed it was the size of a sheet of paper
@@photoo848 Well, as a piece of paperwork - it technically was the size of a sheet of paper, but the sizes were different back then )
@@artemkras but it's not really paperwork... More like rockwork
@@Corn0nTheCobb It took us thousands of years to learn that paper beats rock )))
Rober Greene’s mastery brought me here, I use to think Rosetta Stone was just a language learning program infomercial lmao
Love your videos, always make me think of things i never knew i would be interested in.
If I just find Tom standing on a pedestal in a museum I ain't even questioning that I just be taking my selfies and MOVING.
Ah, monday again, time to feed my brain. Thanks tom!
I love languages and linguistics and this is a brilliant example of some amazing work
This is the Rosetta Stone the key to understanding hieroglyphics
*SLÄP SLÄP SLÄP*
YO WE GOT ASSIGNED THIS FOR HISTORY AND WHEN I SAW YOU I JUMPED OUT OF MY CHAIR WITH EXCITEMENT!!!
“I’ve got here the REAL Rosetta Stone!”
*hits and makes plastic noise
Finally. A video of yours I actually know stuff about because I was that Egypt-obsessed kid with a photo of the Rosetta Stone hanging on my wall. Never thought it would happen, but here it is. This was a cool experience, thank you for that blast-to-my-past there. Feeling a bit more youthful right now :)
Have you read Gods, Graves and Scholars by C.W. Ceram? It tells great stories about a variety of Egyptologists, including Champollion, who was the one who "cracked" the Rosetta Stone. Made me want to see it. I never got to see it in person but I found out what it looked like. This is a great video.
I was expecting it to say "the quick brown Fox jumps over the lazy dog"
I wonder if you dream about finding a stone with emojis carved on it.
Look up the 9gag meme rock
@@medalex195322 DESTROY THE 9GAG ROCK!!
@@MurriciTerceiro Carry the vinegar, smash the stone
We need to make our own stone. Write down a long, mundane sentence. Translate it to proper English, French, Spanish, German, Arabic, Chinese, Cantonese, Japanese, Urdu, Hindi, and more big languages that has existed for a long time. Maybe even Esperanto and Lojban too, as those languages are much more structured, and have a chance to at least have their documentation survive.
Top stuff as always, cheers Tom
Your videos are so freaking interesting!!
Should be given back to Egypt.
I was horrified until you said it was a replica, and then realized you did it on purpose ;_;
Hieroglyphics are incredibly complex and so worth learning, in my opinion.
cant believed they had did this hard work
I thought that this was an ad for rosetta stone™
*slaps roof of rosetta stone*
this badboy can fit so many languages in it
Roof?
The speed of Tom's explanation is the most fascinating part of this video.
You seem to be following me around, Tom Scott. I was in Iceland in February last year looking at a geyser, and a few days later you uploaded a video of you by that same geyser. And now just a few days ago I was in the British museum, looking at the Rosetta stone - both the original and the replica - and now you post this video.
So after "Emojli", how about "Hyroglyphli"?
+Highspeedline01 It would have to be "hieroji", since the "ji" on the end of "emoji" is the Japanese word for "character". Since "glyph" is an English word adopted from Ancient Greek to mean a single "character", you'd drop that and replace with "ji" for consistency.
+Antony Derham
Tom Scott: where even the comments section is educational.
+Caitlin McIlvenna on frikkin youtube!!
You made me wonder what the egyptian hieroglyph(s) is/are for the word hieroglyph, which I guess comes from greek, and whether unicode supports hieroglyphs!
@@AntonyDerham _hieromoji_ better? _ji_ means character, but so does _moji_ and _moji_ is the bit that stays consistent between _emoji_ and _kaomoji_ already (｡･ω･｡)ノ♡
So now I know that I lose MY taxes, way down the line, a generation of humans will use it to decode all of the English language!
**throws away taxes**
Excuses, yeah!
+HQDefault Sorry to rain on your parade, but the stone appears to have been "filed" correctly. This was probably somewhere on the front of the temple, for all the world to see, declaring something along the lines of, "this Temple has been granted special rights, NO tax collectors allowed."
notbobby125
>The joke
>Your head
>**whoosh**
>Your joke
-- Trash --
>Quality of your joke
>**whoosh**
I'm an Egyptian who almost finished secondary school and never studied anything about how it was translated; and he I am, understanding the way it worked from a UA-cam video made by a Brit. I feel quite ashamed, but thank you. Really.
That's the beauty of the Internet. We can learn from each other across the world. Sometimes, it takes an outsider explaining us to understand ourselves, I find
So happy I found your channel :)
0:13 oh ok lol I was like "you're touching it, stop touching it"
Tom, how t-shirts do you own in that exact shade of red? Vision of a Steve Jobs-esque wardrobe with dozens of only red t-shirts on the rail!
he literally buys them by the box, so yes, hundreds
Thank you for telling us what is on the Rosetta Stone. I've wondered that for years.
dude your vids are so insightful...
"this is the most precious artifact" ==> proceeds to aggressively smack it "jk it's a replica"
and not a word about Jean-François Champollion?
champollion attempt was failure, or his real work was cancelled
@@DODI88MH Aye, him being recognised by everyone who know anything about the topic as the legitimate decipherer of hieroglyphics is clearly a failure of his work. Makes one wonder what it takes for you to consider something a success
I wonder if Jean-François could have deciphered Tom Scott's meaningless hand gestures?
So fascinating and intriguing for some reason.
I LOVE these videos .
I used to live in Egypt growing up and the first year we were there I was a bit bored so I taught myself hieroglyphics from some books we got. I can understand and write the letters but never got as far as learning the Coptic language they are written in so I only know the alphabet not the words lol! It is still fun to be able to write people's names in Hieroglyphics for them, and when my boyfriend took me to the British museum I had him cover up the information cards on the Egyptian exhibits while I translated the names, then he could check if I got it right, which I did :) random but fun.
1:16 "Ancient Greek"
Coptic:....am I a joke?
You are really interesting to watch. I have watched a few videos I'm gona watch a few more. Well done.
thanks for 4k quality
More like a Rosetta Rock.
sarcasmo57 it is made out of stone so they call it Rosetta stone
why didn't you mention the fact that the one to break the "code" and actually translate the stone was Champolion ?
Whoa, this is amazing!
One of the most important archaeological discoveries of all time. Great gag slapping and rubbing it in the start. 😱
Egyptian made emojis confirmed.
Do we know how to *pronounce* hieroglyphics?
Really old comment but in case you never got an answer: yes, sort of. The vowels weren't recorded (since people just knew pronunciation rules and didn't need to write them, like Hebrew today), but we know the consonants and we can take educated guesses at the vowel sounds in individual words and, from them, the general rules for the language as a whole through things like Egyptian words being recorded in or borrowed by other languages, rhyme schemes, etc. We have a relatively strong confidence that we know how most of Egyptian was pronounced, but it's not 100% definitive, and there's bound to have been words that broke the usual rules or exceptions to the rules in certain situations just like there are in any language.
^ yes that is correct, silly me thought you meant the *word* hieroglyphics, not how to actually pronounce hieroglyphics
Very cool! Thanks for sharing.
So Brilliant, So Amazing, So over my head... But so cool!
You make it sound like English linguists deciphered the stone. You didn't mention Champollion at all.
We should make something like this but hire linguists to write something easy to translate for all languages and make it hard to destroy
i remember studying about Ancient Egypt and hieroglyphics in Canada (2000s) in elementary school, fun times in the library and we had these scratch books with hidden ancient messages
I read the book about Champollion’s work on this 10 years ago. It was a fascinating read indeed.