Tuesday, June 05, 2007

Book Review: John Ray - The Rosetta Stone and the rebirth of Ancient Egypt

http://resolutereader.blogspot.com/2007/05/john-ray-rosetta-stone-and-rebirth-of.html
"John Ray takes us through how they worked out the meaning of the words – first translating the ancient Greek, then gradually associating the different Hieroglyphics with the intermediary demotic script. We also read a potted history of other attempts to translate ancient writings and get a short breakdown of the step-by-step processes that are used. We also get a fleeting history of Egypt. The Egypt of the Pharaohs (and the sort of things they wrote about, including an amusing account of Egyptian erotica) and the Egypt that was fought over by French and British colonialism. A conflict that eventually lead to the Rosetta Stone spending the last two centuries in the British Museum.John Ray also briefly examines the thorny question of who should own the Stone, or similar artefacts."
See the above page for the entire review.

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