The Hunt for Hieroglyphs

HISTORY This Week

The HISTORY® Channel | Back Pocket Studios

History, Society & Culture

4.5 • 4.2K Ratings

🗓️ 12 July 2021

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

July 15, 1799 (approximately). In the town of Rashid on the Nile Delta, French soldiers and Egyptian laborers are rebuilding an old, falling-down fort, when someone spots something unusual. It’s a jagged black rock, inscribed with what looks like three different types of writing. This stone—the Rosetta Stone—will become the key to deciphering a language that had been lost for thousands of years. Today: the race to unlock the secrets of hieroglyphs. How did two scholars manage to decode a language that no one in the world spoke? And when modern people could finally read the messages left by a long-dead civilization, what were we able to learn?

Special thanks to our guest, Edward Dolnick, whose book, The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone, comes out in October 2021.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The History Channel, original podcast.
0:05.4	History this week.
0:07.2	About July 15, 1799.
0:11.0	I'm Sally Helm.
0:13.4	In the town of Rashid on the Nile Delta,
0:16.4	French soldiers and Egyptian laborers
0:19.4	are rebuilding an old falling down fort.
0:23.6	Napoleon has invaded Egypt as part of his grand empire-building scheme
0:28.8	and now he wants to use this fort for his own military purposes.
0:35.0	The stones that make up the fort have a long history.
0:39.6	Thousands of years ago, some of them were built into a temple.
0:44.2	Then that temple was demolished and the stones were reused in other buildings.
0:49.0	Maybe another temple or a house or a wall.
0:52.6	Until more recently, in the 1400s,
0:55.4	some of the rebel was carted here to Rashid
0:58.4	to help build a fort for an Islamic ruler.
1:01.6	Now that fort is falling down and the French are trying to shore it up.
1:06.8	The men are digging trenches for a new foundation
1:09.8	and clearing away rubble from the old fort
1:12.2	when one of them spots something interesting.
1:16.2	We'll never know exactly who saw it first.
1:18.6	We also don't know the exact date this happened.
	...

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