According to a witness outside General Menou’s tent, a great deal of shouting ensued.
The English replied that that was most definitely not going to happen: these things were spoils of war, and they, the British, had won the war. When, two years later, the French finally surrendered to the British, they said that, by the way, they were taking home the antiquities they had discovered in Egypt-or what they liked-including the Rosetta Stone. The stone was swiftly carted away, to the tent of Jacques-François de Menou, a commander of the French forces. Bouchard surely saw what that meant: the Greek text, if indeed it matched the others, would allow them to translate the hieroglyphs and hence, eventually, all the other hieroglyphic texts that people had been puzzling over for two millennia. Furthermore, the Greek writing explicitly stated that its text was the same as that of the two preceding inscriptions.
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One can only imagine what these men felt when they saw the third inscription, like a familiar face in a room full of strangers. (Called Demotic, it turned out to be a sort of shorthand derived, ultimately, from hieroglyphs.) But-eureka!-the bottom section, fifty-three lines long, was in Ancient Greek, a language that plenty of Napoleon’s savants had learned in school. (It was probably about twice that length originally the top of the slab had broken off.) The middle section, thirty-two lines long, was in some other script, which nobody recognized. The topmost text, in Egyptian hieroglyphs, was fourteen lines long. It was a slab of granodiorite (a cousin of granite), about four feet tall, two and a half feet wide, and a foot thick, inscribed on its front with three separate texts. When the dirt had been cleaned off the front of what is now known as the Rosetta Stone, he realized that it might be something of interest. But their supervisor, Pierre-François Bouchard, was one of Napoleon’s savants, trained as a scientist as well as a soldier.
Under a different officer, the men might have been told to maneuver around it somehow. So it was that, on a hot day in July of 1799, a team of laborers, working under a French officer to rebuild a neglected fort near the port city of Rosetta-now known as Rashid-discovered a stone so large that they could not move it. They complied, dispiritedly, for two more years. Napoleon moved on to an ill-fated campaign in Syria and eventually headed back to France, instructing his army in Egypt to go on fighting and, in particular, to fend off British incursions along the coast.
“Victory is not a name strong enough for such a scene,” Nelson said. The French, however, were no sooner launched than the English Navy, under Horatio Nelson, was on their tail, and shortly after they landed they were pretty much routed, at the Battle of the Nile, in which they lost eleven of their thirteen warships. So Napoleon brought with him not just soldiers but some hundred and sixty so-called savants-scientists, scholars, and artists, with their compasses and rulers and pencils and pens-to describe what they could of this fabled old realm. “In the villages,” Napoleon said, “they don’t even have any idea what scissors are.” Still, from its astonishing ancient monuments-pyramids and obelisks piercing the clouds-and its strange, beautiful picture-language, called hieroglyphics, which everyone admired and no one could read, people knew that this had once been a formidable civilization. By the nineteenth century, Egypt was no longer the glamorous prize it had been for Alexander. But he was also interested in Egypt itself, which his idol Alexander the Great had conquered in 332 B.C. He had a practical purpose: he wanted to kick the English out of the eastern Mediterranean and block their lucrative trade with India.
In 1798, Napoleon, with some four hundred ships, set sail across the Mediterranean, bound for Egypt.
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