The inscription is in one of the three languages. Which scientist was able to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphs? How did you unravel the mystery of Egyptian hieroglyphs? Confusion among the learned world of Europe

Of all the achievements of human genius, both in art and in science, the deciphering of unknown languages ​​\u200b\u200bmay be called the most perfect and at the same time the least recognized skill. To understand this, you just need to look at a tablet with an inscription in one of the Mesopotamian languages ​​- Sumerian, Babylonian or Hittite. A person who does not have special knowledge will not even be able to determine whether this letter is alphabetic, syllabic or pictographic. In addition, it is not clear how to read the text - from left to right, right to left, or top to bottom. Where does the word start and where does it end? And if we move from the mysterious written signs to the language itself, then the researcher faces the most difficult problems of defining vocabulary and grammar.

Thus, it is clear what a philologist faces when trying to unravel an unknown language, and why so many languages ​​​​still cannot be deciphered, despite the efforts of specialists devoting many years to studying them. The best-known example of such "lost languages" is undoubtedly Etruscan, although its alphabet is well known and some bilingual inscriptions provide some information from the vocabulary and grammar. And when it comes to pictographic languages, like the writing of the ancient Maya, the researcher faces even greater, almost insurmountable difficulties. All that the experts can do is only to guess the meaning of the signs, without being able to read a single sentence. It is even difficult to determine whether we are dealing with a language or a series of mnemonic pictures.

Naturally, the first diggers of the ancient cities of Babylonia and the Persian Empire, who discovered cuneiform writing on the stone columns of the Persepolis palace or on tablets found in the hills of Mesopotamia, could not distinguish the beginning of these inscriptions from their end. However, the most educated among the researchers copied a few lines of Persepolis inscriptions, while others sent back to their countries samples of Babylonian cylinder seals, clay tablets and bricks with inscriptions. European scientists at first could not even come to a consensus about these signs. Some considered them to be just an ornament, but even after it was established with the help of numerous evidence that this was indeed writing, disputes continued about whether it originated from Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Chinese, Egyptian, or even Ogham (Old Irish) writing. . The degree of confusion caused by the discovery of such an unusual and mysterious type of writing can be judged by the statement of a certain Thomas Herbert, secretary to Sir Dodmore Cotton, the English ambassador to Persia in 1626. Herbert writes about the cuneiform texts that he examined on the walls and beams of the palace at Persepolis :

“Very clear and obvious to the eye, but so mysterious, so strangely drawn, as it is impossible to imagine any hieroglyphic letter, or other bizarre images, more sophisticated and not amenable to reason. They consist of figures, obelisks, triangular and pyramidal, but arranged in such symmetry and in such an order that it is impossible to call them barbaric at the same time.

This Thomas Herbert, who later accompanied Charles I to the scaffold, was one of the first Europeans to visit Persepolis and made sketches of the ruins, as well as some of the cuneiform inscriptions. Unfortunately for the scientists who decided to start deciphering the newly discovered signs, the three lines sketched by Herbert did not belong to the same inscription. Two lines were taken from one inscription, and the third from another. The signs themselves were also reproduced with insufficient accuracy; the same can be said about the copies provided by Italian and French travelers. One can only imagine the commotion caused by the so-called "Tarku inscription" allegedly copied by Samuel Flower, the East India Company's representative at a place called Tarku by the Caspian Sea. In fact, such an inscription never existed. Samuel Flower copied not the inscription, but 23 separate characters, which he considered characteristic of cuneiform, separating them with dots. But over the years, many researchers have tried to translate this series of independent signs as a whole, including such authorities as Eugene Burnouf and Adolf Holzmann. Some even claimed that they succeeded.

Confusion, confusion and errors were, of course, inevitable, since both the language itself and the script remained unsolved. Subsequently, it turned out that the Persepolis inscriptions were made in three languages, which turned out to be important for deciphering, the possibilities of which were identified at the end of the 18th century thanks to the work of two French scientists - Jean Jacques Barthélemy and Joseph Beauchamp. The great Danish explorer Karsten Niebuhr also noted that the inscriptions on the window frames of Darius's palace at Persepolis were repeated eighteen times and written in three different alphabets, but he did not draw the very important conclusion that, regardless of the alphabet, the texts duplicated each other.

It can be argued that until the languages ​​of the inscriptions were determined, all attempts to translate them remained just exercises in cryptography. Gradually, more and more inscriptions were discovered, and thanks to the finds of Bott and Layard, their number increased to hundreds of thousands. About 100 thousand inscriptions were found in the library of the Ashurbanipal palace; another 50 thousand - during excavations in Sippar; tens of thousands in Nippur, and so many in Lagash that the loss of about 30,000 tablets, plundered by local residents and sold at a price of 20 cents per basket, went almost unnoticed. Tens of thousands of tablets still lie in the 2886 known tutuls, or hills, rising on the site of ancient cities.

Obviously, the literature of vanished civilizations is just as important for understanding their customs and ways of life as monuments - perhaps even more important. And the scientists, who were engaged in the unusually difficult task of unraveling the mystery of strange signs in the form of arrows, did no less significant work than the diggers, although it was the latter who got fame, honor and financial support. This is not surprising, since the study of cuneiform began as an exercise in cryptography and philology, and these sciences are not of particular interest to the general public. And even when Professor Lassen from Bonn in 1845 made the first approximate translation of the Persian column of the inscription on the great Behistun relief of Darius, only his colleagues paid attention to this fact. The usual disregard of the public for such specialists sometimes led to the fact that they, in turn, treated their more successful amateur colleagues with distrust and disdain. After all, they knew that while, for example, Layard was becoming rich and famous, Edward Hincks, a pioneer in deciphering the long-extinct languages ​​of Mesopotamia, spent his whole life in one of the church parishes of the Irish County Down and his only award for forty years of hard work was the medal of the Royal Irish Academy. It has been said of Hincks that "he had the misfortune of being born an Irishman and holding the minor office of a country priest, so that, no doubt, from the very beginning he was forced to come to terms with the subsequent neglect and obscurity." The degree of reverence with which he was treated, even in learned circles, can be judged by the single short paragraph allocated to him in the Athenaeum, where he was allowed to explain just one of the most important discoveries in the study of the Assyro-Babylonian language. And yet, as far as our knowledge of Babylonian history is concerned, Edward Hinks has done incomparably more than Henry Layard. Indeed, all those objects and works of art that Layard sent from Nimrud to Europe told the scientific world little that was new. The greatness of Babylon and its monuments has already been described by Herodotus; the Old Testament tells about the power of Nebuchadnezzar's empire. Layard himself also learned almost nothing new for himself, and even identified the name of the city he excavated incorrectly. In fact, it was not Nineveh, but the Kalah (Kalhu) mentioned in the Bible. His mistake is understandable: neither he nor anyone else could read the inscriptions that would explain what kind of city it was.

Edward Hinks was followed by a succession of similar scientists who managed to turn Assyriology into a real science and eventually decipher the mysterious wedge-shaped writings on the Assyro-Babylonian monuments. It is quite natural that the general public did not know about them and was not interested in their work, since all their discoveries were published in journals published by one or another Royal Academy, obscure to the average layman, and were of interest exclusively to specialists. It is hardly to be expected that the ordinary reader will be interested in the following discovery of Hinks: "If the primary consonant is preceded by "and" or "y", while the secondary consonant has the same characteristic as the primary, and corresponds to this vowel, then one should insert " a, either as a single syllable or as the guna of a vowel.

But nevertheless, such seemingly small and insignificant discoveries made by the village priest paved the way for the solution of what seemed to be an inaccessible mystery. As noted at the beginning of the chapter, a man in the street need only stop in front of the bulls in the British Museum or the Oriental Institute of Chicago and look at the inscriptions with which these monsters are covered in order to realize the greatness of the task that confronted the first researchers of Babylonian writing. Many scientists at first even believed that the unknown language could not be deciphered and the chances of translating the inscriptions were practically zero. Henry Rawlinson himself admitted that all these difficulties led him to such despondency that he was sometimes inclined to "leave the study completely in extreme despair and due to the impossibility of achieving any satisfactory result."

At the same time, as happens in the study of unknown or little-known languages, from time to time various enthusiastic amateurs appeared who, according to their own assurances, had considerable intelligence and sufficient scholarship to provide the public with a ready translation of inscriptions even before deciphering writing, without speaking already about the syntax and morphology of a dead language. A typical example of such "scholars" is William Price, secretary of Sir Gore Ouzley, Ambassador Extraordinary of Great Britain and His Majesty's Plenipotentiary to the Persian Court in 1810-1811. William Price reports that, while on an embassy in Shiraz, he visited the ruins of Persepolis and copied "with great care" many of the inscriptions, including those at such a height that it was necessary to use a telescope. Further he writes:

"There were no details to tell whether these were alphabetic or hieroglyphic characters, but they are composed of arrow-shaped strokes and look like imprints on bricks found in the vicinity of Babylon."

In a note, Price adds that "having discovered some alphabets in an ancient manuscript, the author has great hope that with their help he will be able to read these venerable inscriptions."

It is amazing how often in the history of science such mysterious manuscripts were announced, and, as a rule, in the most remote and inaccessible parts of the world, and only a few initiates managed to read them. Meanwhile, William Price, having acquired an "ancient manuscript" and discarding as superfluous all the rules of philology, presented to the world what he called a "literal translation" of a Babylonian inscription on a clay cylinder:

“The banks of covetousness might overflow if our futility rose above the grape-stone, and our nation, sheathed and divided, would shamefully endangered under the triple crown.

It would be a display of blue beads and an empty throne. Happy is the man who can show a vine stone in this court not corroded by evil: for the sins committed here must be counted in the great court (heaven) ... "

Since Price provides neither the original text nor an explanation of his method of translation, we are left wondering how he came up with these vine stones, which "a happy man can show in a yard not corroded by evil." And since his sources are unknown to us, we can assume that this “translation” of his appeared to him in a state of trance caused by prolonged contemplation of the mysterious wedge-shaped characters of the Babylonian script. Such false translations did not appear all that rare, especially from the pen of amateur cryptographers who dared to fight with such mysterious types of writing as Etruscan script, Linear A, Mohenjo-Daro script, Kassite, Hittite, Chaldean, Hurrian, Lycian, Lydian, etc.

Interestingly, the real breakthrough in deciphering cuneiform was made by the amateur orientalist Georg Grotefend, just as a century later the first steps towards deciphering Linear B were made by the amateur Hellenist Michael Ventris.

The German schoolteacher Georg Grotefend (1775-1853) viewed cuneiform as a cryptographic rather than a philological puzzle, and his approach to finding the "key" was more mathematical than linguistic. He began by examining two inscriptions in Old Persian and noticed that in each of them the same groups of characters were repeated three times. Grotefend suggested that these signs meant "king", since the inscriptions of later Persian monarchs were known to begin with the declaration of a name, followed by the formula "great king, king of kings". If this assumption is correct, then the first words of the inscriptions should mean:

X, great king, king of kings

The full royal formula should have looked like this:

X, great king, king of kings, son of Y, great king, king of kings, son of Z, great king, king of kings, etc.

Therefore, from a mathematical point of view, this formula can be expressed as follows:

where X is the name of the son, Y is the name of the father of X, and Z is the name of the grandfather of X. Therefore, if one of these names is read, the rest are determined automatically.

From ancient Persian history, Grotefend knew several well-known sequences son - father - grandfather, for example:

Cyrus< Камбиз < Кир.

But he noticed that this sequence was not suitable for the text he was studying, since the initial letters of the names Cyrus, Cambyses and Cyrus were the same, but the cuneiform characters were different. The trio of names Darius did not fit either< Артаксеркс < Ксеркс, потому что имя Артаксеркса было слишком длинным для среднего имени. Гротефенд пришел к мнению, что перед ним следующая генеалогическая последовательность:

Xerxes< Дарий < Гистасп,

and the full inscription probably meant the following:

Xerxes, great king, king of kings, son of Darius, great king, king of kings, son of Hystaspes.

It should be noted that the last name of the three is not accompanied by a royal title in the inscription, and it should not have been accompanied, because Hystaspes (Vishtaspa), the founder of the royal dynasty, was not a king himself, and, therefore, he could not be called "a great king, king of kings."

Grotefend's brilliant guess turned out to be correct, and he became the first person to translate the cuneiform inscription and determine the phonetic meaning of the ancient Persian characters.

Thus, Grotefend was the first of his contemporaries to read the name of the Persian king, whom the Greeks called Darius (Darios), transmitted in cuneiform characters.

But, despite the epochal achievement, Grotefend's contemporaries, especially German scientists, did not attach much importance to this discovery and refused to publish his work in their academic journals. For the first time, he presented a description of his method and the results of research before the Academy of Sciences in 1802. He was refused publication on the grounds that he was an amateur, and not a specialist in oriental studies. Therefore, the scientific world learned about the discovery of Grotefend only in 1805, when his article was published as an appendix to a friend's book entitled "Historical research in the field of politics, communications and trade of the main nationalities of antiquity." In this article, written in Latin and entitled "Praevia de cuneatis quas vocent inscriptionibus persepolitanis legendis et explicandis relatio", Grotefend attempted not only to translate the three royal names (Xerxes, Darius, Hystaspes) and the royal formula (great king, king of kings), but and the next part of the inscription. He offered the following translation:

"Darius, valiant king, king of kings, son of Hystaspes, heir to the ruler of the world, in the constellation Moro."

The correct translation is this:

"Darius, great king, king of kings, king of the lands, son of Hystaspes Achaemenides, who built the winter palace."

Such an absurdity as "the constellation Moreau" arose from Grotefend's ignorance of Oriental languages; without special knowledge, he could not claim anything more serious than deciphering names and some of the most common words, such as "king" or "son." It soon became clear that the dead and forgotten languages ​​of the ancient Middle East could only be understood through the methods of comparative philology. So, the key to the ancient Persian language, which was spoken and written in the time of Darius, Xerxes and other "great kings", could be the Avestan language of Zarathushtra, the great Persian prophet of the 7th century. BC e. Avestan, in turn, is close to Sanskrit, and both of these dead languages ​​were well known. Therefore, an orientalist who knows Sanskrit, Avestan and modern Persian would understand and translate Persepolis and other inscriptions much faster than such a cryptographer as Grotefend, despite all his brilliant insights. Likewise, knowledge of Hebrew, Phoenician, and Aramaic proved necessary to transliterate and translate Assyro-Babylonian inscriptions.

As soon as the texts of the trilingual inscriptions in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian arrived in Europe, the great joint work of translating them began, so characteristic of the European scientific community of the 18th and 19th centuries. Even the political, economic and military rivalry of European states during the era of the Napoleonic Wars and the subsequent period of imperialist expansion could not prevent scientists from constantly communicating with each other and exchanging discoveries. German, Danish, French and English philologists formed a kind of international team whose main goal was the search for knowledge. These included the Dane Rasmus Christian Rask (1781-1832), "feeling free among twenty-five languages ​​and dialects"; Frenchman Eugene Burnouf (1803-1852), translator from Avestan and Sanskrit; the Germans Edward Behr (1805-1841) and Jules Oppert (1825-1905), both specialists in Semitic languages ​​of extraordinary erudition (72 books and articles by Oppert are listed in the catalog of the British Museum), Edward Hinks (1792-1866), an Irish priest, and also greatest of all, father of Assyriology, English soldier and diplomat, Sir Henry Rawlinson (1810-1895).

The last of this list of dedicated scholars has rightly achieved great fame, for his contribution to Assyriology, even compared with his contemporaries, was the greatest. Rawlinson's personality, which has overshadowed the names of Rusk, Burnouf, Hinks, and Oppert, lies in the fact that he lived an unusually full, fruitful and active life. He managed to be a soldier in Afghanistan, a political agent in Baghdad, an ambassador to Persia, a member of parliament, a member of the board of the British Museum, as well as a copyist and translator of the Behistun inscription of Darius.

Behistun rock! In some respects, it can be called the most breathtaking monument of world history - still one of the most impregnable. One has only to stand at this lofty mountain, rising to a height of four thousand feet, and look up at the legendary monument of Darius, the great king, king of kings, to understand the greatness of the work done by Rawlinson, who "merely" copied a huge inscription. Only the most courageous and experienced climbers could dare to climb the Behistun rock; it is difficult to reach the monument either from above or from below, for the platforms on which the ancient Persian sculptors and carvers stood were cut away, leaving only a short narrow cornice about eighteen inches wide under one of the inscriptions.

On the surface of the rock there are a dozen columns or tablets with cuneiform texts in three languages, which describe how Darius came to power by defeating and executing his ten rivals. One of the languages ​​is Old Persian, another is Elamite, and the third is Babylonian. All three languages ​​disappeared along with the empires in which they were spoken by the beginning of our era. Old Persian was, of course, the language of Darius himself and his followers, son of Xerxes and grandson of Artaxerxes. Elamite (which at one time was called Scythian, and then Susi) was the language of the population of southwestern Iran; Elamites from time to time appear on the pages of the history of Mesopotamia, either as allies or as enemies of the Sumerians, and later the Babylonians. In the XII century. BC e. Elam briefly became a great state and even a world power, but in the VI century. BC e. he became a Persian satrapy. The Elamite language apparently retained its historical and cultural significance, and the Persian monarchs in their inscriptions used it as a kind of Latin or Greek, the inscriptions of which can still be found on English monuments.

Darius, of course, wanted his name and deeds to be remembered as long as people could read, and did not imagine that in less than six centuries after his reign, all these three languages ​​\u200b\u200bwould be dead. For the Persian king, the Middle East was the cultural center of the world, international trade and commerce were concentrated here, cities such as Babylon, Ecbatana, Susa and Persepolis were located here, from here he ruled an empire that stretched from the rapids of the Nile to the Black Sea and from the shores of the Mediterranean Sea to borders of India. And Behistun, the last of the peaks of the Zagros mountain range separating Iran from Iraq, stood, as it were, in the geographical center of his empire. It was here that caravans passed from ancient Ecbatana (modern Hamadan), the capital of Persia, to Babylon, the capital of Mesopotamia. They have been staying here since time immemorial, because at the foot of the mountain several springs with crystal clear water beat out of the ground. Warriors of all armies drank from them on the way from Babylonia to Persia, including the soldiers of Alexander the Great. In ancient times, there must have been an inn or even a settlement here. According to Diodorus, this mountain was considered sacred, and the legend of Semiramis may be connected with this fact. It was believed that Semiramis, the legendary queen of Assyria, was the daughter of a Syrian goddess, and the mountain could be her sanctuary; hence the mention of Diodorus about a certain "paradise", which she allegedly built here. The Sicilian historian, of course, conveys the legend, but in reality this place seemed to King Darius ideal for capturing his victories over the impostor Gaumata and the nine rebels who rebelled against his power. The relief depicts the magician Gaumata, lying on his back and in prayer raising his hands to King Darius, who tramples on the chest of the vanquished with his left foot. Nine rebels, bearing the names of Atrina, Nidintu-Bel, Fravartish, Martya, Chitrantahma, Vahyazdata, Arakha, Frada and Skunkha, are tied to each other by the neck. This scene is typical of that time.

At the foot of the mountain is the usual Persian teahouse, where travelers can sit at a wooden table under a canopy and drink tea (or Coca-Cola), studying the relief with field glasses, just as in 1834 Rawlinson examined it through a telescope. This is how he began to copy the cuneiform signs of the ancient Persian text, which eventually led him to decipher the names of Darius, Xerxes and Hystaspes using approximately the same method that Grotefend used. Rawlinson proved that the inscription was not carved on the orders of Semiramis, the semi-legendary queen of Babylon, or Shalmaneser, king of Assyria and conqueror of Israel; it was ordered to be carved by Darius himself, who became the sole ruler of the Persian Empire in 521 BC. e. Rawlinson also found out that the large winged figure hovering over the images of people is Ahuramazda, the supreme god of the Persians, and not at all a heraldic decoration, as early travelers believed, and not a cross over the twelve apostles, as a Frenchman claimed in 1809, but nor is it a portrait of Semiramis, as Diodorus reported in the following passage:

“Semiramide, having made a platform from the saddles and harness of the pack animals that accompanied her army, climbed this path from the plain itself to the rock, where she ordered her portrait to be carved along with the image of hundreds of guards.”

The claim that the legendary queen climbed 500 feet with the help of her animals is, of course, absurd, but until Rawlinson climbed the rock, no one could copy the relief and inscriptions in all details. The main problem was not even to climb 500 feet, but to stay there and at the same time try to draw what he saw. This is exactly what Rawlinson did in 1844 when he climbed a narrow ledge overhanging an abyss of Old Persian inscriptions.

How Champollion deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs

When Jean Francois Champollion deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphs, he was 32 years old, 25 of which was spent studying the dead languages ​​​​of the East. He was born in 1790 in the small town of Figeac in southern France. We have no reason to doubt the reliability of the information depicting him as a child prodigy. We have already talked about how he learned to read and write. At the age of 9 he was fluent in Greek and Latin, at 11 he read the Bible in the original Hebrew, which he compared with the Latin Vulgate and its Aramaic forerunner, at the age of 13 (at this time he was already studying in Grenoble and living with his older brother Jacques , professor of Greek literature), he takes up the study of Arabic, Chaldean, and then Coptic languages; at 15, he takes up Persian and studies the most complex texts of the most ancient writing: Avestan, Pahlavi, Sanskrit, and "in order to disperse, and Chinese." At the age of 17, he became a member of the Grenoble Academy and, as an introductory lecture, read there the preface to his book Egypt in the Reign of the Pharaohs, written according to Greek and biblical sources.

He first came into contact with Egypt when he was 7 years old. The brother, who intended to take part in the expedition of Napoleon, but did not have the necessary patronage, spoke of Egypt as a fabulous country. Two years later, the Egyptian Courier accidentally fell into the hands of the boy - just the number where the discovery of the Rosetta Plate was reported. Two years later, he comes to look at the Egyptological collection of the prefect of the Iser department of Fourier, who was with Napoleon in Egypt and, among other things, served there as secretary of the Egyptian Institute in Cairo. Champollion attracted the attention of a scientist when Fourier once again inspected their school; the prefect invited the boy to his place and literally charmed him with his collections. “What does this inscription mean? And on this papyrus? Fourier shook his head. "No one can read this." "And I'll read it! In a few years, when I grow up! This is not a later invention; Fourier recorded the boy's words as a curiosity long before Champollion actually deciphered the hieroglyphs.

From Grenoble, Champollion leaves for Paris, which he considers only as "an intermediate station on the way to Egypt." Monsieur de Sacy is surprised by his plans and admired by his abilities. The young man knows Egypt and speaks Arabic in such a way that the native Egyptians take him for a compatriot. The traveler Sominy de Manencourt does not believe that he has never been there. Champollion studies, lives in incredible poverty, starves and does not accept invitations to dinner, since he has only one pair of holey shoes. The need and fear of falling into the soldiers force him to eventually return to Grenoble - "alas, poor, like a poet!"

He gets a place in the school where his classmates are still studying, teaches them history. At the same time, he is working on the history of Egypt (based on Greek, Roman and biblical sources) and a Coptic dictionary (“he is getting fat day by day,” Champollion writes, reaching the thousandth page, “and his creator is the other way around”). Since he cannot survive on a salary, he writes more plays for local fans. And like a staunch Republican of 1789, he composes satirical verses that ridicule the monarchy, they are directed against Napoleon, but after the Battle of Waterloo they are sung, referring to the Bourbons. When Napoleon returned from Helena for 100 days, Champollion believed his promises of a liberal government without wars. He is even introduced to Bonaparte - the brother of Jean Francois, a zealous supporter of the old-new emperor - and he, on a campaign whose goal is to win the throne again, finds time to talk with him about his plans for Egypt. This conversation, as well as the “anti-Bourbon” couplets, is enough for the envious colleagues from the Academy to put Champollion on trial, which, at the time when “sentences rained down like manna from heaven”, declares him a traitor and dooms him to exile ...

Champollion returns to his native Figeac and finds the strength to prepare for a decisive attack on the secret of hieroglyphs. First of all, he studied everything that had been written about hieroglyphs in Egypt itself over the past two thousand years. Equipped in this way, but not constrained in his actions, he began the actual study of Egyptian writing and, unlike other scientists, began with demotic, that is, folk writing, which he considered the simplest and at the same time the most ancient, believing that the complex develops from simple. But here he was wrong; with regard to Egyptian writing, the situation was just the opposite. For many months he moved in a strictly planned direction. When he was convinced that he had hit a dead end, he started all over again. “This possibility has been tried, exhausted and rejected. There is no need to go back to her. And that also matters."

Egyptian hieroglyphs. The names - Ptolemy and Cleopatra - served as the starting point for deciphering Champollion

So Champollion "tried, exhausted and rejected" Horapollon, and at the same time the false views of the entire scientific world. I learned from Plutarch that there are 25 characters in the demotic letter, and began to look for them. But even before that, he came to the conclusion that they must represent sounds (that is, that Egyptian writing is not pictorial) and that this also applies to hieroglyphs. "If they were incapable of expressing sounds, the names of kings could not have been on the Rosetta Plate." And those of the royal names, "which, apparently, should have sounded the same as in Greek," he took as a starting point.

Meanwhile, acting in a similar way, that is, comparing the Greek and Egyptian names of the kings, other scientists came to some results: the Swede Åkerblad, the Dane Tsoega and the Frenchman de Sacy. The Englishman Thomas Jung advanced further than others - he established the meaning of five signs! In addition, he discovered two special characters that are not letters, but indicate the beginning and end of proper names, thereby answering the question that baffled de Sacy: why do names begin with the same “letters” in demotic texts? Jung confirmed the earlier suggestion that in Egyptian writing, with the exception of proper nouns, vowels are omitted. However, none of these scientists was sure of the results of their work, and Jung in 1819 even abandoned his positions.

At the first stage, Champollion deciphered some signs of the Rosetta plate by comparing with the text of some papyrus. He took this first step in August 1808. But only 14 years later he was able to present irrefutable evidence to the scientific world, they are contained in the “Letter to Mr. Dasier regarding the alphabet of phonetic hieroglyphs”, written in September 1822, and later were given in a lecture given at the Paris Academy. Its content is an explanation of the decryption method.

A total of 486 Greek words and 1419 hieroglyphic characters have been preserved on the Rosetta Plate. This means that there are an average of three characters for each word, that is, that hieroglyphic signs do not express complete concepts - in other words, hieroglyphs are not picture writing. Many of these 1419 signs are also repeated. In total, there were 166 different signs on the plate. Consequently, in hieroglyphic writing, signs express not only sounds, but also entire syllables. Therefore, the Egyptian letter is a sound-syllabic. The Egyptians enclosed the names of the kings in a special oval frame, a cartouche. On the Rosetta Slab and the obelisk from Philae there is a cartouche bearing, as the Greek text proves, the name Ptolemaios (in the Egyptian form Ptolmees). It suffices to compare this cartouche with another containing the name Kleopatra. The first, third and fourth characters in the name Ptolemaios are the same as the fifth, fourth and second characters in the name Kleopatra. So, ten signs are already known, the meaning of which is indisputable. With their help, you can read other proper names: Alexander, Berenike, Caesar. The following signs are revealed. It becomes possible to read titles and other words. It is already possible, therefore, to compose a whole hieroglyphic alphabet. As a result of this kind of decoding, a relationship is established between hieroglyphic writing and demotic, as well as between the two of them and an even more mysterious third, hieratic (priestly), which was used only in temple books. After that, of course, it is possible to compose the alphabet of demotic and hieratic writing. And Greek bilinguals will help translate Egyptian texts...

Champollion did all this - a colossal work that would be a problem for scientists working with electronic computing devices. In 1828, he managed to see with his own eyes the land on the banks of the Nile, which he had dreamed of since childhood. He got there as the leader of an expedition that had two ships at its disposal, although he still remained a "traitor" who never received an amnesty. For a year and a half, Champollion explored all the main monuments of the empire of the pharaohs and was the first to correctly determine - by inscriptions and architectural style - the prescription of many of them. But even the healthy climate of Egypt did not cure his tuberculosis, which he contracted in his student years, living in a cold apartment and suffering hardship in Paris. Upon the return of this most famous scientist of his time, the pride of France, there were no funds for treatment and enhanced nutrition. He died on March 4, 1832 at the age of 42, leaving behind not only the glory of a scientist who deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the author of the first grammar and dictionary of the ancient Egyptian language, but also the glory of the founder of a new science - Egyptology.

"Knowingly lost" bet teacher Grotefend

Unlike Egyptian hieroglyphs, the old Assyro-Babylonian cuneiform was already forgotten in classical antiquity. Herodotus, for example, still places in his work a “translation” of the hieroglyphic inscription on the Great Pyramid, containing information about the costs of its construction, but he returns from his trip to Mesopotamia only with the news that “there are Assyrian writings” (assyria gramata). However, cuneiform played a much more significant role in antiquity than hieroglyphs.

It was the most common type of writing in the Middle East. It has been used from the eastern coast of the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas to the Persian Gulf for three millennia - longer than the Latin script is used! The name of the first known ruler in world history is recorded in cuneiform writing: the name of Aannipadd, son of Mesanniadd, king of the first dynasty of Ur, which ruled approximately 3100-2930 BC and which, according to the Babylonian "Royal Vaults", was the third dynasty after the Flood. But the nature of this inscription leaves no doubt that by the time it appeared, cuneiform writing had already passed a centuries-old path of development. The latest cuneiform inscriptions found so far date back to the time of the last Persian rulers of the Achaemenid dynasty, whose empire was crushed in 330 BC by Alexander the Great. The first examples of cuneiform writing, writing even more mysterious than Egyptian, were brought to Europe by the Italian traveler Pietro della Balle in the first half of the 17th century. Although these samples were not exact copies in our understanding, they contained a word that, 150 years later, made it possible to decipher them. The following texts were brought at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries by the German physician Engelbert Kaempfer, who was the first to use the term "Chegae cuneatae", that is, "cuneiform"; after him - the French artist Guillaume J. Grelo, companion of the famous traveler Chardin, and the Dutchman Cornelius de Bruyne - the copies made by him still amaze with their impeccability. Equally accurate, but much more extensive copies were brought by the Danish traveler, a German by birth, Carsten Niebuhr (1733–1815). All the texts were from Persepolis, the residence of the Persian king Darius III, whose palace was burned by Alexander the Great "in states of intoxication," as Diodorus notes, "when he lost control of himself."

Niebuhr's messages, coming to Western Europe since 1780, aroused great interest among scientists and the public. What is this letter? And is it even a letter? Maybe it's just ornaments? “It looks like sparrows have jumped on the wet sand.”

And if this is a letter, then in what language from the "Babylonian confusion of languages" were the brought fragments made? Philologists, Orientalists, and historians of many universities have struggled to solve this problem. Their attention was not yet diverted by the rediscovery of Egypt. The greatest results were achieved by Niebuhr himself, who had the advantage of a scientist conducting research right on the spot: he established that the Persepolis inscriptions are heterogeneous, they distinguish three types of cuneiform and that one of these types is clearly sound - he counted 42 signs in it (in fact there are only 32 of them). The German orientalist Oluf G. Tichsen (1734–1815) recognized the dividing sign between words in the frequently repeated oblique cuneiform element and concluded that three languages ​​must be behind these three types of cuneiform. Danish bishop and philologist Friedrich H.K. Munter even set in his "Study of Persepolis Inscriptions" (1800) the time of their occurrence. Based on the circumstances under which the finds were made, he concluded that they belonged to the time of the Achaemenid dynasty, that is, to the second third of the 4th century BC at the latest.

And this is all that was known about cuneiform by 1802. We became convinced of the correctness of these conclusions much later, at the same time they were lost in a multitude of errors and incorrect assumptions. At the same time, distrust was often expressed even in the little that was known.

The development of cuneiform writing (according to Pöbel). The first sign on the left from the last on the right is separated by 1500-2000 years

It was under such circumstances that the Göttingen teacher Georg Friedrich Grotefend made a bet with his friend Fiorillo, the secretary of the Göttingen library, that he would decipher this letter. Yes, so much so that it can be read! True, provided that he gets at least some texts at his disposal.

In less than half a year, the impossible happened - Grotefend really read the cuneiform. It is incredible, but a twenty-seven-year-old man, whose only entertainment was puzzles, and whose life ideals boiled down to the most ordinary career of a school teacher, which later culminated in the position of director of a lyceum in Hannover, really did not think of anything other than how to win a "knowingly lost" bet. This is what Grotefend had at his disposal (or rather, what he did not have).

Firstly, he did not even know what language these inscriptions were in, since in Mesopotamia many peoples and languages ​​\u200b\u200bhave replaced each other over the past two to three thousand years.

Secondly, he had no idea about the nature of this letter: whether it is sound, syllabic, or its individual signs express whole words.

Thirdly, he did not know in what direction this letter was read, in what position the text should be when reading.

Fourthly, he had not a single inscription in the original at his disposal: he only had not always exact copies from the notes of Niebuhr and Pietro della Balle, which Fiorillo got for him under the terms of the bet.

Fifthly, unlike Champollion, he did not know a single oriental language, for he was a Germanist philologist.

And, finally, for cuneiform texts - at least at that stage of study - there was no Rosetta plate, no bilingual.

But along with these disadvantages, he also had advantages: the habit of working methodically, an interest in writing in 1799, shortly after graduating from the University of Göttingen, Grotefend published the book On Passigraphy, or Universal Writing - and, finally, the desire to win a bet.

Thus, he was a man of a completely different sense than Champollion, at that time still an eleven-year-old schoolboy, and he faced a completely different, although no less difficult, task, and therefore he acted in a completely different way.

First, he figured out the technology of the unknown letter. The cuneiform signs were supposed to be applied with some kind of sharp instrument: vertical lines were drawn from top to bottom, horizontal lines from left to right, as indicated by a gradual weakening of pressure. The lines seem to have gone horizontally and started on the left, as in our writing method, otherwise the scribe would have blurred what was already written. And they read this letter, obviously, in the same direction in which it was written. All these were fundamental discoveries, now self-evident, but for that time they were a kind of Columbus egg.

He then checked and validated Niebuhr's suggestion that the letter was "alphabetic" because it contained relatively few characters. He also accepted Tichsen's hypothesis that a repeating oblique element is a separating sign between words. And only after that Grotefend began to decipher, deciding, for lack of another way out, to proceed not from philology, but from logic; comparing signs with each other, determine their possible meanings.

These were inscriptions that were no different from each other, but after all, in the inscriptions, some words are often repeated: “This building was built ...”, “Here rests ...” In the inscriptions made at the behest of the rulers - according to the circumstances of the find, he concluded that they belonged to rulers - usually stood at the beginning of the name and title: "We, by the grace of God, X, the king," etc. If this assumption is correct, he told himself, then it is likely that any of these inscriptions belongs to the Persian king, because Persepolis was also the residence of the Persian kings. Their names are known to us, though in the Greek version, but it cannot differ significantly from the original. Only later it turned out that the Greek Dareios in Persian sounded Darajavaus, the Greek Xerxes - Hsyarasa. Their titles are also known: king, great king. We also know that they used to put the name of their father next to their name. Then you can try this formula: "King B, son of king A. King C, son of king B."

Then the search began. There is no need to dwell on how he found this formula, how much patience and perseverance it took for this. It's not hard to imagine. Let's just say he found it. True, in the texts it was found in a slightly different form: "Tsar B, son of A. Tsar C, son of Tsar B." This means that King B was not of royal lineage, since there is no royal title next to his father's name (A). How to explain the appearance of such successors among some Persian kings? What were these kings? He turned to ancient and modern historians for help ... however, let's leave him to tell us about the course of his reasoning.

“It could not be Cyrus and Cambyses, since the names in the inscriptions begin with different characters. It could not have been Cyrus and Artaxerxes, because the first name is too short in relation to the number of characters in the inscription, and the second is too long. It remained to be assumed that these were the names of Darius and Xerxes, which so corresponded to the nature of the inscription that there was no doubt about the correctness of my guess. This was also indicated by the fact that the royal title was given in the inscription of the son, while there was no such title in the inscription of the father ... "

Grotefend's reading of the names of Darius, Xerxes and Gastaspes in the Persepolis inscriptions and their reading today

So Grotefend revealed 12 signs, or, more precisely, 10, solving the equation with all the unknowns!

After that, one could expect that the hitherto unknown teacher would attract the attention of the whole world, that he would be given the highest academic honors, that sensational crowds would greet him with enthusiastic applause - for these ten signs were the key to the ancient Persian language, the key to all Mesopotamian cuneiforms and languages...

But nothing of the sort happened. The son of a poor shoemaker, who was not a member of the Academy, could not be allowed to appear before the venerable learned synclite of the famous Göttingen Scientific Society. However, the Scientific Society was not averse to hearing a report on his discoveries. And then Professor Tikhsen read it, read it in three steps - so few pundits were interested in the results of the work of this "amateur" - September 4, October 2 and November 13, 1802. Tichsen also took care of publishing Grotefend's theses "On the question of deciphering Persepolis cuneiform texts."

However, the University of Göttingen refused to publish the full text of this work on the pretext that the author was not an orientalist. What a blessing that the fate of the light bulb or the anti-rabies serum did not depend on these gentlemen, because Edison was not an electrical engineer either, and Pasteur was not a doctor! Only three years later a publisher was found who published Grotefend's work as applications Geeren's "Ideas on the Politics, Means of Transportation and Trade of the Largest Peoples of the Ancient World".

Grotefend lived long enough (1775-1853) to wait for the sensational news, which in 1846, under fat headlines, was distributed by the press of the whole world: the Englishman G. K. Rawlinson read the cuneiform texts.

Wandering the Internet or the streets of your hometown, you can often find hierographic inscriptions. "Chinese" - the majority thinks and does not take a steam bath. But not only the Chinese use hieroglyphs. How to recognize what language the inscription is in (why do you need this is another question)?

It is not difficult at all, each language has its own characteristics.

In ancient times, Koreans used Chinese characters. But in the 15th century, its own script, Hangul, was developed specifically for the Korean language. Letters-blocks were invented from which hieroglyphs-syllables (from two or three blocks) are formed by a bizarre connection. This is best illustrated in this video:

But it's all lyrics, the main thing is CIRCLES. Only in Korean characters can you find the circle element.

inscription in Korean with characteristic circles in hieroglyphs

So the rule

There are circles - this is Korean!

Japanese writing consists of three parts: kanji - borrowed Chinese characters, katakana and hirogana - syllabary modified kanji. In writing, it is customary for the Japanese to use all 3 methods at once. The main part of the word is written in hieroglyphs, suffixes in katakana, foreign and borrowed words in hirogana. Kanji characters are highly simplified (usually consisting of 2-3 strokes) and are easily distinguished from complex and cumbersome kanji characters.

The inscription is in Japanese - simple kan symbols are clearly visible

There are very primitive hieroglyphs - this is Japanese!

Chinese script is the mother of the two previous scripts. Chinese characters are complex and fit into a square. Each character represents a syllable or a morpheme. To recognize hieroglyphs as Chinese, it is enough to make sure that there are no signs that this is Korean or Japanese.

The inscription in Chinese - only traditional characters

If not Korean or Japanese, then Chinese!

By the way, due to the need to write words in other languages, as well as mathematical expressions, all 3 languages ​​switched from a vertical and right-to-left writing system to a horizontal one from left to right (while the page order was preserved from right to left).

The monument to Cyril and Methodius, which will be discussed, is located in Moscow (Lubyansky proezd, 27). To get to it, you need to get to Slavyanskaya Square (metro station Kitay-Gorod). The sculptor V.V. Klykov built this monument in 1992.

Equal-to-the-Apostles Saints Methodius and Cyril were outstanding enlighteners of their time, creators of the alphabet. Many years ago, the brothers arrived in the Slavic lands to preach the teachings of Christ. Prior to this significant event, Cyril received an excellent education in Constantinople, then taught at the University of Magnavra, which was considered one of the most serious institutions at that time.

In 862, the ambassadors of Prince Rostislav asked Methodius and Cyril for a high mission - the preaching and teaching of Christianity in the Slavic language in Moravia. Saint Cyril, with the help of his brother Methodius and his students, compiled the alphabet and translated from Greek all the main Christian books. But the Roman Church did not approve of these efforts. The brothers were accused of heresy, because it was believed that true books and worship were possible only in three sacred languages: Greek, Latin and Hebrew.

Returning to Rome, brother Cyril fell seriously ill. In anticipation of the hour of death, he took a vow of monasticism, and after a month and a half he died. Methodius returned to Moravia, where he conducted an educational and preaching service until the last days of his life. In 879, he received official permission to conduct worship in the Slavic language and translated the Old Testament into this language.

The monument represents the figures of two brothers Methodius and Cyril, who are holding Holy Scripture and a cross in their hands. The inscription on the pedestal is written in Old Slavonic: “To the holy Equal-to-the-Apostles first teachers of the Slavic Methodius and Cyril. Grateful Russia.

After carefully examining the inscription, linguists found five grammatical errors. In the name "Methodius" and in the word "apostle" is written "O" instead of "omega". The name "Kirill" should contain the letter "i" instead of "i".

But most of all the indignation was caused by two errors in the word "Russia": instead of "and" there should be "i", and instead of "o" there should be "omega". Incredible, because this monument is a symbol of Slavic writing - and contains such spelling errors! Many consider this curious case rather amusing.

On the day of the celebration of "Slavic writing and culture" in 1992, the opening of the monument took place, and at the foot of the monument an Unquenchable Lampada was installed.