Why haven’t we found other “Rosetta Stones”? Or have we?
It’s my understanding that the actual text on the Rosetta Stone is fairly mundane administrative government business; this being the case, shouldn’t these sorts of things be common? Shouldn’t there be hundreds or even thousands of these things everywhere around Egypt and the Mediterranean?
The Behistun Inscription was cahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behistun_Inscriptionrved into rock in Iran.
As for a multi-lingual text being similarly crucial in cracking an ancient writing system, there is a “Rosetta Cliff.”
I note from Wiki that the Rosetta Stone is now not considered unique. There are other copies of the same decree. There are also 3 part translations of earlier decrees now found.
Also there is the Behistun Inscription which is written in written in three different cuneiform script languages and equally revelatory.
Bloody 2,000 year old manuscript and I get beaten by 2 minutes …
There is a really nice long article on the Behistun Inscription in a National Geographic from around the 40s or 50s, if anyone has access to the full archive. (I had a copy laboriously saved to a PDF two pages at a time from the awful interface on the NatGeo box set program, but it is currently on a defunct computer.)
Okay, this page has the text of the article (but not the many photos.)
We’d love to find one that explains abstract Pictish symbols that appear on carved stones and sometimes portable objects in early medieval eastern Scotland. There are various theories on whether they were heraldry, writing or whatever, but they have not been found in a context them which links specific symbols with an understood writing system such as Ogham or Latin script.
(The identity of the Pictish language is a different question. It was also disputed in the past but nowadays it’s believed to have been closely related to the old Welsh that was spoken in the south of Scotland.)
Gandj Nameh, Darius’ and Xerxes’ inscriptions.
ETA: There is also this Xerxes inscription, which seems to have the same content, but so far as I can tell is in a different location than the one linked to above.
I’m pretty sure the notched rectangle and z-rod means, “Crazy robot man loves to work jigsaw puzzles”.
That one is pretty funny–little more than “I had this blank space, so I’m writing that I had a blank space to write on.” It reminds me of the theme of The Garry Shandling Show.
You realize that what makes the Rosetta Stone special is not what it says, but that it features the same text in three different languages, right? Why should that be common?
Because if it’s just mundane government business, why is such a thing so rare and unique? Certainly ancient Egyptian government officials had such mundane business all the time, the same way any given government office today will run off thousands of pages of documents every single day.
If the Rosetta Stone itself wasn’t particularly important contemporaneously, and was just routine government business (OR WAS IT?), why aren’t similar artifacts found all over the place?
Was the dissemination of such decrees an infrequent occurrence, or did other such artifacts just not survive the rigors of time, or some other reason? Why are such things rare? OR ARE THEY? I don’t know; hence the question.
Because it was not just mundane government business( it wasn’t even strictly speaking entirely governmental, the actual “document” was issued by the religious establishment separately ) and it was particularly important :). It certainly reads like mundane business, but it was anything but. Rather it was an important propaganda piece. Most, if not all of these examples, are exactly that. Issued in multi-lingual states as a political gesture of one sort or another.
Mundane administrative blather was typically issued in whatever the dominant administrative lingua franca was. Koine Greek in the Hellenistic states, Imperial Aramaic in Achaemenid Persia, etc. Occasionally locally dominant languages might rise to the fore in particular locales, like Old Persian in Perseopolis. But multi-lingual documents are rare precisely because they were usually extra, unnecessary effort.
Thank you.
A big carved inscribed slab like that wouldn’t be cheap or fast to produce and move, so they wouldn’t be pumping them out like a weekly newsletter.
In addition to what’s been said, it’s basically luck that anything’s survived into modern (say post 1700 AD) times. Egypt and to a lesser extent Mesopotamia may seem that a lot of things survived, but it’s very little in the grand scheme of things of what they produced.
For instance the Diary of Merer is an accounting of the transport and purchase of materials for the construction of the Great Pyramid and the feeding of the workers. So we now know where they got at least some of the stones from.
It was discovered in 2013.
On the other hand, we basically have zilch idea as to why the Great Sphinx was built. Lots of conjectures and surmises, but no clear reason. For one monument, we know the name of a mid level official and how he got material and handled labour. For another, jackshit.
And they are in the same damn complex.
Plus later rulers routinely activly destroyed monuments to past rulers (which, of course, continues worldwide to this day.)
Depends what qualifies as a “document”, I suppose. Bilingual coins of the ancient Indo-Greek/Greco-Bactrian rulers are actually fairly common. Similarly for the Ghaznavids about a millennium later.
Of course, coins contain a very small amount of text, but even longer bilingual inscriptions aren’t exactly what I’d call rare, although naturally they’re rarer than monolingual ones.
Greek-Phoenician bilingual inscriptions
Greek-Latin bilingual inscriptions
Greek-Eto-Cyprian bilingual inscription
Ancient North Arabian-Nabatean bilingual inscriptions
Sanskrit-Khmer bilingual inscriptions
Sanskrit-Prakrit bilingual inscriptions
Luwian-Phoenician bilingual inscription
Turkish-Arabic bilingual inscriptions
Sanskrit-Tamil bilingual inscriptions
Pahlavi-Chinese bilingual inscription
And many more. I think the main issue is, as AK84 said, there’s just not much of any kind of epigraphic evidence around anymore for certain ancient languages such as Luwian or Pahlavi, so bilingual inscriptions in them are extra unusual. But in languages with more abundant epigraphic witnesses and cross-cultural impact, it’s clear that bilingualism was not all that exceptional.
Also, put a terrible strain on the postmen
