The Translation Stone

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• The Translation Stone
• Brian O'Keeffe (bio)

In 1799, a large stone was discovered in Egypt. Inscribed on its surface were texts in Greek, demotic, and hieroglyphs. Would this stone permit the hitherto undecipherable hieroglyphs of the ancient Egyptians to be understood? Key to unlocking the secrets of the Egyptian script was that the three languages incised on the stone were equivalent to one another: each was a translation of the other. In a few short years, the code was broken and the hieroglyphic riddle solved. Finally the meaning of those elegantly oval eyes, proud-beaked falcons, and bulbous scarab beetles was translated into French and English. Egypt—the entire country a scroll of lapidary writing unfurling from obelisk to pyramid to temple complex and burial chamber—now became legible. The Rosetta Stone, as it's now known, of course, is the emblematic artifact of translation itself. It is the translation stone.

Before Thomas Young and Jean-François Champollion accomplished their translation work, the Egyptian hieroglyph was, along with the Sphinx, a byword for enigma itself. Greeks, Romans, and Ottomans attempted the translation, but in vain. But as much as hieroglyphics daunted all those who attempted to penetrate their glyptic secrecies, some wondered whether they also represented an ideal language, as if pictograms might somehow be more expressive of concepts and ideas than the writing systems of Greek or Latin. Plotinus, in his Enneads, speaking of "the wise of Egypt," remarked that "in their effort towards philosophical statement, they left aside the writing-forms that take in the detail of words and sentences—those characters that represent sounds and convey the propositions of reasoning—and drew pictures instead, engraving in the temple-inscriptions a separate image for every separate item." Discreteness, rather than the clotted details of words forming into sentences, is what Plotinus likes here: perhaps philosophy is better articulated when one image expresses one distinct idea, no more, no less. "Thus," writes Plotinus, "they exhibited the mode in which the Supreme goes forth." As philosophy [End Page 105] dreamed its dreams of Supreme Ideas, ideal Essences and Forms, the desire for a universal, indeed primordial language accompanied that dream. In his work Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652–54) Athanasius Kircher claimed not only to have translated the Egyptian hieroglyphs but also that Adam and Eve spoke that language in the Garden of Eden. And the frontispiece to Johann Becher's 1661 book, Character pro notitia linguarum universali, another proposal for a universal language, depicts his characters inscribed on an Egyptian obelisk. The investment in Egyptian hieroglyphs waxed and waned with the centuries, some countering with the proposal that a universal language is best achieved by mathematics and logic, some others looking to Chinese instead.

In The Advancement of Learning, Sir Francis Bacon firmly objects, however: Egyptian hieroglyphs are too primitive to serve a modern philosophical purpose, even if one could translate them. Yet once they were translated, thanks to Young and Champollion, then another kind of "translation" became possible. Here, it's a matter of Hegel and his philosophy of history. At issue is how to counterpose ancient Egypt and ancient Greece, and shift from the former to the latter in order to continue the dialectical inspection of history's "spiritual" logic. But the enigmas of Egypt resist that dialectical shift, much to Hegel's vexation. The Egyptian spirit, he wrote, "stands before us as a mighty taskmaster"—a daunting foe for Hegel's self-confident philosophy of history. Egypt's hieroglyphs, petroglyphs, and sphinxes resist him, and must therefore be overcome. Happily, Champollion comes to Hegel's rescue, and it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the Rosetta Stone and its translation enabled the dialectical moves of Hegel's own philosophy: once Champollion translated the Egyptian enigma, Hegel's own "translation" could now proceed whereby Egypt is transposed into Greece. The sieved leftovers of Egyptian spirit were bequeathed to Greek thought and civilization by the Ptolemies to posterity; the unusably dead enigmas of Egypt could be left behind in the sepulchral pyramids and ornate burial pits of the Valley of the Kings. Oedipus, the ambiguous hero of the Grecocentric West, moreover preceded Champollion by solving the...