All that glisters...

I caught this article - http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/nov/17/heart-disease-ancient-egyptians - in today’s Guardian. To summarise, based on body scans of twenty mummified corpses, approximately 3,500 years old. Of these, sixteen had identifiable circulatory systems (hearts and arteries), and nine showed signs of atherosclerosis (that is to say arteries whose walls have been damaged and whose lumina have been occluded by fatty deposition). From this, the article states that the researchers involved appear have concluded that a great number Egyptians of high socioeconomic status tended to suffer from cardiovascular disease.

All well and good, although nine of twenty mummies is hardly good enough to draw any real conclusions, and a claim made by one of the research team that "The findings suggest that we may have to look beyond modern risk factors to fully understand the disease [atherosclerosis]" seems an incredible overstatement. It seems hardly surprising that wealthy Egyptians would have been able to eat a diet heavy in meat, and indeed needing to do no physical labour themselves, could well have grown fat and developed heart and arterial disease. I hardly think that were we to have a perfectly preserved Henry VIII to dissect and examine, we would conclude from his morbidly obese, gouty body that all Tudors had heart disease and that it can't just be modern diets that are problematic. The man was a glutton par excellence, as, I imagine, were many rich Egyptians.

The above is largely apropos of nothing, but it did point me to two other recent stories relating to pharaonic Egypt. Firstly, the revelation that new evidence suggests the pyramids were not built by slaves, which I was not too surprised to hear. Secondly, more interestingly, was the call by Dr. Zawi Hawass, the head of the Egyptian Supreme Court of Antiquities, for the return of the Rosetta Stone to Egypt from the British Museum.

The two stories together got me thinking - Egypt retains a place in the popular imagination, but generally people only really know of names like Tutankhamun, and stories pertaining to him, such as the fabled curse of his tomb that befell the team that discovered his tomb led by Howard Carter. Overall the ancient age is rather poorly represented in our national psyche. Frankly, Tutankhamun is a boring subject, and was an irrelevant king, and it is a great shame that he is perhaps first to jump to our minds when we think of Egypt. We know his name because of gold, and gold alone. So, since the Rosetta Stone is in the news, I thought I'd tell you a little tale about it...

The stone was discovered in the late 1790s, by the French under Napoleon. The arrival of British forces in Egpyt who defeated the French at Cairo explains how it made its way to its current home in London. These are reasonably trivial details - the really interesting part is the information inscribed.

The stone features inscriptions in three languages - classical Greek, and two Egyptian scripts, hieroglyphics and demotic (naturally, the Egpytians didn't just write in the intricate hieroglyphics - there were two less formal written languages of hieratic and demotic to use). The stone was thus immensely valuable, providing the key to reading the hieroglyphs present throughout the tombs and temples of the land.

The first man to really get to grips with the stone was the Englishman Thomas Young, but before he really got into his stride, he grew bored of the stone and abandoned his search. It was ultimately a Frenchman, Jean-Francois Champollion, who would prove a key. He correctly identified that the glyphs were based on phonetic sounds (i.e. if I were to represent the word 'belief' as an English hieroglyph, I would draw a bee, then a leaf), and that the sounds came from the spoken Coptic language of the Egyptians. With his consumate knowledge of Coptic, Champollion correctly translated the cartouche (the names of Egyptian kings were surrounded in an oval or cartouche in hieroglyphics) of the pharaoh Ramesses.

Upon discovering this, he shouted 'Je tiens l'affaire!' (Eureka!) and collapsed, not waking for five days. Fortunately, living with his brother who had supported him, he regained consciousness and made his discovery known, achieving a lifelong dream.

I don't know if that story made any impression - indeed, you may already have known of it, or heard it. I thought of other episodes in the history of Egypt but somehow this story is the one I feel ought to be most well known (though, if you have time, I'd look into the stories of Hatshepsut and Ahkenaten, fascinating pharaohs who did frankly staggering things) - and indeed, to turn a little Aesopian, there is a slight moral to this diatribe. It's easy to be bewitched by tales of rich boy kings (like Tutankhamun). I'd like to think that maybe, with Egypt, people would look a little deeper if they knew a little more. I've barely scratched the surface of the rich collection of personalities and tales from the pharaonic times. So, if this piqued your interest, try and quell your inner magpie, and remember, all that glisters is not gold...