Most people have some idea of who Napoleon Buonaparte was. He met his defeat at the battle of Waterloo in 1815, at the hands of one General Wellington. What they do not know about Napoleon is that he was something of a Renaissance man, at least in spirit. He had sent, a few years earlier, an expedition of scientists, archaeologists and scholars of many sorts, into Egypt -- with his invading army -- to discover whatever they might for the cultural posterity of Europe.
Yes, this was considered unusual at the time too. Wiki has it that:
"In March 1798, Buonaparte proposed a military expedition to seize Egypt, then a province of the Ottoman Empire, seeking to protect French trade interests and undermine Britain's access to the British Raj. The Directory [the French Government], although troubled by the scope and cost of the enterprise, readily agreed to the plan in order to remove the popular general from the center of power.
An unusual aspect of the Egyptian expedition was the inclusion of a large group of scientists assigned to the French expeditionary force: among their discoveries was the finding of the Rosetta Stone. This deployment of intellectual resources is considered by some an indication of Bonaparte's devotion to the principles of the Enlightenment ..."
Later, many of his contemporaries decided to create a kind of educational database, an encyclopedic project aimed at empirical discovery and (hopefully) eventually a kind of systematizing of the sciences. This all began when one of Napoleon's armies made a fascinating discovery.
Modern Egyptology was born of those efforts, and with the discovery of a very important artifact, known simply today as the "Rosetta Stone." Up to this point (1799), Students of ancient Egypt had a nagging problem which hampered their efforts significantly. No one could read hieroglyphics, the more ancient script in which the majority of then-known Eyptian artifacts of antiquity had inscribed upon them. The Rosetta Stone changed all this. It placed in parallel three languages, two of which were Egyptian, and one Greek. Scholars could read the classical Greek, and used it to decipher the others.
Wiki says that, "[Jean-Francois] Champollion could read both Greek and Coptic [a later Egyptian language], and figured out what the seven Demotic signs in Coptic were. By looking at how these signs were used in Coptic, he worked out what they meant. Then he traced the Demotic signs back to hieroglyphic signs."
Below I have paraphrased the wikipedia article's introductory paragraphs on the Rosetta Stone:
"The Rosetta Stone was created in 196 B.C., as a Ptolemaic era "stele" [inscribed flat stone] written with the same text in two scripts corresponding to two different ancient Eyptian languages, known as "hieroglyphic" -- the priestly script, and "demotic," (the tongue of the ordinary people), as well as in classical Greek.
Discovered by the French in 1799 at Rosetta, a harbor on the Mediterranean coast in Egypt, it enabled the deciphering of hieroglyphic writing in 1822, long after its discovery, by Frenchman Jean-François Champollion. Comparative translation of the stone assisted in understanding many previously undecipherable examples of hieroglyphic writing. The text of the Rosetta Stone is a decree from Ptolemy V, describing the repealing of various taxes and instructions to erect statues in temples.
The Stone is 114.4 centimeters high at its tallest point, 72.3 centimeters wide, and 27.9 centimeters thick (45 1/16th in. high, 28 7/8ths in. wide, 11 in. thick). Weighing approximately 760 kg (1,676 pounds) .... and is dark grey-bluish-pinkish in color."
The last paragraph means, "Do not drop it on your foot."
Jean-François Champollion was a significant contributor to "The Enlightenment" project, which was supposed to end up as a comprehensive and systematic guide to the arts and sciences, under the guiding editorship of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert. Wiki adds, The "Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers" (English: "Encyclopedia, or a systematic dictionary of the sciences, arts, and crafts") was an encyclopedia published in France between 1751 and 1766, with later supplements and revisions in 1772, 1777 and 1780 and numerous foreign editions and later derivatives.
Its introduction, the Preliminary Discourse, is considered an important exposition of Enlightenment ideals. The Encyclopédie's self-professed aim was "to change the way people think."
The work comprised 35 volumes, with 71,818 articles, and 3,129 illustrations. The first 28 volumes were published between 1751 and 1766 and were edited by Diderot - although some of the later picture-only volumes were not actually printed until 1772. The remaining five volumes were completed by other editors in 1777, along with a two volume index in 1780. Many of the most noted figures of the French enlightenment contributed to the work including Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu. The single greatest contributor was Louis de Jaucourt who wrote 17,266 articles, or about 8 per day between 1759 and 1765."
For reasons I have mentioned many times before, it was not possible to mesh the various theories of the sciences, and philosophies of the arts and crafts into one system. This became apparent fairly late in the game and the project was abandoned.
The surprising feature of history to me comes from the fact that the Reformation tradition, a parallel, Christian tradition to that of the Renaissance - Enlightenment, had lost momentum (for various reasons) long before the great discovery of Napolean's army at Rosetta.
What I have proposed in the HLA project amounts to a Christian counterpart to the failed Encyclopédie of Diderot and D'alembert. It amounts to a continuation of the confessional project begun both in Great Britian and Germany during the Reformation, but dares also an application of the system of theology found in the Bible to the many fields of science. Not only this, but it also predicts, and could enable many new fields of study, not presently recognized or known, both in biblical, as well as rational and empirical studies.
The Wikipedia program, a somewhat global and encyclopedic project itself, does not pretend it will systematize anything, and is quite helpful in many ways, for the value of its empirical and historical orientation to the subject matter it details.
An interesting application of the lesson taught by the Rosetta Stone's historical revolution in Eyptology (and ancient history more generally) to biblical algorithmic studies, would be the implementing of several algorithmic searches conducted in paralell langauges -- perhaps Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic -- simultaneously, with the results of each lingsuitic search cross-referenced to obtain the full canonical view of any one topic.
One would not need to know any one of the languages well in order to conduct such a search successfully, but would only require a cursory knowledge, since online tools like Aramaic dictionaries -- with full explanations on the use of such words (by people who DO know the language well) -- are readily available. Moreover, some biblical scholars have already undertaken these kinds of studies (notably Joachim Jeremias and others have translated many portions of the NT into Aramaic).
It seems to me that the better Encyclopedia project -- one which can be well systematized (set in order) needs a better Rosetta Stone. This could help give the project a useful shove in the right direction, and a host of good, multilingual sources (like the famous stele) are already available online. And what is not now, will become progressively more accessible in the future. Sources like the wikipedia cannot but help as well.
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