1 Introduction, Aims, and Origin of the Project
This contribution aims to describe the origin, execution, and results of the pilot project The Digital Rosetta Stone and shows its usefulness in editing and teaching ancient texts. The main techniques involved are alignment, treebanking, 3D imaging, and online visualization.1
The Greek text of the Decree of Memphis, better known as the Rosetta Stone, was published as the Marmor Rosettanum by Karl Müller in an appendix of the first volume of the Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum (FHG). It includes the addition of the French literal translation and the commentary that Jean-Antoine Letronne produced to help Jean-François Champollion with the analysis of the differences between the Egyptian and the Greek versions of the decree carved on the stone. The reason for the publication in the FHG is due to the importance of the Rosetta Stone as a source of ancient political history and the desire of the French editor Ambroise Firmin-Didot to include it in the FHG together with the text of the Marmor Parium.2
In 2014, while working on the Digital Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum (DFHG) project, the PI Monica Berti decided to promote two separate initiatives for experimenting with the analysis and representation of the Parian Marble and the Rosetta Stone in a digital environment.3 Since the FHG edition includes only the Greek text of the Rosetta Stone and the document bears three scripts (beyond the Greek, also a hieroglyphic one in Middle Egyptian language and another one in Demotic Egyptian script and language), Berti approached the Egyptologist Franziska Naether with the idea to create a new digital edition of the Rosetta Stone to experiment with digital technologies applied to epigraphy and develop educational resources for students in Classics and Egyptology.
Initially, the team focused on the alignment of the texts of the stone, which was accomplished by Julia Jushaninowa using the alignment editor of the Alpheios project.4 The morpho-syntactic annotation of the Greek version was produced by Giuseppe Celano and Polina Yordanova with the tool Arethusa.5 In order to produce more data and expand the project, Monica Berti and Franziska Naether successfully applied for a grant from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).6
Thanks to this grant, the Egyptologist Josephine Hensel and the Digital Humanist Miriam Amin were hired to work on the alignment and the visualization from October 2017 to October 2018. The treebanking of the Egyptian languages, however, proved more difficult. To address this issue by devoting more resources for developing guidelines for the linguistic annotation of the Demotic part of the text, Berti and Naether were able to obtain an additional grant from the BMBF that allowed Josephine Hensel to compile a test case of the Demotic in the academic year 2019/2020.
Moreover, as the project focuses on advanced visualizations of the artifact, the team invited Angelos Barmpoutis and Eleni Bozia of the Digital Epigraphy and Archaeology Project at the University of Florida to take new high-resolution pictures of the Rosetta Stone.7 In June 2018, the team traveled to the British Museum in London to take new images of the monument that were used to visualize the text alignment and produce a new high-resolution 3D model.8
Several courses in Digital Humanities and Egyptology at Leipzig University were devoted to the language, historical context, and digital edition of the Rosetta Stone.9 The results of the project were also presented at the Digital Classicist Seminar in London,10 the Sunoikisis Digital Classics online study course11 and in an online exhibition.12 These activities have been generating considerable interest from colleagues, museum curators, and the public in this project.13
2 Features and Peculiarities of the Monument
This section conveys the basic features of the monument briefly. Then, it relates its place in the history of archaeological research to demonstrate the significance of the current project’s in-depth study, as we cannot fully cover the almost 200 years of scholarship on the Rosetta Stone that is as old as the discipline of Egyptology itself.14
Whereas the existence of the Rosetta Stone and its importance in deciphering the Egyptian languages (both the hieroglyphic and the demotic script)15 are widely known, presumably a smaller number of people would know about the contents of the three versions of its text and the purpose of its erection. The Stone bears a decree with the publication of decisions from a priestly synod—the outcome of a meeting of the pharaoh and select priests from all over Egypt. Most prominently, the items pertain to the funding of temples, construction of shrines, statues, benefactions of priests, gods, and ancestral cults of the Ptolemaic family. Sometimes, political events are mentioned. Apart from the Rosetta Stone (or the Decree of Memphis), about 30 other monuments, temple texts, and papyri carry comparable decrees from the Ptolemaic Period and beyond, such as the Gallus Stele. Whereas the format of the sacerdotal decrees as a text type are modeled after Greek honorary inscriptions,16 the genre of decrees is attested in Egypt since the Old Kingdom, with famous examples dating to the rule of Pepi II or during the time of the New Kingdom.17
With its trilingual inscription, the Rosetta Stone was erected in the first year of the reign of pharaoh Ptolemy V in 196 BC. The dark stela made of granodiorite measures 114.4 × 72.3 × 27.93 cm (45 × 28.5 × 11 in). Perhaps a total height of 200 cm (78 in) is realistic. However, the original layout of the stela with a possible decoration of the lunette and an offering scene with the pharaoh before the gods and accompanying Hieroglyphic labels is speculative. Having been found as part of a wall in a fortress close to the city of Rosette in the Eastern Nile Delta in Lower Egypt in August 1799 by a French general named Boussard, the monument was kept for two years in the mansion of the governor in Alexandria. After Napoleon Bonaparte’s unsuccessful military campaign in Egypt (during which the first facsimile in ink of the Stone was produced), it fell into the possession of the major general Turner, who then transferred it to London in 1801. Since 1802, the Rosetta Stone has been an iconic object of the British Museum18 and served as one of the objects—though not the decisive one, which was the Bankes Obelisk in Kingston Lacy, Dorset19—to decipher ancient Egyptian. While the Danish Johan David Åkerblad and the British Thomas Young worked mainly on the Demotic version, Jean-François Champollion successfully worked with all three versions, including other monuments and Coptic sources. This consultation of other manuscripts is an often-overlooked fact but stated clearly in Champollion’s decisive document, the Lettre à M. Dacier from 1822. The deciphering of the Hieroglyphs also marks the beginning of Demotic Studies and contributes to Coptology, both sub-disciplines of Egyptology.20
The decipherment of the ancient Greek version happened much quicker. In 1803, Richard Porson completed the first edition that includes a reconstruction of the broken lower right edge,21 followed by others, such as the edition by Letronne mentioned above.
Our transliteration and German translation of the Rosetta Stone is based on two current editions: Günter Vittmann’s record of it in the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae22 and an unpublished dossier of the late Heinz-Josef Thissen, who thankfully shared his findings with us at an early stage of this project. The English translation is the one of Stephen Quirke and Carol Andrews from 1988.23 Autopsy and the new images helped to improve both slightly.
There is a tiny bit of history about the Rosetta Stone and Leipzig University.24 Georg Steindorff, Professor of Egyptology since 1894, tried to obtain a plaster cast of the monument in 1892 while still a museum curator in Berlin. According to the letters of Steindorff and the British Museum’s head of Egyptian antiquities, Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge, preserved in the archive of the Egyptian Museum in Leipzig, Budge agreed to create a copy of the Stone. However, the project was never completed. Other local institutions, such as the German Museum of Books and Writing of the German National Library in Leipzig or the Museum of Archaeology at the Department of Ancient Studies at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, own plaster casts.25
Figure 3.1
Possible reconstruction of the Rosetta Stone of the Egyptian Museum Leipzig in a special exhibition 2022
photo: Franziska Naether263 Word-by-Word or Expression-by-Expression? The Alignment
Alignment in a text edition is a tool for the comparison of texts and languages.27 By putting corresponding words or expressions (and translations thereof) right next to each other and linking them, the system enables the user to see the aligner’s connections. Therefore, a digital alignment—e.g., highlighting corresponding words and expressions by color-coding—facilitates comprehension and learning of foreign languages, both ancient and modern. Moreover, for scholars of Greek, Latin, and Egyptian, which are not usually taught in the same departments and joint study programs, textual alignment provides an excellent opportunity to make use of original sources instead of translations only.
As mentioned above, the alignment with Alpheios was unsuccessful because this tool supports only the alignment of two texts.28 This is one of the reasons why the Open Greek and Latin project of the Chair of Digital Humanities at Leipzig University assigned Tariq Yousef the implementation of Ugarit iAligner, which is a tool that supports the alignment of three texts, therefore offering an ideal feature for an inscription in three versions.29 We used Unicode fonts for ancient Greek and the transliteration of the two Egyptian languages. However, it should be noted that Unicode versions of Ptolemaic Hieroglyphic and Demotic are in the process of being developed and not fully available yet. We will include these passages in the future.30
The decree on the Rosetta Stone is commonly described as one text translated into two languages and written in three scripts. We aimed to analyze how the translation from one language to another was done and address the following questions: How close are the translations of the text in terms of vocabulary? Have mistakes been made in the translations? To this end, we worked on two levels: vocabulary and syntax.31
Initially, we had to separate each text section of the Rosetta Stone in its sentences. Then, we created a synoptic text version based on this sentence level. Our synopsis consisted of 47 paragraphs, which were defined by content, i.e., units of meaning. Therefore, a paragraph can include one or more sentences.
Subsequently, we worked on alignment—a first way of comparing the Hieroglyphic, the Demotic, and the Greek text on word level. During this process, we were able to identify different word relations (1:1, 1:2, 1:n, 2:1, 2:2, 2:n, n:1, n:2, n:n)32 and also observe different kinds of inconsistencies between the texts, such as omissions,33 additions,34 twisted words,35 differing vocabulary,36 and “real” mistakes.37
Altogether, these inconsistencies may have resulted in some text passages being more detailed in their descriptions than the corresponding version(s) in the other language(s), which is then abbreviated. To illustrate this in context, we offer here two synoptic examples:
4 Paragraph 25 “Building Canals and Dams”
Demotic (line 14–15) |
Greek (line 24–26) |
dj=f tn=w nꜣ yꜥr.w r-wn-nꜣw dj.t šm mw r tꜣ rsꜣ.t (n-) rn=s r-bn rḫ nꜣ Pr-ꜥꜣ.w ḥꜣ.ṱ.w jr=s m-qd=s jrj={w}⟨f⟩ ḥḏ ꜥšꜣy n he wbꜣ=w jp=f mšꜥ rmṯ-rd.wj=f ḥtr r-rꜣ (n) nꜣ yꜥr.w n-rn=w r ḥrḥ r-r=w r dj.t wḏꜣ=w (r-)ḏbꜣ nꜣ [mḥ(.w)] n pꜣ mw r-wn-nꜣw ꜥy.w n ḥꜣ.t-sp 8.t r nꜣ yꜥr.w n-rn=w nꜣ ntj dj.t šm mw r jtn ꜥšꜣy jw=w mty.w m-šs |
|
79 (+ 1) words |
42 words |
“He caused to be dammed up the canals which provided water for the stronghold in question,a) the like of which no former pharaohs had been able to do,b) expending much silver upon it.c) He appointed a force of infantry and cavalry at the mouth of the canals in question to watch over and guard them,d) because of the overflow of water which was great in year 8 at the canals in question,e) which provided water for an extensive area and were (therefore) extremely deep.b)” |
“And when the Nile had made a great rise in the eighth year, being wont to flood the plains,e) he checked it by damming at many points the outlets of the channels,a) expending on it no small sum of moneyc) and setting cavalry and infantry to guard them.d)” |
4.1 Commentary
The Hieroglyphic text is lost.38 This example clearly illustrates how detailed or abbreviated an ancient translation could be. Comparing both passages, we see that the Demotic text is more extended, as it needs 80 words in contrast to the Greek text, which contains all the important content information in only 42 words. Some observations will be discussed in detail:
a) The Demotic text begins this paragraph with the following information: what the pharaoh has done, namely building canals and dams to protect the stronghold with an explanation as to the reasons. The stronghold is not mentioned directly in Greek, in which it is related that in many places the outlets of the canals had to be checked.
b) These two subordinate clauses either are added in the Demotic text or are omitted in the Greek text. The first one is an important phrase within Egyptian royal inscriptions. On the one hand, a pharaoh has to legitimize himself and his actions. On the other hand, he emphasizes his superiority and performance over the former kings by giving orders that no one before him had given.39
The second addition, a relative clause, repeats what was said at the beginning of this long sequence, thus emphasizing the overflow of the water as the result of the high flood.
The Greek text avoids unnecessary repetitions and concentrates on the present time, i.e., what king Ptolemy is doing to solve problems. Orders of former kings in the same context are probably not noteworthy.
c) This phrase is nearly identical in its expression—except for the word order (which is not surprising because Demotic and Greek belong in two different language families) and slightly deviating linguistic phrases. Both texts begin with a verb. The Demotic expression jr n he “to incur expenses” (see Erichsen 1954, 267) has its equivalent in the Greek verb
d) In Demotic, this sentence is more detailed than in Greek, and we find a rearranging of the nouns “infantry” and “cavalry.” The Verb jp (Erichsen 1954, 28) “to count, to appoint” has its equivalent in Greek
e) This part of the paragraph explains the reason why the pharaoh had the canals built. The structure of the sentences is remarkable. While the Demotic text relays this information nearly at the end, the Greek text starts with it. Once more, it is interesting to note how these texts describe the situation, and this time it is the Greek text that shows a slightly different wording. The “great rise” of the Nile (noun and adjective in Greek) corresponds to an “overflow of water, which was great” (indirect genitive followed by a relative construction in Demotic). Additionally, in Greek, the verb
5 Paragraph 34 “Rewards from the Gods”42
Hieroglyphic (line x+5) |
Demotic (line 20–21) |
Greek (line 35–36) |
[…] jsw nn rdj n=f nṯr.w nṯr.wt qnw nḫt ꜥnḫ wḏꜣ s(nb) ḥnꜥ ḫ.t nb(.t) nfr(.t) r-ꜣw=sn r jꜣw.t=f wr.t ḏd.tw ẖr=f ḥnꜥ ẖrd.w=f ḏ.t |
dj n=f nꜣ nṯr.w (n) tꜣ šb.t (n) nꜣy pꜣ ḏrꜣ pꜣ qny pꜣ nꜥš pꜣ wḏꜣ pꜣ snby jrm nꜣ ky.w md.t-nfr.t.w ḏr=w (r) tꜣj=f jꜣw.t (n) Pr-ꜥꜣ smn(.w) ẖr-r=f jrm nꜣj=f ẖrd.w šꜥ ḏ.t |
|
29 words |
37 (+ 4) words |
24 words |
“[in] return for these things the gods and goddessesa) have given him strengthb), victoryc), lifed), prosperitye), healthf) and all good things in their entirety, his great officeg) being establishedh) with him andi) his children foreverj).” |
“As reward for these things the godsa) have granted him mightb), strengthb), victoryc), well-beinge), healthe) and all other good things, his office of Pharaohg) being establishedh) with him andi) his children foreverj).” |
“In return for which the godsa) have given him healthf), victoryc), powerb), and [all] other good things, the kingshipg) being establishedh) for him andi) his children for all timej).” |
5.1 Commentary
In this paragraph we find omissions/additions, reversed word order, and differing vocabulary.
a) Pharaoh receives presents from the gods—here, only the Hieroglyphic text mentions both male and female gods.
b) qnw > qny / ḏrꜣ >
c) nḫt > nꜥš >
d) ꜥnḫ “life”: It occurs only in the Hieroglyphic version. This could be explained either as an addition of the Hieroglyphic version or an omission of the other two. However, it is impossible to determine, as we do not know which one the source text is.
e) wḏꜣ “prosperity”: It is only listed in the Egyptian texts in the typical combination with “life” and “health.” The group ꜥnḫ wḏꜣ snb is very common after pharaoh’s name and is an expression of blessing (“Pharaoh NN, may he live, be prosper and be healthy”).
f) snb(y) >
g) jꜣw.t wr.t > jꜣw.t (n) Pr-ꜥꜣ >
h) ḏdj > smn >
i) ḥnꜥ > jrm >
j) ḏ.t > šꜥ ḏ.t >
To sum up, these two examples illustrate clearly that ancient translations differ from each other. The synoptic comparison of the three texts of the Rosettana has shown that strictly speaking, they are not one and the same text. The content of the decree is the main focus. The majority of the ancient translations are not identical or “1:1” (which, of course, is not possible in two languages with different syntax). Several partial omissions, extensions, and even errors occur in both the Egyptian and the Greek text. Further syntactical and morphological analysis will enable us to study such discrepancies more closely.
In conclusion, we can say that this multilingual decree consists of three text variants. In the future, a comprehensive study of all multilingual decrees from the Ptolemaic period will provide insights into the ancient methods of translating.49
6 Scanning the Stone in 2D and 3D
In addition to the text-based representation of the Rosetta Stone that we used in our text alignment, our project provides an image-based representation of its form to present a holistic view of the text in its original context. In June 2018, with the permission of the British Museum, we photographed the Rosetta Stone to generate high-resolution 2D and 3D maps of its inscribed surface. In our setup, we used a single DSLR camera (Nikon D3400), which was fixed on a tripod in front of the stone and calibrated as follows: exposure time = 5 sec., ISO speed = ISO-100, F-stop = f/25, focal length = 135 mm, and max aperture = 4.5. To reconstruct the tridimensional inscribed surface using the shape-from-shading method,50 we controlled the lighting of the stone using a handheld light wand (Ice Light) that served as a 15-inch-long light source of 1600 lumen at 5600k color temperature.
We divided the artifact into eight regions (four rows and two columns), photographed individually at 6000- × 4000-pixel resolution. Each region was photographed in four different lighting directions (light from the left, top, right, bottom) by placing the light wand in the corresponding side of the region of interest. This quadridirectional lighting configuration allowed us to capture information related to the local orientation at each point of the surface through the differences of the light reflection observed in the corresponding four photographs.51
Thirty-two photographs were taken in total (eight regions x four lighting conditions), which were then processed to compose high-resolution 2D and 3D representations of the surface with 0.08141 mm sampling frequency, which is equivalent to 312 DPI resolution. Figure 3.2a shows a sample of our photographs taken with the light source placed on top of the depicted region. The tridimensional details of the inscribed surface were then be captured by the depth map, which was computed by processing the four corresponding images of the same region of interest illuminated with four different lighting orientations. An example of a reconstructed depth map from our photographs is shown on the right panel of Fig. 3.2. This is a small section of the complete reconstructed depth map, which we have published electronically and is available on the project’s website.52 The color intensity of the depth map is proportional to the depth of each point of the surface. As a result, deeper inscribed or weathered locations appear darker, making the inscription more legible than the original photograph.
Figure 3.2 a+b
A sample photograph from our dataset (left). The surface’s corresponding reconstructed depth map (right) using the shape-from-shading algorithm
Barmpoutis et al. 2010The depth map contains detailed three-dimensional information of the inscribed surface to be visualized in 3D, as shown in Fig. 3. The 3D reconstructed surface can be rendered as an interactive 3D model that the user can manipulate (move, scale, rotate) and can be inspected under different virtual lighting orientations and shading methods. A 3D visualization is shown on the top left panel that shows the 3D inscription as if it were on white porous material. Non-natural visualization can also be used to enhance the legibility of the 3D reconstructed text. For example, the visualization shown on the top right panel combines 3D rendering with the depth map to generate higher contrast between the virtual stone and the inscribed text.
Finally, in addition to the 3D reconstruction of the inscribed surface, we used a hand-held laser scanner (Structure Sensor by Occipital) mounted on a tablet computer (iPad Air by Apple) to create a 3D model of the entire stone.53 Although the 3D model generated by this scanner can depict the overall shape of the whole artifact, it does not have enough resolution to capture the fine details of the inscribed surface.54 Therefore, the 3D reconstructed surface using shape-from-shading is complementary to the laser-scanned 3D model, as both of these forms can co-exist to serve different needs.
Figure 3.3 a–c
Different 3D visualizations of the region shown in Fig. 2. The surface can be visualized with natural shading using virtual material properties (top left) or the depth map as the texture of the 3D surface to enhance legibility (top right). The 3D surface can be observed from different points and angles of view and virtual lighting orientations to assist scholars in studying the inscription closely.
7 Visualization
To display the parallel versions in the alignment directly on the stone, we had to visualize this within the framework of our website. The user can hover with their mouse over the lines of the stone. While doing this, each passage and its corresponding versions in the other two languages (if preserved) is highlighted on the new 3D image.55 Transcription of the corresponding text is provided in the tooltip. By clicking on the text passage, the user is directed to the alignment in the Ugarit iAligner that provides the parallelized text versions along with a translation. This way, we connect the abstract textual representation with the original artifact. Figure 3.4 shows a detail of our visualization of the alignment.
To connect the three versions of the same unit of meaning and their position in the photo, we developed an XML scheme that matched our requirements. Therefore, we treated the stone as a hierarchically structured document.
The root element is the Rosetta Stone itself. The following level of structural elements conveys the units of meaning, as defined above. Again, one unit of meaning refers to the abstract idea of the passage rather than the specific realization in one language. Each unit of meaning has two or three child elements that represent the languages as instances of the abstract form. Since some parts of the text are not preserved, several units of meaning convey merely two languages. Fig. 3.5 illustrates the document structure.
The language elements have the three same child elements: transcription, translation, and coordinates. Initially, transcriptions and translations were encoded according to the TEI Epidoc guidelines.56 This entails e.g., the specification of the lines of the text in the original artifact and the markup of additional epigraphic information of parts of the text, such as preservation state. However, for ease of legibility, the epigraphic information is annotated according to the Leiden conventions for the purpose of visualization. The child element coordinates the link between the text and the actual object, resp. the photograph of it. Each language representation of each unit of meaning comes with one set of coordinates corresponding to the HD photograph’s position.
Figure 3.4
Detail of the visualization of the text alignment on the high-resolution photograph of the Rosetta Stone
Figure 3.5
Document structure by the example of one single unit of meaning
For the frontend of the visualization, we use a JavaScript Query to get the elements from the external XML source and build up an HTML image map. All are implemented within our website in a Typo3 environment.
8 Treebanking
Treebanking is a way of visualizing texts after they have been annotated syntactically in two ways: on the “sentence-level” and the “word-level.” While the first means describing the structure of a sentence (main or subordinate clause), type (e.g., interrogative, declarative, circumstantial), and certain elements (e.g., subject, attribute, object), the latter includes information on morphology, syntax, and semantics for each word. The international standard of annotating, i.e., glossing texts, are the “Leipzig Glossing Rules” established by the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig,57 adapted for Egyptian.58
Giuseppe Celano and Polina Yordanova treebanked the ancient Greek version of the Rosettana in 2015 using Arethusa (Fig. 3.6).59 The statistics show that this part comprises 29 sentences with 1681 tokens of 1514 words—a diameter of 52.28 words per sentence.
Since there has been no treebanked version of an Egyptian text (except in Coptic),60 we had to add a corpus grammar of our test case, Demotic Egyptian, to the Arethusa treebanking application.61 This Demotic tagset must include all types of sentences, i.e., main and subordinate clauses, all kinds of word categories (“part of speech”), and their possible functions within a sentence. Each category had to be defined precisely. In the case of Demotic, we provide an example of this analysis:
Figure 3.6
Visualization of the structure of sentence 16 as a tree (Rosettana, Greek, line 35)
Line 15
jr |
=f |
jr-sḫy |
(n) |
nꜣ |
sbꜣ.w |
“to do” |
“he” |
“have power” |
“in” |
“the” |
“enemy” |
verb |
suffix pronoun |
noun |
preposition |
definite article |
noun |
PRF |
3SG.M |
NMLZ.INF |
PREP |
DEF.ART.PL |
M.PL |
predicate |
subject |
direct object |
indirect object |
r-wn-nꜣw |
(n) |
pꜣj |
=s |
ẖn |
“who were” |
“in” |
“this” |
“she; her” |
“interior” |
prefix of participle + imperfect converter |
preposition |
possessive article |
suffix pronoun |
noun |
REL.PST |
PREP |
POSS.M.SG |
3SG.F |
M.SG |
relative |
predicate |
|||
Literal translation: “He made having-power over the enemies who were in its [= the stronghold Shekan; J.H.] interior.” > “He prevailed over the enemies who were within it.” |
This sentence shows a typical Egyptian word order: predicate—subject—object—attribute. The predicate of the main sentence is verbal, followed by a pronominal subject. There are two objects because the verb is a compound one (jr + infinitive). The indirect object is the subject of the relative clause. Its adverbial predicate follows directly the converter (r-wn-nꜣw), which transfers the sentence into past tense.
Using the Leipzig Glossing Rules, the example illustrates that Egyptian Demotic grammar is very complex. For the text’s syntactical annotation, we are preparing a Demotic tagset in the style of the Guidelines for the ancient Greek Dependency Treebank that Giuseppe Celano has compiled.62 Morphological and syntactical tagsets are necessary. They have to be written in an XML file and after uploading them on GitHub, they will be available in Arethusa. Each word category with all its “sub-kinds” (e.g., pronoun > dependent, suffix, etc.) gets an abbreviation and a color, which is used for the visualized tree (see above, Fig. 3.6). Grammar aspects like person, number, gender, and the functions of the words (e.g., predicate, object) are also included within this schema. Within Arethusa, the user uploads a sentence, assigns each single word its grammatical category, and determines its function within the sentence. The previously created word categories etc. (i.e., the tagset) are now available as selection lists.
Finally, the following extract of the tagset shows its structure:
{“postagSchema” : [“pos”,…],“styledThrough” : “pos”,“attributes”: {“pos” : {“long” : “Part of Speech”,“short” : “pos”,“values” : {“art” : {“long” : “article”,“short” : “art”,“postag” : “l”,“style” : {“color” : “lightblue”},“values” : {“def” : {“long” : “definite article”,“short” : “def”,“postag” : “dl”}}},…}
9 Teaching Ancient Languages and Cultures
As stated above, new learning applications aligning words and expressions with their respective translations facilitate language learning. Additionally, visualization of grammar and syntax structures by treebanking can serve as teaching tools to foster a deeper understanding.
Classes on political and religious communication in the Ptolemaic Period or lessons in Middle Egyptian/Égyptien de tradition, Demotic, and Greek featuring versions of the inscription are not syllabus mainstream in Egyptology and related disciplines. Some institutions have been teaching in-depth seminars on the decrees, namely the Ancient Studies Center at the University of Trier and its alumni, continuing the tradition in Halle, Tübingen and elsewhere. However, with the new technologies of Digital Humanities and a turn in Egyptology to research its beginnings, we detected a heightened interest of scholars and students in the Rosetta Stone.63 Additionally, air travel along with museums’ social media presence have resulted in increased public awareness of and interest in such artifacts, and the bi-centennial jubilee of the decipherment of Egyptian in 2022 will bring more exhibitions (e.g. in London and Leipzig) and publications
In the past, we have used the alignment of the Rosetta Stone in modules teaching Digital Philology (Berti), Demotic (Naether/Hensel), and in classes on material culture and Egyptian history. Our mission is to teach ancient sources and their functions, historical contexts, provenances, and reception. In some of these seminars, students were required to add new alignments to the Ugarit iAligner as part of their graded assignment. Then, in an oral exam, they had to justify the approach of their alignments of the ancient and/or modern languages. During this task, they also provided the developer and us with valuable feedback on the application and the teaching methods.
There are two observations that we would like to share for future endeavors. First, to our experience, students’ understanding of ancient languages improved through aligning and treebanking methods. Generally, they worked with more enthusiasm in such project-based classes since their contributions also had an impact beyond the classroom.64 Students were also more motivated to contribute due to the project’s visibility as well as scholarly and historical significance. If successful, they are also more inclined to get involved in such projects, especially when they expect that their input will make a difference and may result in an exhibition, an event, or a publication. One of the challenges in teaching using digital tools is that it is necessary to schedule extra time for IT troubleshooting.
10 Conclusions and Potential for Further Research
With our pilot project on the Rosetta Stone, we tried to combine new technologies for studying and researching ancient texts. The trilingual inscription of this well-known landmark proved ideal to develop a new application for a state-of-the-art digital edition, on account of its brevity, its highly formulaic language, and because it highlights well the challenges in our disciplines. Many corpora could be analyzed similarly, such as the multilingual magical papyri of Greco-Roman Egypt, which can then lead to an in-depth study of multilingualism as a phenomenon in social, cultural, and religious practices.
The Unicode solutions for Demotic and Hieroglyphic and a dedicated tagset for ancient Egyptian languages are still under development. Hopefully, this project and its establishment of the Leipzig Glossing Rules will mark the beginning of more such multidisciplinary digital editions with advanced features that will revolutionize the study and teaching of ancient documents.
Acknowledgments
We wish to thank Leipzig University’s LaborUniversität framework under which The Digital Rosetta Stone Project was funded through a main grant in 2017–2018 and an extra grant in 2019. The funds were administered by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). We would like to express our sincere thanks to Prorektor Thomas Hofsäss, Katharina Günther, Beatrice Hartung, and Marit Vissiennon, who have always supported our project, as well as Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, head of the Leibniz program in Leipzig, for providing us with travel funds to London. Giuseppe G.A. Celano and Polina Yordanova thankfully contributed the treebanking of the Greek version, whereas Tariq Yousef’s web-based platform Ugarit iAligner was finished just in time for the beginning of our project. Big thanks go to our colleagues Eliese Sophia-Lincke and Daniel Werning from the Humboldt Universität in Berlin to share their results on the glossing of the Rosetta Stone with us and the British Museum (namely Ilona Regulski and her colleagues) for enabling us to take new photographs and 3D images of the monument. Uwe Kretschmer from the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities provided IT support in a tricky tech issue. The Digital Epigraphy Project benefitted through initial funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Grant HD-51214-11. Many colleagues helped us with their feedback on our paper and/or poster presentations in Berlin, Bloomington, Cambridge/MA, Heidelberg, Lecce, Leipzig (12), London, Münster, New York, and Stellenbosch (3). In December 2018, Monica Berti and Franziska Naether received the Theodor-Litt-Award for Excellence in Teaching, in part for this project.65 Last but not least, thanks go out to the editors and to the two anonymous reviewers of this article.
Müller 1841–1873, vol. I, v–viii.
On the DFHG project see
Preliminary ideas and results were published by Berti, Celano et. al. 2016.
See the implementation of the funding line “StiL—Studieren in Leipzig” and “LaborUniversität”:
Two time-lapse videos of the working session in the British Museum are available on YouTube: see
These courses are taught at Leipzig University as part of the Bachelor of Science and the Master of Science in Digital Humanities and as part of the Master of Arts in Egyptology at the Faculty of History, Arts and Regional Studies. See a full list of modules and classes at
Digital Classicist London Seminars 2018, session 5:
SunoikisisDC Summer Semester 2018, common session 12:
The main results of the project were presented in November 2019 through the Mitteldeutsche Rundfunk (Central German Broadcasting, MDR). One of their outputs is available at
A handy introduction is Ray 2007 or the scholarly peer-reviewed Wikipedia article by Dalby 2019.
See the monograph by Thomasson 2013 on Åkerblad, especially 215–288.
Clarysse 2000.
General introduction: Blumenthal 1974; for Pepi II’s decree see Goedicke 1989; for Horemheb’s decree see Helck 1955; for Sethi I’s decree in Nauri see Edgerton 1947 just to name a few examples.
Inventory: BM EA 24; Trismegistos identification no.: 8809; Greek inscription publication no.: OGIS 1, 90.
Schenkel 2016. The name “Kleopatra” on the obelisk provided the main clue.
Champollion 1822.
Published in Porson 1812.
See
Quirke and Andrews 1988.
Ellen Rehm provided useful insights on the distribution of plaster casts of chiefly Near Eastern Monuments in German collections (Rehm 2018).
Another reconstruction is proposed by Patrick Brose in Hoffmann and Pfeiffer 2021. We wish to thank the authors for sharing their results before publication with us.
Textual and translation alignment of historical languages are still experimental due to the complexities of these languages and their sources. For example, see Bamman and Crane 2009, Crane 2019, Cronin 2013, Poibeau 2017.
On Alpheios and its use in Perseids, see Almas 2017.
See
See
For the analysis of syntax, see the section below about treebanking.
In these cases, “n” stands for “many”, i.e., three and more words.
One example could be found at the beginning of the text. Within the last title of pharaoh Ptolemy V, we have two different translations. In Demotic, we read: “Son of Re Ptolemy living forever, beloved of Ptah, the God who appears, whose goodness is perfect, (son of) Ptolemy and Arsinoe, the Gods who love their father” (line 2). And the Greek part has: “Son of the Sun Ptolemy everliving, beloved of Ptah” (line 3–4). The second part (here cursive) is missing in the Greek text—but why? Has it been forgotten? Has it been deliberately omitted to avoid repetition (cf. the mention of the parents at the beginning of line 2)? Or does this information at this point not correspond to the Greek standard form? Sometimes it is not clear if words or phrases are omitted or if one text is more detailed than the other (see the following case “additions”). In the above-mentioned example, from the perspective of the Demotic text, the Greek shows an omission, but we could also say, that on the basis of the Greek text, the Demotic is extended—maybe following the Egyptian tradition of protocol.
There are many examples for this case. The selected one will demonstrate it: At the end of the decree there is a description of how to celebrate the yearly festival for the pharaoh in the first month of inundation. The Hieroglyphic Text writes: “making festive the altars, presenting libations and everything it is fitting to do” (line x+12). In Demotic, we find: “and making burnt offerings and libations and the other things it is fitting to do” (line 30) and finally the Greek: “performing sacrifices and libations and the other fitting matters” (line 50). The festive decoration of the altars is only mentioned in one text. Both Demotic and Greek are listing burnt offerings and libations. Either one text is extended, or the other ones rephrased the information (festive altars > burnt offerings).
They are rare. In most examples, we have nouns that stand in a reversed order, e.g.: “He [= the pharaoh; J.H.] has taken every care to send infantry, cavalry and ships against those who came by land and sea to attack Egypt …” (Demotic, line 12), cf. “He has provided also that forces of cavalry and infantry and ships be sent out against those who attacked Egypt by sea and by land” (Greek, line 20–21).
If one compares only the Egyptian versions of the decree, there could be some interesting cases in vocabulary usage. This shows the development of the language in its written and spoken use or different levels of speech, i.e., Hieroglyphs as mdw-nṯr “words of Gods” (for priests) and Demotic as popular speech. Some examples: ḏdb > twtw (“to assemble, to gather”); rꜣ-pr or gs.w-pr.w > jrpy (“temple”); sjꜣ > swn (“to recognize”); sḫꜣ.w > wt (“order, decree”), etc.
E.g., paragraph 29 about the remission of some residues of the temples. In the Demotic text, (line 16–17) we read: “He has remitted the dues of Pharaoh which were charged to the temples up to Year 9 (ḥꜣ.t-sp 9.t) …” and the corresponding Greek text (line 28–29) writes: “He has also remitted the dues to the Crown from the temples up to the eighth year (
A reconstruction of the Hieroglyphic part based on the Nobaireh stela (Egyptian Museum Cairo, CG 22188) is given in Urk. II, 181.3–182.2. But, as Sethe already noted, this text version is very faulty because it is: “eine im Altertum hergestellte Reproduktion eines zertrümmerten Exemplares des Dekretes, (…). Dem Urheber der Reproduktion lagen eine Anzahl Bruchstücke des alten Steins vor, die er, ohne die Lücken anzugeben, hintereinander kopierte” (Urk. II, 167). Therefore, we compare the Demotic and the Greek text only.
Such statements can also be found in ancient Egyptian biographies—the only difference being that an individual emphasizes his person over his contemporaries to demonstrate his uniqueness.
See https://logeion.uchicago.edu/
Uses and references can be checked at https://logeion.uchicago.edu/
Urk. II, 187.6–8. This topic has some parallels in other Ptolemaic decrees. Their comparison shows that the rewards of the gods differ from each other. The parallel texts are discussed in Altenmüller, El-Masry et al. 2012, 115–117 and von Recklinghausen 2018, 131.
For qnw in Demotic, see Erichsen 1954, 539 (earlier records in Wb. V, 41.5–43.17); for ḏrꜣ, ibd. 682–683 (also attested earlier, see Wb. V, 599.1–16). For the Greek word, see https://logeion.uchicago.edu/
For using nḫt as verb, adjective or noun in Hieroglyphic and Demotic, see Wb. II, 314.6–317.10 and Erichsen 1954, 226 (this word is also attested in Coptic as
See https://logeion.uchicago.edu/
See https://logeion.uchicago.edu/
For smn, see Wb. IV, 131–134.7, Erichsen 1954, 433–434; for ḏdj, see Wb. V, 628.6–629.15. For the corresponding Greek word, see https://logeion.uchicago.edu/
See https://logeion.uchicago.edu/
Simpson 1996, 22–24 furnishes some considerations about nature and manner of text composition. The opinions of the Egyptological community differ and mostly refer to one decree—either the original text was written in Greek (because of a Ptolemaic government, Greek as official language, and the possible origin of the genre in Attic honorary decrees), or it was Egyptian (because of many details within religious aspects or special Egyptian knowledge). Up to now, the question of composition cannot be answered satisfactorily.
Barmpoutis, Bozia, and Wagman 2010.
Gallen, Eastop et al. 2015.
Amin, et al. 2018.
Barmpoutis, Bozia and Fortuna 2015.
A 3D model of the Rosetta Stone was scanned previously by the British Museum. See
The Leipzig Glossing Rules: Conventions for Interlinear Morpheme-by-Morpheme Glosses, ed. by the Department of Linguistics of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Bernard Comrie, Martin Haspelmath) and by the Department of Linguistics of the University of Leipzig (Balthasar Bickel),
Di Biase-Dyson, Kammerzell, et al. 2009 and Glossing Ancient Languages, Open access Wiki,
For this, see the project Coptic SCRIPTORIUM:
The project repository can be accessed at
See
See the material from the Humboldt Universität Berlin, Creation of a digital transliteration and translation (XML) with interlinear morphemic glossing (Leipzig Glossing Rules): The Rosetta Stone Online project, ed. by Daniel A. Werning, Eliese-Sophia Lincke,
We have shared our teaching experience at
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