Pursuit recently published an article concerning the luckiest fiends of ancient history. I've filtered out the Hellenic ones for you.
Dr Brent Davis: The Rosetta Stone
The story of the Rosetta Stone starts with Napoleon Bonaparte, who invaded Egypt in 1798 on one of his many campaigns to become master of the world.
In 1799, a group of French soldiers working near the town of Rosetta in the Nile Delta tore down an ancient Egyptian wall so they could use the stones to repair a French fort. One of these stones was the Rosetta Stone, an inscribed slab of granite now in the British Museum.
The stone is inscribed in three different scripts: the top section is in full hieroglyphs, the middle section is in Demotic (a cursive form of hieroglyphs), and the bottom section is in Greek which, of course, could easily be read.
Scholars quickly realised that the stone contains the same text written three times, once in each script.
Everyone saw that this stone might unlock the secret of hieroglyphs—as indeed it did. In 1822, the brilliant French scholar Jean-François Champollion made a major breakthrough in deciphering the hieroglyphic portion, giving birth to the modern field of Egyptology.
Professor Louise Hitchcock: Linear A and B
One of the last frontiers in the discovery and decipherment of ancient texts are the Aegean scripts Linear A and Linear B. These are the scripts of the Minoan, Cypriot and Mycenaean civilisations of ancient Greece – Homer’s Age of heroes.
The decipherment of Linear B, an early form of Ancient Greek preserved mostly on clay tablets, was dramatically announced in a famous 1952 radio announcement on the BBC by architect and war time codebreaker, Michael Ventris.
As a fourteen-year-old, young Ventris had heard Sir Arthur Evans – the discoverer of the Knossos palace on Crete fabled as the home of the Minotaur – present a lecture on the Linear B texts, and made it his lifetime dream to decipher it.
Linear B dates to the era of Mycenaean palaces around 1500 to 1200 BCE, and pushes the study of classical languages back into the Bronze Age, the time before the Trojan war.
However, these are not texts recording events or deeds by famous people. Rather they are temporary administrative palace documents consisting of allocations of goods or labour to the likes of smiths, temples, ships, cloth workers, and chariot makers. They give us valuable insights into the structure of the Mycenaean political system, as well as trade, manufacturing, and the economy.
But the language written in the earlier Linear A script is yet to be deciphered.
It originated on Crete initially as a hieroglyphic or pictographic script around 1900 to 1700 BCE and is preserved on clay tablets, stone libation tables, gold jewellery and even on magic bowls inscribed with octopus ink.
So far, we simply haven’t discovered enough Linear A to decipher it, which means archaeologists and codebreakers continue to dream of cracking it.
Dr James H.K.O. Chong-Gossard: Sappho’s poems
“My knees, that were once swift for the dance like little fawns, do not carry me. I lament this often, but what can I do? To be ageless when one is mortal, is not possible.” So writes the incomparable ancient Greek poetess Sappho in the late 7th century BCE in the “Tithonus poem”, a gem of only twelve lines that speaks to us across centuries of the sadness of ageing.
But fragments of the poem had long been lost, including these beautiful lines, and it is only because of a material similar to papier-mâché that they have been preserved for publication in 2004.
Sappho’s poetry highlights the agelessness of human feeling. Picture: ‘Sappho and Alcaeus’ by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema/Wikipedia
The original fragments of the poem had survived on papyri from 2nd to the 3rd century CE Roman Egypt, and had been unearthed at Oxyrhynchus in the early 20th century.
But, in 2002, the Cologne Papyrus Collection acquired from a private collector papyri that preserved the rest of Sappho’s poem.
These missing fragments had survived as “cartonnage” – a hard material comprising papyri, linen and plaster that was used in ancient times as book covers and mummy cases.
Another rediscovered Sappho poem first published in 2014, the “Brothers Poem,” was similarly preserved in cartonnage and was only uncovered when the papyrus fragments were separated by dissolving the cartonnage in warm water.
Some 2,600 years ago, Sappho lamented that people cannot be ageless, but the continual re-discovery of her words is proving the agelessness of her poetry.
The story of the Rosetta Stone starts with Napoleon Bonaparte, who invaded Egypt in 1798 on one of his many campaigns to become master of the world.
In 1799, a group of French soldiers working near the town of Rosetta in the Nile Delta tore down an ancient Egyptian wall so they could use the stones to repair a French fort. One of these stones was the Rosetta Stone, an inscribed slab of granite now in the British Museum.
The stone is inscribed in three different scripts: the top section is in full hieroglyphs, the middle section is in Demotic (a cursive form of hieroglyphs), and the bottom section is in Greek which, of course, could easily be read.
Scholars quickly realised that the stone contains the same text written three times, once in each script.
Everyone saw that this stone might unlock the secret of hieroglyphs—as indeed it did. In 1822, the brilliant French scholar Jean-François Champollion made a major breakthrough in deciphering the hieroglyphic portion, giving birth to the modern field of Egyptology.
Professor Louise Hitchcock: Linear A and B
One of the last frontiers in the discovery and decipherment of ancient texts are the Aegean scripts Linear A and Linear B. These are the scripts of the Minoan, Cypriot and Mycenaean civilisations of ancient Greece – Homer’s Age of heroes.
The decipherment of Linear B, an early form of Ancient Greek preserved mostly on clay tablets, was dramatically announced in a famous 1952 radio announcement on the BBC by architect and war time codebreaker, Michael Ventris.
As a fourteen-year-old, young Ventris had heard Sir Arthur Evans – the discoverer of the Knossos palace on Crete fabled as the home of the Minotaur – present a lecture on the Linear B texts, and made it his lifetime dream to decipher it.
Linear B dates to the era of Mycenaean palaces around 1500 to 1200 BCE, and pushes the study of classical languages back into the Bronze Age, the time before the Trojan war.
However, these are not texts recording events or deeds by famous people. Rather they are temporary administrative palace documents consisting of allocations of goods or labour to the likes of smiths, temples, ships, cloth workers, and chariot makers. They give us valuable insights into the structure of the Mycenaean political system, as well as trade, manufacturing, and the economy.
But the language written in the earlier Linear A script is yet to be deciphered.
It originated on Crete initially as a hieroglyphic or pictographic script around 1900 to 1700 BCE and is preserved on clay tablets, stone libation tables, gold jewellery and even on magic bowls inscribed with octopus ink.
So far, we simply haven’t discovered enough Linear A to decipher it, which means archaeologists and codebreakers continue to dream of cracking it.
Dr James H.K.O. Chong-Gossard: Sappho’s poems
“My knees, that were once swift for the dance like little fawns, do not carry me. I lament this often, but what can I do? To be ageless when one is mortal, is not possible.” So writes the incomparable ancient Greek poetess Sappho in the late 7th century BCE in the “Tithonus poem”, a gem of only twelve lines that speaks to us across centuries of the sadness of ageing.
But fragments of the poem had long been lost, including these beautiful lines, and it is only because of a material similar to papier-mâché that they have been preserved for publication in 2004.
Sappho’s poetry highlights the agelessness of human feeling. Picture: ‘Sappho and Alcaeus’ by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema/Wikipedia
The original fragments of the poem had survived on papyri from 2nd to the 3rd century CE Roman Egypt, and had been unearthed at Oxyrhynchus in the early 20th century.
But, in 2002, the Cologne Papyrus Collection acquired from a private collector papyri that preserved the rest of Sappho’s poem.
These missing fragments had survived as “cartonnage” – a hard material comprising papyri, linen and plaster that was used in ancient times as book covers and mummy cases.
Another rediscovered Sappho poem first published in 2014, the “Brothers Poem,” was similarly preserved in cartonnage and was only uncovered when the papyrus fragments were separated by dissolving the cartonnage in warm water.
Some 2,600 years ago, Sappho lamented that people cannot be ageless, but the continual re-discovery of her words is proving the agelessness of her poetry.
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