The Brooklyn Rail

Planar Vessels

When the Rosetta Stone was uncovered in the French-occupied port of el-Rashid in 1799, the first steps toward decipherment saw this ancient stele function as a printing matrix to transfer the text to paper, for distribution among scholars who would try to unravel the threads of meaning of ancient Egyptian writing. Today, the stone represents far more than a bilingual decree of an ancient king that helped to bridge us with the distant past (the hieroglyphic and demotic scripts of ancient Egypt were accompanied by the translation in Greek, the latter serving as the key to decoding the former).