New book tells the tale of the Rosetta Stone

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iguanamon
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New book tells the tale of the Rosetta Stone

Postby iguanamon » Fri Oct 22, 2021 3:12 pm

This morning, I read this article in the New York Times about a new book detailing the story of how the Rosetta Stone was decoded.
NYT- Joshua Hammer- The 20-Year Contest to Crack the Code of the Rosetta Stone wrote:THE WRITING OF THE GODS
The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone
By Edward Dolnick
Edward Dolnick’s “The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone” is an engrossing account of the 20-year competition that followed. A former science writer for The Boston Globe and the author of books about Isaac Newton and a Dutch art forger who duped the Nazis, Dolnick here conjures up another intricate intellectual caper. With its thrilling dissection of the decoding process, it calls to mind Margalit Fox’s “The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code” (2013), about three scholars who deciphered Linear B, the 3,400-year-old script excavated from the ruins of Crete’s Minoan civilization. Like Fox, Dolnick exuberantly captures the frustrations and triumphs of scholars as they puzzle out the meaning of long-dead runes, “seduced by tantalizing clues and then careening into dead ends and losing hope, but then spotting new markers and dashing off jubilantly once more.”

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sirgregory
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Re: New book tells the tale of the Rosetta Stone

Postby sirgregory » Tue Oct 26, 2021 4:48 pm

When they taught us about the Rosetta Stone in school I had the misimpression that the process of deciphering Egyptian was a piece of cake once they had a translated text. It wasn't until later I realized it was a decades-long effort.

Some other books people might like,

The Decipherment of Linear B, John Chadwick
Breaking the Maya Code, Michael Coe
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JLS
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Re: New book tells the tale of the Rosetta Stone

Postby JLS » Tue Oct 26, 2021 6:11 pm

I seriously thought that this was going to be about the software.

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Re: New book tells the tale of the Rosetta Stone

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Wed Oct 27, 2021 5:33 pm

sirgregory wrote:When they taught us about the Rosetta Stone in school I had the misimpression that the process of deciphering Egyptian was a piece of cake once they had a translated text. It wasn't until later I realized it was a decades-long effort.

Some other books people might like,

The Decipherment of Linear B, John Chadwick
Breaking the Maya Code, Michael Coe

Funny, cause I had the same misimpression about the decipherment.
I endorse the two book recommendations, as well.
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