Academic order was turned on its head, all because somebody found an old stone! You probably thought Egyptologists were above politics, happily translating their hieroglyphics as per the early nineteenth-century Rosetta Stone interpretations. But sadly, no!
Although not widely reported, except within archaeological journals, there was the quite serendipitous, 1942 discovery of the missing upper half of the Rosetta. Rommel’s tank divisions were bogged in the eastern Egyptian sands. A dozer, helping to extract the behemoths, nudged a rock – and away went the accepted modus operandi – fluttering feistily off into the Khamaseen winds.
One rogue archaeologist, Herr Bertie Heinrich did the hard yards, locked away inside Berlin’s Egyptian Museum for several years. Heinrich’s eventual paper declared that the original Rosetta translations, done by the British at the turn of the nineteenth century, and refined by the French twenty years later, had got it wrong. You can imagine the smouldering irritation, academic indignation, nationalistic fervour, and the coup delivered to remnant members of the Third Reich.
Let me briefly remind you that the Stone had already been at the centre of international controversy. It had become one of Napoleon’s forfeitures, following his defeat, by the British, in the 1802 Egyptian Campaign. For nearly 150 years, French academics were refused access to the British Museum.
While no one was doubting the general veracity and significance of the ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Demotic scripts to archaeology, there emerged a thorny problem surrounding the interpretations. Academic traditionalists held that the stone revealed the decree of the Divine Cult of Pharaoh, Ptolemy V. Our German friend contended that this was an incomplete interpretation.
Heinrich argued that the upper half of the Stele explained in great detail the ritualised role of the Inner Temple priests, their duties, in the event of the Pharoah’s death, a duty to protect the holiest Temple rituals, if political instability ever threatened. There were also details of a curse surrounding the Stone, promising a grizzly demise upon any intruding infidels. The academic establishment, of course, dismissed any suggestion of a Divine Cult.
Heinrich wrote in great detail of his reading from the Stone about the embalming of Ptolemy’s father, presumably written as a guide for those to come. There were intricate explanations of how the body was to be drained of fluid, the herbs and spices to be used in the replacement elixir. There was another warning to the operatives, to anticipate and prepare for the viscosity likely to be encountered in removing the brain tissue and the larger internal organs.
The Germans, defeated in 1945, quietly revelled in the controversy surrounding this academic squabble. Papers were written, countered, and press releases appeared in the mainstream media supporting one perspective, over the other.
But by the ’60s, animosities had softened, the French were back researching at the British Museum, UK Egyptologists were accessing Berlin. Then disaster. Both sections of the Stone disappeared. Three researchers vanished as well, and were subsequently found dead, in fact, mummified at the British Museum, their bodies neatly secreted into a sarcophagus. Another two deaths were reported from Berlin!