Hello and welcome to the hieroglyph episode of Half as Interesting where I head to a museum
in Britain to talk to people from France about a language from Egypt to plug a game from
Canada.
Now, if it was 350 years ago and I showed you this, it would mean nothing, because 350
years ago, people really had no idea what Egyptian hieroglyphs meant.
Nowadays, you still probably don’t know what this means, unless you’re one of these
three people or me so I’ll spend the next three minutes going on tangents so I can turn
this into a video.
What you have to remember about Egypt is that it’s really, really old.
Cleopatra, for example, lived closer to the moon landings than to the building of the
Great Pyramids, and no, I definitely did not steal that fact from Reddit.
We’re not 100% sure where Hieroglyphs came from, but by the Ptolemaic period, about 300
to 1 BC, the written language had basically split into two—Hieroglyphic and Demotic.
Hieroglyphs had existed for centuries, but at this point they were mostly used by the
elites and rulers as a form of official writing.
Demotic was a much simpler writing system used by the common people, so most of the
population couldn’t even understand hieroglyphs.
At the same time, Alexander the Great had conquered Egypt so it was under Greek rule,
meaning that Greek was the official language.
Now, to the French, or more specifically, this Frenchman—Napoleon Bonaparte.
In 1798 Napoleon went to Egypt, headed to Rosetta, found this rock, and decided it was
his.
But then the British came, found it, decided it was theirs, and took it.
It was then brought to the British Museum in London, put on display, and then 200 years
later a bunch of game journalists and YouTubers had dinner around it.
The significance of the stone was that it had the same text in the three different writing
systems of Egypt— Hieroglyphic, Demotic, and Greek.
Hieroglyphic and Demotic text could not be understood, but Greek has been spoken and
written continuously for thousands of years meaning that this bottom section could be
easily translated.
And now for another frenchman—Jean-François Champollion.
Champollion started to try to translate the Rosetta Stone in 1808 but he wasn’t making
much progress because in the 5th century a guy named Horapollo wrote a book about hieroglyphs
which was basically completely wrong but, since he was old and dead, everyone assumed
he was right.
The main thing that book said was that hieroglyphs were ideographic, as in, each symbol represented
an idea rather than a spoken sound.
Mathematical signs, punctuation marks, and even emojis, for example, are ideographic
characters since they mean the same thing in every language and they don’t correlate
phonetically to spoken sounds.
Most of modern language, however, is phonetic where the symbols represent sounds that make
up the spoken words.
As it turns out, the hieroglyphic system is a mix of both.
The real breakthrough for Champollion came by looking at names.
Ptolemy, the king during the Rosetta Stone’s inscription, was Greek, so he didn’t have
an Egyptian name.
Therefore, in hieroglyphic text, his name was approximated phonetically.
So, since we know what his name sounds like in Greek, by comparing his Greek name and
Hieroglyphic name, Champollion was able to figure out what sounds the characters correlated
to.
That unlocked a huge part of the writing system and then, from there, researchers were able
to figure out much of the rest through context.
So what’s the Rosetta stone about?
Well, it’s ancient tax paperwork, and yet it still manages to be more readable than
a W-4 form.
But now, the reveal.
This hieroglyphic text translates to “Half as Interesting,” but not literally.
Despite our relative understanding of the language, there aren’t exact translations
for every English word.
And now for yet another Frenchman, but this one’s alive.
This means “half,” this means “as,” “but the problem was interesting.”
That’s Dominique Farout, professor of Egyptology at the Louvre.
What he did to translate “interesting” was phonetically spell “seba,” the Egyptian
word for learning.
Then, since “seba” is also the name of a star, he put the symbol for a papyrus which
means “idea” to clarify he’s not talking about the star.
Then, he slipped this symbol in here because it’s the logo of Assassin’s Creed.
“Funny, and it is protecting, so it will protect you, and then, a man, because there
is a man, here.”
That’s right Domonique, I am a man, but what we’re not sure about is exactly how
ancient Egyptian sounds.
Obviously, we have no recordings, so how it’s said today is just an educated guess, “iripat,
hatiar, imiranet, sarnisut, marira.”
We know roughly how the phonetic parts sound, but everything else is made up so speaking
today would sound like nonsense to an ancient Egyptian, “an ancient Egyptian would be
really astonished by my accent and many things,” (7:10) including the idea of a video game
having real educational value, or probably the idea of a video game at all I guess.
Assassins Creed Origins comes out the day after this video goes out and it’s a pretty
awesome game because they’ve completely and accurately recreated the entirety of Ptolemaic
Egypt so that you can kill pe…
I mean learn things.
I had a conversation with their dev team and it’s clear to me how much pride they take
in the historical accuracy.
They’re even releasing a special game-mode called “Discovery Tour” which essentially
turns the game into an interactive museum in ancient Egypt.
So, if you like history and seeming smart and video games and learning things and me,
make sure to check out the game with the link in the description.