The Mummy of Ani the scribe, lying on a bier, attended by Isis, Nephthys, Anubis, the four children of Horus, the ushabti figure, the Tet. (From the Papyrus of Ani, plates 33,34.
Inhale, exhale with the word Isis, and think Heal the World, as the flow begins to go out from my hands. Where you are is not important; Ive dons this rite while alone, with others, or even while driving.
The modern town of Rosetta (also known as Rashid) lies on the Mediterranean coast in the Nile Delta east of Alexandria. Here, in 1799 during the Napoleonic invasion, French engineers discovered a broken, inscribed basalt block. Following Nelsons victory over Napoleon at Aboukir Bay, the Rosetta Stone was seized and transported to London.
Linguists soon recognized the stone as a very important find. Its inscriptions represented the same text repeated in three different languages-a Middle Egyptian version written in hieroglyphs, a cursive Demotic version (the language spoken in Egypt during the Ptolemaic age), and a Greek version. All knowledge of the Egyptian hieroglyphic script had been lost centuries before when it was replaced by Arabic. Despite the abundance of hieroglyphs on Egyptian monuments, their meaning had eluded scholars. Since the Greek version on the Rosetta Stone could be read, the linguists realized that it might be possible to use this text as the key to deciphering the other two. Copies of the texts were circulated throughout Europe, and scholars set to work.
It was already known that the Egyptians wrote their royal names in a flattened ring, or cartouche. The French linguist Jean-Francois Champollion, identifying the cartouches in the Middle Egyptian inscription, was able to translate the name of Ptolemy by referring to the Greek inscription. This allowed him to start constructing and Egyptian alphabet. In 1822, Champollion reported that he had cracked the code-Egypts ancient texts could now be read.
In 1939, a further small group of six tombs was discovered under a temple courtyard at Tanis in the delta. Threee of the burials belonged to kings o f the Twenty-first and Twenty-second Dynasties. The French archaeologist, Pierre Montet, made little fuss about his find in the hope of not attracting the attention of robbers. But is was to no avail, for the early 1943, his storehouse was broken into and many of the smaller objects stolen. Much of this material appeared on the antiquities market, including bronze figureines from the burial of the pharaoh Psusennes and some of the jars which had contained internal organs of the mummies. The bodies themselves were not removed by the robbers and the remains were taken to Cairo.
