My personal Rosetta Stone

For as long as I can remember, I've been fascinated by the Rosetta stone, and the first chance I got, I made a point of seeing it. Now I look in on it every time I visit the British Museum.

Praising Pharaoh in Greek and Egyptian, the tablet is inscribed in three alphabets. Dating back to 196 BCE, the stone was found in 1799 in Rashid (Rosetta), a village on the Nile delta.

Deciphering the words on the stone was something language scholars puzzled over for a long time. The riddle was solved by Jean-Francois Champollion in 1822. He used his knowledge of Greek and Coptic, related to the demotic Egyptian on the stone, and managed to decipher the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Not surprisingly, the image of the Rosetta Stone was made use of for commerce, as the  name of a computerized language learning program. Years ago we put a Rosetta stone jigsaw puzzle together, and once I brought my daughter a silk scarf in the same pattern. When I visited the British Museum this past spring and saw a watch strap bearing the same symbols, I got that too. This time, the keepsake was mine.

I was wearing that watch when I attended a talk given by Professor Thomas Grieve through the Graduate Liberal Studies department at Simon Fraser Harbour Centre a few weeks ago. Tom Grieve's seminar concerned a trio of poems by Eliot,Yeats and Pound. Because I remembered the poems from my years as a young undergrad in English Literature, I was curious. Would the experience of the intervening years have improved my understanding of those poems? What more could I learn about them?

Strangely, in the course of discussing the poetry, Grieve made reference to the Rosetta Stone, and checked to confirm whether the people around the table were aware of its significance. My moment had come. I raised my arm, pulled back my sleeve to reveal the hieroglyphics on my wrist.