SYSK Selects: How the Rosetta Stone Works
Stuff You Should Know- 1,319 views
- 1 Aug 2020
Sometimes providence smiles on historians. Thus is the case with the Rosetta stone, an ancient Egyptian tablet that served as the key for unlocking hieroglyphics, lost to time for a millennia. In this classic episode, learn about the international intrigue, rivalry to translate it and the luck that led to the founding of Egyptology.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers
What happens after an advice columnist signs off on our new show, Dear Therapists for My Heart Radio, we find out. I'm Lori Gottlieb from The Atlantic.
And I'm Gauguin's from Ted. And each week we sit down with a listener for a consultation. Then we ask them to come back on and tell us what happened. You can email us with your own dilemma at Lorean Guy at IHOP Media dot com.
Listen to dear therapists on Apple podcast, the I Heart Radio app, or wherever you get your podcasts. Everybody has a podcast, all right, every celebrity, everybody you knew in college, there are literally hundreds of thousands of podcasts out there and yeah, it's a bit of a mess.
I'm Nick Clock and my new show, Servant of Pod. We'll give you the most interesting and important stories in podcasting. And I'll tell you why you should care to listen to serve in a pod on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast.
Hey there, everyone, it's me, Josh. And for this week's spy case, selects chosen a 2013 episode, How the Rosetta Stone Works. It's kind of amazing, actually, that had it not been for this one government decree that happened to be written in a few different languages, we may never have figured out what the heck hieroglyphics mean and they would have been lost forever, including the culture that formed the basis of a significant portion of Western civilization.
So check it out.
How the Rosetta Stone works coming at you right now.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know. A production of ancient radios HowStuffWorks. Hey, and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Bryant, and this is stuff you should do, the overly hot studio edition. I have a bit of a chill. No, you don't. I do. I'm not at all hot. You also said it hurt when our new coworker shook your hand. So what does that say? That is a strong handshake.
OK, and you're always cold. It's all these lamps in here. Well, Jerry's decorated. It's nice. It is nice.
It's just like an IKEA catalog. That's right, Chuck. Yes.
How many times have you been to Egypt counting that trip in high school? Zero.
Same here. Yeah. And yet we know an awful lot about Egypt.
Yeah. It's popular, especially ancient Egypt.
Sure. Like, I would wager that we probably know more about ancient Egypt, the modern Egypt. Oh, yeah. Most people in the West. Yeah. Is there a modern Egypt? There is. And it's undergoing quite a bit of turmoil right now.
Yeah. No kidding. Um. Oh, OK. I just wanted to make sure that you knew that Egypt was still around.
Yes. OK, um, well, the reason that you and I know a lot about Egypt is thanks to a soft science, one of the humanities, you would call it, called Egyptology. Yeah. Pretty on the nose name for the study of ancient Egypt.
Yeah.
It's a real popular thing and has been for a while, a while, but not too terribly long, I would say, about the beginning of the 19th century. Yeah.
And the reason that all of it was fostered and all of it came about and that we, you and me know about Egypt was because of the discovery of a tablet known as the Rosetta Stone.
That's right. But you can also go back even further and make the case that if it wasn't for Napoleon Bonaparte, we may not understand Egypt to this day.
Yeah, that little guy, he wasn't that little, though, is that right? Right. He was average height. Right. What is what do people say that then where that come from?
Because some doctor wrote down, I think, upon his death that he was five foot two. But what a lot of people don't realize is that the doctor was using the French inch, which is longer than the British imperial inch, really. So when you translate five foot two from the French inch to the Imperial, it's six eight.
He was about five, six, OK, which is average height. And the other reason why he was called, like the little emperor by his armies was because compared to most of his bodyguards and his people he had around, I'm sure he was shorter than them.
Yeah, I guess when you're five, six, you want some six, four dudes around you. Right.
So but the idea that he was a very short man is is not correct.
Yeah, I always heard that, but I didn't know the story. The French inch. Mm hmm. There's your band name for the day. And, uh, although I typically don't like rhyming names, French Inch doesn't write.
It just it sounds similar. I wouldn't call it rhyme. French an inch. Yeah. French inch of the EMI. Yeah. That's nit picky. Well yeah.
It's the vowels that rhyme that the consonants. Yeah. But if you're a Steve Malkmus and you put French at the end of a line and at the end of another it would be, it would be Rimi but then you'd sell a lot of records.
That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Well there was our um pavement reference episode. That's becoming a daily thing too. Mm hmm. So you want to get on with this? Yeah, let's do it.
We're going to be talking Rosetta Stone, not the language software, which neither one of us has ever used. No, we're talking about the the real thing, which is actually bigger than I thought. You know, many things are smaller for me. Like when you see him in person. Mona Lisa, of course, Mona Lisa, small. I went to England. I was like Big Ben. And it's a big. Oh, really?
Yeah. I don't think I had the impression of Big Ben, but I was kind of underwhelmed.
It definitely didn't seem big, whereas the Eiffel Tower, that was bigger than I thought.
That is where I developed a fear of heights that still plagues me to this day. Like it literally happened to me on the Eiffel Tower on the way up. Never had a fear of heights my entire life on the way down, I like was hanging on to the fence, really. And it took me forever to get down because I was suddenly deathly afraid of it. Just hit me. All right.
My brain changed. And how old were you? Uh, seventeen ish. Wow. Yeah.
Um, I didn't go up to the top. I'm pretty messed up. I didn't either. It was the first level that got me. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, wow. All right. So, um, anyway, where was I going. Oh, it's bigger than I thought it was.
It is black basalt and it weighs about three quarters of a ton, um, forty six inches high, point five thirty inches wide and twelve inches deep. And it's large. It's heavy. It's. You didn't write this, did you? No, no, it's about the size of a heavy coffee table. Were you about to make fun of something? No, I was just going to say, whoever wrote this, you know, referenced in LCD TV of medium size.
Yeah. A medium screen LCD television. Oh, by the way, thank you to Theresa Dove fan request. OK, yeah. That's who requested this one. Yeah.
OK, so it's larger than I thought and I learned a lot about this. I thought the Rosetta Stone because I'm a dummy was literally like, here's what our alphabet is and here's what everything means. And now that you found it, you can decipher everything.
Yeah, I think I had the same impression as well until I read this. I thought it was like created as a key to hieroglyphics. Not at all. Not so. It was a government document. Basically, it's a Stella. Stella. Stella is the plural. Yeah. And it's not just the Egyptians that you. Stella. Stella. The Mayans have largely been figured out. Their language has from old Stella. Yeah, well, that's it.
Those are the two that use Stella.
Yeah.
In this case, it's an inscription carved in three different languages, Greek hieroglyphics and demotic with a T.. Not demonic. Yeah, demotic.
But since I'm from the south, I softened my teeth. So it might sound like I'm saying demonic. Yeah. Um, and basically it was in the three languages to ensure that everybody could read it because it was an official government decree. Not super exciting. No, no.
It wasn't basically what the Rosetta Stone says. And like you said, it's in three languages. There is a decree that says essentially that Ptolemy the Fifth is a great ruler and he is a righteous worshipper of all the right God. So he's OK in our book. Yeah. In this decree was made by some priests who gathered at Memphis and they inscribed the stone or had it inscribed and dated March 27th, 196 B.C.. Yeah, and it's not it doesn't actually say March 27th in hieroglyphics.
It says eighteen mushier, which on the Egyptian calendar translates to something like March twenty seven. And then they got the one because somewhere in there it references the ninth year of Ptolemy, the fifth reign. Right. Which is about one ninety six. So that's where they got the date from the what we would in the West equate it to.
Yeah. So like we said, it doesn't say anything of particular interest at the time. It was an important message, but it's not the Rosetta Stone because of what is transcribed upon that stone.
No, it's the fact that it's in three different languages. Exactly. Yeah. So there's like you said, hieroglyphics, demotic and Greek and hieroglyphics were a sacred alphabet. Yeah. They use that for really important stuff.
So I didn't know this either. I thought just any old thing they wanted to write was a hieroglyph.
No, that's what they had methodic for or demotic. That was kind of like an abbreviated shorthand, more vulgar version of hieroglyphics. Yeah, and in between that was hieratic, which was slightly more complicated than demonic, but less complicated and not sacred like hieroglyphics.
Yeah, it was kind of a transition between demotic and hieroglyphics. Yeah, it was cursive. Right. So you can so you could use hieratic for like a business transaction.
Sure. But if you were saying the king is a very righteous ruler and you mentioned the gods, you're going to use hieroglyphics. That's right. So to have it written in Greek demotic, which was an offshoot of hieratic, which is an offshoot of hieroglyphics. Yeah. And hieroglyphics, these priests that gathered and issued this decree that was written on the Rosetta Stone, they made sure that everyone in Egypt who is literate could read this one way or another.
Yeah.
And it was sort of a not a stroke of luck. I mean, it was just smart thinking at the time, but ended up being a stroke of luck because the three languages I mean, without that, I don't think we we may have never been able to figure out hieroglyphics. No. Agreed. And have been lost forever. Exactly.
And that's that's not the only way that the Rosetta Stone was kind of a bit of fortune. But, um, so the reason that it was lost was up until the fourth century A.D., any average Egyptian could have read the Rosetta Stone one way or another.
Yeah, but after that, the Egypt, it left the pharaonic stage. Yeah. Cleopatra was the last pharaoh of Egypt.
And then it came to be ruled by the Greeks later on, the Romans, the Ptolemy sites and a bunch of different foreigners or different groups. And with these groups came the introduction of new gods. Yeah. And the suppression of all gods. And since hieroglyphics were very much religious in nature, they are sacred or holy, but associated with those old gods hieroglyphics itself came to be cut off. Stop. Yeah, especially Christianity.
They tended to want to get rid of other competing gods and languages that are tied to those gods. All right.
But luckily we still had demotic. That's right. And demotic wasn't taboo. That eventually became what's known as Coptic and Coptic, used some Greek and then a little bit of still of the hieroglyphic symbols.
So there's still like this is just a little bit very tenuous link between Coptic and hieroglyphics. But then Coptic is lost. It's pushed out by Arabic. Yeah. And then that was like way gone. Goodbye, hieroglyphics.
That's it. That was like that hieroglyphics is no longer understood by anyone walking planet Earth. Yeah. And that means that all of the ancient Egyptian civilization itself was lost a thousand years aside from its structures.
Um, the the thought put into it, the reasoning behind it, all of the explanations, all the inscriptions, all the writing, all over these ancient buildings are understood by no one now and then. As a result of that, the buildings themselves, the last vestiges of this ancient civilization, are deconstructed and used for the next wave by new rulers. And so ancient Egyptian culture is lost to to the mists of time. Yeah. Wow. Thanks.
Very nice. Yeah, there was no love lost. They were basically like, we don't need this language anymore. We don't need these sacred buildings anymore. They're pagan anyway. Yeah.
Let's tear them all down, build up new ones. And oddly, the Rosetta Stone was actually used as a buttress in a wall of a new building. Yes. So part of the construction. Right. That's how this is another way. The this is all just stroke of luck. Of luck. So the first stroke of luck, as you pointed out, is that they just happened to decree that this thing be written in three languages. Yeah, OK.
Same message in three languages. Then it's used for a building.
A wall, right? Yeah. Then it happens to be discovered by some French who are marooned in Egypt because they got crushed by the British. Right. When they tried to invade.
Yeah, I guess let's talk about that first. OK, the French thought, hey, we need to we need to get a strong hold on India eventually. And Napoleon said, I think a good way to do that is to start a little further away and let's say Egypt, let's cut off the the Brits access to the Nile River, and that'll really help our cause. Unfortunately, the Brits had a great navy and pretty much destroyed all their ships and stranded them in Egypt.
What, 19 years? Yeah, yeah, and so for the French, whose ships were now at the bottom of Abu Kheir Bay, they decided that they really kind of needed to set themselves to creating forts.
Yeah, like since we're here. Right.
And it wasn't just military that was there part of this invasion, this strategy that Napoleon had come up with to take over Egypt was kind of a hearts and minds strategy, too. And so he created something called the Institute of Egypt, also known as the Scientific and Artistic Commission. Yeah, mineralogist mathematicians are historians. A lot of engineers, chemists, all like all of these people from the letters and sciences brought together to understand and study Egypt.
Yeah, they were actually given military rank, but they weren't. I think that was just more of a here. Just so we'll call you military. Right. Like they weren't from military backgrounds.
So there were thinkers, but they were among this invading force. Yeah. That was left stranded in France. So as the real military guys were building the forts, the people from the Institue Egypt start studying Egypt.
Yeah, I guess they're the first Egyptologists each. Yeah. Boy, that was close. They definitely were. And it was very covert operation. Like they weren't really allowed to talk about what they were doing that much except to just say, hey, we're following Napoleon's orders, acting on behalf of the good of the French republic. Right. That's what we're doing. Don't ask any questions. Yeah, that's what don't ask why I have this measuring tape out or why I'm transcribing things from papyrus.
But they did they did become, I guess, embedded with the local population as well to learn as much as they could. And so it's under this climate that a French soldier one day finds this very polished black stone that's inscribed and something about it told him that it was pretty important. So we took it to these early Egyptologists, the French, and said, you guys think this is important?
And they said, yes, yeah, that was Lieutenant Pierre Francois Bouchard. And he took it to his boss. And they they said, OK, this is weird that this is built into a wall, but it's clearly something of note. Yeah. And maybe we should take a closer look at it and immediately they start to get to work on trying to transcribe it super difficult at the time and would prove to be difficult over the years.
It eventually ended up in the hands of England, of course, but luckily these the Institute of Egypt people made copies of it.
Yeah, I think like etchings or plaster molds and things, I'm sure.
Yeah, but they had readable copies of the Rosetta Stone, so when they did give it up to the British, it wasn't entirely lost to them. That's right. And give it up as in not here have this. It was more like here we're taking this in the Treaty of Alexandria. We're going to take this in a bunch of other stuff.
So now basically you have the French and the British both have the Rosetta Stone, the one group that doesn't or the Egyptians. But we'll get to that later.
Yeah. Hi, guys, welcome to the. Last year, we are having a moment. Everybody has a podcast now, right? Every celebrity, everybody you knew in college, every family member at least once, there are literally hundreds of thousands of podcasts out there. Yeah, it's a bit of a mess. So I figured, what the heck, what's Woodmore? I'm Nick Quaff and my new show, Civita Pod, we'll give you the most interesting and important stories in podcasting.
We'll talk to producers, entertainers and journalists. We'll talk to bigwigs and we'll talk to independent creators. Servanda part. We'll give you a sense of what's happening in a growing world of podcasts and more importantly, why you should care. Listen to serve in a pod on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.
What happens when two therapists walk into a podcast and then hold people accountable for their advice? Hey, I'm Lori Gottlieb. I write the dear therapist advice column for The Atlantic, and I'm Guy, which I write the Dear Guy advice column for Ted. And we're the hosts of a new podcast from radio called Dear Therapist.
One of the most frustrating things for us as advice columnist is that afterward no one gets to hear how the advice worked out.
But on our show you will be guide people through a consultation and then have them come back and tell us what worked or didn't and what we can all learn from it.
I was raised in a generation where men didn't show emotion. I am not good at words, but going through it has helped me grow in that sense.
I've been dating a single dad for two years and his daughter, the six year old. She hates me for one minute and loves me 10 minutes later.
I don't want to lose sight of the negative feelings that I caused her.
I just hope that at some point you can forgive me if you'd like to walk into our podcast, email us with your dilemma at Lori and Guy at Hart Media Dotcom.
Listen to dear therapists on Apple podcasts, the I Heart radio app, or wherever you get your podcasts. Both of them recognize that this is a very, very important. Something, they know that it's some sort of decree. They recognize that it's in three different languages, and I think it becomes obvious to them that this could be the key to understanding hieroglyphs, which people have tried to understand. This is not new.
Now, people going back to a fellow named Rapallo who was a 5th century scholar, supposedly he may not have actually existed. Um, he created basically what was a translation for hieroglyphics. Right. But it was a false translation, as we'll see. But, you know, dating back basically from the moment that hieroglyphics were lost to history, people have tried to understand them. So these this this was the British and the French were aware of this. Like this may be the key to these mysterious hieroglyphics and this is important.
So we're going to try to translate it.
Yeah, well, it became a race, really, because they didn't like each other very much. And they both wanted to be the first ones to figure out what these hieroglyphics meant and how to unlock this history. And so they sent their best and the brightest on the English side. The British side was a scholar named Thomas Young. And then on the French side, we had Jean-François Champollion, who he was sort of born to do this. Apparently, he was way into Egypt as a kid even and as a young child said, I'm going to I'm going to figure out hieroglyphics one day.
Yeah. He was even called the Egyptian because he had dark skin and dark hair.
And I think a magician, like, foretold his fame one day. Yeah.
When he was born, supposedly Christian said this guy's going to be famous. And and he was and yeah, he was a very talented linguist. He studied under a guy named. Sylvester, the Sussie, yeah, Antoine, Isaach, Sylvester, D.R.C. He, um, who would take a crack at the Rosetta Stone, but he trained, uh, Champollion, is that how we're saying it?
Oh, yeah, sure. He trained him, but Champollion quickly became went from student to master. He applied for he applied to be a student at an institute in Paris, and they were impressed enough with his application that they said, how about you just skip the school part and come be on the faculty?
That's pretty good.
Yeah, that's a talented linguist. Yeah, they said the same thing when I applied to Georgia. Is that right? You just want to go and be an English teacher? Yeah. Oh, really? You turned down, huh? Sure. I want to be a student. Oh, gotcha. So before all this happens, we have the Greek inscription transcribed, which that was Reverend Stephen Watson in 1882. And I don't want to say it was no big deal, but there were quite a few people that could have done this.
It wasn't like unlocking hieroglyphics. No, but it was a necessary part of the process. Right. So we want to give him his due.
So we have a we have a translation, an accurate translation of what the the stone says.
Exactly. So that's step one. And if you have one translator, then if you're a linguist, I guess I mean, it sounds really difficult to do to I mean, it's I can't imagine the painstaking. Process of figuring out an alphabet? Yeah, I mean, I think about how hard it is to translate a well-known language into a language that you speak. Imagine translating a language that's totally lost into something understandable. Yeah.
Um, so we had the Greek and then eventually we had the demotic as well. Yeah. Thanks to this one. Yeah. Antwaan and that same year, at the same time, a Swedish diplomat named Uecker Ballard also translated the demotic and they both went about it two different ways. I thought this is pretty interesting. Yeah. So D.R.C. figured out that there were two proper names, at least in their Ptolemy and Alexander, and he used those to match up sounds and symbols.
Um, oxblood probably had the bigger breakthrough. Yeah, he used a different technique. He recognized that there was something similar between demotic and Coptic. Yeah. And he was well schooled in Coptic. Right. Which helped obviously. Yeah.
That was his big breakthrough. He figured out what words spelled Love Temple in Greek and he used that to form basically this rough structure for demotic based on his awareness of Coptic.
Yeah, that's only 11 letters. It's pretty impressive. Yeah.
But I mean, if you've got 11 letters, that's a decent I think they call it a skeletal outline. I guess that's what you'd have.
Well yeah. I mean especially since Coptic was only, what, 22 plus a couple more from hieroglyphics.
Yeah. It's like a big Wheel of Fortune game. Yes. After that. Right. So the thing is, though, this established connection now between Coptic and demotic and then demonic and hieroglyphics and so side by side that kind of opened up this mentality that would be needed to finally crack the hieroglyphics for for the Rosetta Stone. And Thomas Young was the first to really try it.
He was the British guy and he got somewhat far, but he gave up. Yeah. He in 1814, his big breakthrough was figuring out what a cartouche was. Yeah. And that is it's they say oval, but it's a little more squared away with round edges, but it's a loop basically with hieroglyphic characters in it. And he figured out that these are not only proper names but royal names. Anything contained in a cartouche is a royal name, which was a big breakthrough because he identified Ptolemy, the pharaoh's name in one of the cartouches.
Yeah, Cartouche cartouches cartouches and his queen, Barrenechea, was in there as well. So he said, you know what, again, I've got these two names now to work with. Um, but he was still working on her Apollos false premise that hieroglyphics was not phonetic in nature and that it was based just on symbols. Right.
That's what her upclose big contribution was, to confuse a century's worth of scholars.
So bad for Young because he was on to something. And if he wasn't using that, the fake or not fake, but just the poor system than he might have figured it out. Right.
So this is the thing like everyone believed for Rapallo, because Rapallo claimed that his translation was a direct translation from Hieroglyphic. It was written in the 5th century A.D. right around the time we lost hieroglyphics. So it was considered to be a primary source and basically completely reasonable. Yeah, but it was wrong. It was wrong because it said that hieroglyphics are symbolic. So, like, if you see a cart, a picture that looks like a cart next to a cat and then a lizard, what that should say under her upclose translation is Kaat Cat Lizard.
This kept throwing everybody off because it didn't make sense, especially right, especially when compared to the Greek translation in the translation of demotic, it didn't make any sense whatsoever. So like you said, John gave up, but he published his findings. And you can really strongly make a case that had it not been for Yong's breakthrough, Champollion would not have cracked the Rosetta Stone. No.
Which we should mention here, that, like, they should just accept each other as his co-workers and colleagues and get along.
But there was a competition that exists to this day of who what country claims they translated the Rosetta Stone. The French still say that champion was really the one. Yeah, the Brits obviously say now it was really young. And even when they displayed it in 1972, the one of the few times it's left England or maybe the only time they let France display it for like a year, they argued about the size of the photos of the two on both sides of it, when in fact the photos were the same size of Young and Champollion and not photos, but portraits.
Portraits. Yeah, yeah. But the French were like, well, no, Young's is bigger. The Brits are like, no, his is bigger. Right. And they're the same size. So they were really just they never came to common ground on who did it when in fact they both did. And there were rumors apparently during that time that France is going to just steal the Rosetta Stone and keep it not to turn it back to England.
This is the 1970s, so it's not like a long time ago. Right. So Champollion picked up in 1814 where Young left off and started to think, you know what, I need to think more about this this symbol thing that Rapallo like. I don't know if he was on base after all.
And that was actually the breakthrough.
He he got some old cartouches and he figured out that the last two letters and one of them were identical. So that's a good thing because, you know, it's the same letter. He figured out that it was the letter s and then the first character was a circle.
And he said, maybe that's the son. Right. And in ancient Egypt, the son God was RA in Coptic. Yeah. And so basically figured out that that name was Ramses. Yeah. And that was a huge breakthrough. He figured out the identical letters. The last two were S's, first one was raw. And since he knew that it was in a cartouche that it was a royal name. Yeah. From that era, the only person it could have been was Ramses.
So that's how he cracked the code like you say. Yeah.
And cracked it in like, hey, this is a phonetic thing. He was wrong the whole time and apparently he fainted on the spot. Yeah. Which is dramatic. Yeah. Kind of cute. He was French. Sure.
Um, so out of that moment Egyptology was fully born like now we had a way to understand all the stuff that hadn't been destroyed and used as building material, which took a long time though it wasn't like they could just read it.
It still took a lot of translating. Oh yeah. But they had the basis. Exactly. Um, yeah. All they done is transcribe one single Stella. They had millennia worth of things to like papyrus is and or papyri and building inscriptions and sarcophagi and all the love letters.
Yeah. Whatever you know for sure.
And so Egyptology is born and now that it's understood at that moment, there's also a great desire to protect Egypt and all of its treasures.
Yeah. And to get things right. Because previous to that, Napoleon and Guang did a pretty good job. But they also speculated a lot. Yeah. Because they couldn't read hieroglyphics. Yeah.
So they ended up correcting a lot of things about what they thought about Egypt and. Like you said, they wanted to protect things because Egypt at the time was I mean, they were selling these things off to collectors left and right because they didn't know their true value. And, B, there was a market for it.
Sure, doctors during the Middle Ages who were just big dummies would use mummies from Egypt. They grind it up and use it to cure disease, which didn't work.
And so there was this move to protect. Egyptian antiquities from Egyptians, there was kind of this patriarchal mentality, especially among the British, that we need to get everything out of Egypt and into museums and into the hands of us who will preserve them and not sell them to middle age or middle Middle Ages doctors. Yeah, for cure alls. But to his credit, in my opinion, Champollion argued very strongly in favor of keeping them in founding a museum in Egypt to store these keeping them in Egypt.
Yeah, I think he was a little bit of a control freak, like he knew that he could care for things in the proper way. And I don't think he trusted even other museums at the time to care for things in the right way. And he was kind of right because a lot of it was destroyed. Yeah.
Like apparently to preserve an ancient papyrus, you have to store it in a low humidity area. Yeah. In a chamber and in a bamboo box container. Yeah. And they didn't know this and they shipped them by sea to the UK and they all like crumbled the nothingness on the way.
Tummy's um. Yeah.
So the Rosetta Stone still sits in the museum in London where it's been since 1882, except for the time it went to France briefly. And in 2003, Egypt was like, you know what, I want this thing back. Not I we want this thing back and it's ours, and I don't care who found it, it's ours. And England said in two thousand five, took him two years to build a replica and say, hey, how about this?
This is just like it. I guess at least they didn't try to pass it off as the real one. Well, yeah, that's true. Um, send him a replica and they're like, I appreciate this. This is nice, but we really would like the real thing. And England said no, and not just England, but a lot of the big museums, the Louvre and a bunch of the world museums kind of all got together in support of one another and said, you know what repayed repatriation is?
We're not into it. So we're just not going to give things back anymore because we can care for it best. It belongs to the world now. And they just sort of banded together and said, we're keeping our stuff crazy.
And that's, I think, where it's probably going to stay.
They are trying to get it for a. I think in 2012, they tried to get it for the grand opening of the Grand Egypt Museum, sounds like it didn't happen, but even then they said no, no, they'd want it for like three weeks. And they said. Under the guise of I don't know if it's guys, but they said it'd be too dangerous to transport it. That's the story they have at least.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Huh. So that's how museums work. You no pillage and deny, pillage and deny, um, you anything else?
No, sir. That is the Rosetta Stone. Everybody, if you want to learn more about it, you should type that word. Those words are Rosetta Stone in the search for HowStuffWorks and it will bring up this article. And since I said search bar, it means it's time for a message from. Made by Women is a new show brought to you by the Seneca Women Podcast Network and I Heart Radio.
At a moment when businesses face some of the biggest challenges in recent history. We bring you inspiring stories, practical insights and shared learnings to help you successfully navigate today's environment.
Benefit from the experiences of legendary entrepreneurs, fierce up and comers, as well as everyday women in business who have found success their own only. Whether you're looking to start a new business, Hibbett, an existing one, or expand with an eye to the future made by women, gives you the inspiration, expertise and hard won lessons you need to make it happen. Consider it your real world NBA design for the new now I'm Kim Mazzarelli and you can listen to Made by Women on the I Heart Radio Apple podcasts, wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to At Home with Meggan. This show is all about me being home from.
My first guest is my cat bear. Hey, Bear. So Bear, did you knock over my cereal bowl this morning?
Because I feel like I smell the old milk on your tail earlier while being home.
You may get bored and be tempted to make a podcast. Don't instead listen to one of ours. I hired radio over 300000 podcasts.
Now, Chuck, it's time for listener e-mail. Oh, no.
How about instead administrative details? OK. All right, for those of you who don't know, this is at the point where we read off the people who were nice enough to send us little gifts and trinkets and music and letters and all sorts of things. And here we go. Go ahead. All right. Sarah sent us some cool graphic prints, one of which was You can't take the sky from me, from one of my favorite shows, Firefly.
Yeah, very cool Prince. Uh, Amy sent us the lovely carved wooden cicada from timber greenwoods. Yeah. Yeah, it's very cool. And McDonough sent us a Snoopy postcard and a handwritten letter of thanks. Very nice.
Uh, Liz from New Zealand sent us a lot of stuff. That's New Zealand candy, New Zealand chocolates, New Zealand ships, surfboard postcard, really lovely framed photos from her dad, Rudy Goldstein, photography on Facebook. Uh, it's our Goldstein photography, so check it out. Yeah, it's very cool. I have those on my desk, um, Sean and Tony Aksenov, some custom Vinals, some stickers from eight one one graphics dotcom. He and his brother.
Yeah. And this company is cool stuff like skater style stuff, but, um, buy costumes dot com at beauti costumes dot com, send us a full size adult gremlin costume which Ben bowling or all day yesterday in the office. All I here. Yeah I've been and from stuff they don't want you know, in car stuffies. Where did you see that. You emailed me. They did that. Did you actually see that. I haven't seen the picture of them.
Yeah. I put on the hand one day and tried to creep out Strickland but he was like that's not the first Kremlin hand I've had on my shoulder.
Uh, Khateeb. Megan. Oh yeah. Sent a cat t.P my way because I have two cats and, uh, my big boy Lauren gets in it. Now we call the Spirit Tent and he just hangs out in there and, uh, it's pretty neat. I mean, it's what you think. It's just like a little small tip for your kitty. That's very cute. So if you have a cat, I would suggest you buying one.
Um, let's see. Susan sent you a birthday card at the dog drinking beer. Yeah. Yeah, that's nice. Yeah. Well, uh, Kelam Clark's in some T-shirts, um, and he is a handyman in Brooklyn and he gifted us two hours of handyman work. Oh, nice to give to someone we know in Brooklyn, in Brooklyn that very, really cool. So I've actually texted our buddy Joe NDR said, hey, you need any work done?
We have two, three hours of handyman work. So if you're in Brooklyn, you can go to not just handyman dotcom and, uh, give him a call. He'll fix your sink or do whatever you need around the house, I guess. What's he going to do for Joe? I don't know. Joe didn't respond. Well, we'll go to Hodgeman next, I guess, and just work our way up with all the Hodgeman he can afford to pay people.
You should give it like someone else.
OK, I'll figure it out. Uh, Clive Fennessy gave us some really cool Panama Canal postcards.
Yeah, those are neat. Yeah. Uh, Rachel from Uber, have you heard of Uber to sort of like a taxi cab service now? Oh, yeah, but it's town cars and I have an app and you can like, say, just come get me now, right. Yeah. Umu tell me about that. Yeah. They sent us Uber gift cards um and I will send you your gift code for us also like a hundred bucks and free.
Oh thanks a lot. I know somebody is going to be going to the airport for free. Yeah.
Uh, Kristen Curran has been taking us along with her on a tour of Europe. It seems like you got postcards from her from Edinburgh Brugge, Amsterdam, Slovakia, Berlin, all over the place. Yeah. So thanks for those. Um, we also got something from Threadless self design t shirt, Big Foot cradling an alien Loch Ness Monster is in the background. Yeah, there was also like men in black and an abduction going on, all sorts of stuff.
Very cool. And then Kira Aneurin sent the wife some jewelry. Um, and you can visit her store. Thank you very much. Keyer at, um, Cariboo classic Etsy Dotcom. So that's that's our administrative details for now, right? Yeah. Part one. We'll have a part to get on the next episode. Yes, we will, but we'll cover music and books. Nice. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at Suay České podcast.
You can join us on Facebook dot com slash stuff you should know and you can join us at our home on the web stuff you should know dot com.
Stuff you should know is a production of radios HowStuffWorks for more podcasts, My Heart radio, because the radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Made by Women is a new show brought to you by the Seneca Women Podcast Network and I Heart Radio, we bring you inspiring stories and shared learnings to help you successfully navigate today's environment, benefit from the experiences of legendary entrepreneurs as well as everyday women in business who have found success their own way.
Consider it your real world MBA designed for the new.
Now I'm Kim Mazzarelli and you can listen to Made by Women on the I Heart radio app Apple podcasts.
Wherever you listen to your favorite shows, you're listening to the Meditating with Melissa podcast. I'm your host, Melissa. Today we're going to focus on getting rid of anxiety by bringing awareness into the present moment. The beauty of the present moment is that there are infinite things to notice. You notice your body resting while being home.
You may get bored and be tempted to make a podcast. Don't instead listen to one of ours. I heart radio over 300000 podcasts.