“Characters are the most important and dominant carrier of civilization!”, The reason why there is no fault in the ancient Chinese civilization is that among the four ancient civilizations in the world, there has never been a fault in writing, and China is the only one.
The history of ancient Egypt also has a long history and is mysterious. However, the fault of more than 1000 years of writing has made many ancient Egyptian history and culture “riddles”.
At the beginning of the 19th century, a war made a mysterious ancient Egyptian stone tablet “reappear in the sky”. Archaeologists conducted a detailed study on this, and believed that if the “character code” of this stone tablet could be broken, it would be of inestimable significance to the study of ancient Egyptian history and culture.
Unfortunately, over the next 20 years, Western scholars have been “looking at this stone tablet and sighing”. Finally, a French scholar who has made in-depth research on Oriental languages found the key to cracking in Chinese.
01 Rosetta Stele
Many mysteries of ancient Egypt, whether books or movies, let future generations see a mysterious ancient Egyptian civilization, pyramids, mummies and other mysterious products that are difficult to explain with science, and even people associate them with aliens.
For hundreds of years, the ancient Egyptian culture has been a hot research direction for scholars of history, archaeology and culture. However, because the ancient Egyptian culture had more than 1000 “historical ambiguity periods”, it also led to a variety of mysterious legends in that long history.
In the war of Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt in 1799, when a French officer was digging a military fortification, a black stone tablet engraved with three strange characters surprised the whole French army.
In the eyes of the French at that time, Egypt itself was a mysterious and ancient land. The unexpected discovery of this black stone tablet made the officer instinctively think that this was an “extraordinary historical moment”, which soon attracted Napoleon’s attention.
Soon, Napoleon ordered the stone tablet, which was later named Rosetta, to be transported to France. In addition, France has organized an archaeological scientific research team of more than 100 people in a short time. However, these western scholars, using a series of methods such as the ancient Greek language, could not understand what the three characters in the stone tablet represented.
02 Chinese language scholar Shang Boliang
After the defeat of France in the Anglo French War, this stone tablet also became a “subordinate exhibit” of the British Museum.
However, unfortunately, no matter the former French scholars or later British scholars, there has been no progress in cracking the character code of the stone tablet. Until the emergence of the French historical linguist Shang Boliang.
Shang Boliang has deep attainments in many ancient languages. Since he was young, he has been full of interest in languages, especially in Oriental languages.
Shang Boliang was born in a family with a strong learning atmosphere. He is very lucky. His family education has given him a wealth of knowledge.
Shang Boliang’s later high attainments in ancient languages are inseparable from his childhood family learning environment. His brother is a linguist and archaeologist.
And for Shang Boliang, his brother is the most important language and archaeology teacher in his life. At the age of 11, Shang Boliang’s talent in language surprised his brother. He decided that his brother would become the glory of the family.
03 Cracked key
Shang Boliang has an extraordinary talent in ancient languages. An important reason is that he has a strong self-learning ability. At the age of 13, he can master more than a dozen ancient languages through learning.
From Shang Boliang’s life experience, it seems not strange that he could decipher the Rosetta Stone Tablet, because in his life, his biggest goal has always been to study Egyptian culture, and many of his studies seem to be based on Egyptian culture. Similarly, he studied ancient Chinese, and he also tried to find the idea of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs through ancient Chinese hieroglyphs.
It is precisely because Shang Boliang has a good understanding and research of ancient Chinese hieroglyphs. When he was studying the Rosetta Stone Tablet, he thought that since the ancient Greek and other western language systems can not play a role in unlocking the secrets of the stone tablet, it is necessary to find another way.
Therefore, after long-term research, he found that a row of “graphic characters” in the three characters in the stone tablet was very similar to the pictographs in ancient Chinese. Combining the phonological, ideographic and radical expressions in ancient Chinese, and many skills in “translating ancient Chinese pictographs”, he finally made a major breakthrough.
In the next 21 years, he has been using the language learning thinking of ancient Chinese to decipher this stone tablet, and at the same time, he has not given up his study of ancient Chinese.
On the one hand, to unlock the Rosetta Stone Tablet requires knowledge of ancient Chinese; on the other hand, Shang Boliang is increasingly interested in ancient Chinese.
Of course, Shang Boliang also shared that because of the differences in history and culture, ancient Egyptian and ancient Chinese hieroglyphs will also create characters according to their own historical development characteristics and the cultural habits of the people at that time, but some of the rules of the two hieroglyphs can be referred to.
It is worth mentioning that Shang Boliang was able to solve the riddle of the characters on Rosetta Stone Tablet, and he really paid too much effort. After years of research, he almost regarded the Louvre Museum as his home.
He has almost read all the Egyptian historical materials in the museum. In addition, in order to obtain perfect ancient Chinese and ancient Egyptian cultural and historical materials, Shang Boliang has also gone to other libraries in Paris.
04 The answer is revealed
Shang Boliang finally solved the mystery of Rosetta Stone Tablet at the age of 40. This stone tablet records the deeds of the Ptolemy pharaoh in ancient Egypt.
Because the pharaoh exempted the monks from taxes, built temples and gave them some religious privileges such as financial allocations, the monks in ancient Egypt wrote a letter of appreciation on the stone tablet to express their gratitude.
His great understanding has made great progress in the study of ancient Egyptian characters and culture, and his “cultural achievements” have also written a wonderful page in history.
It is worth mentioning that soon after he cracked the Rosetta Stone Tablet, he died in his forties, just like some Egyptian adventure movies. Many people even associate him with various mysterious curses in Egypt. Of course, this feudal speculation is completely unscientific.
A Rosetta stone tablet recording the characters of the Ptolemaic era in ancient Egypt has made Western scholars “confused” for 20 years. Fortunately, Shang Boliang, a French Chinese scholar, was able to successfully “open the door to mysterious characters”. Ancient Chinese is the key to the door. From the perspective of this historical and archaeological research event, Chinese culture is truly broad and profound!
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