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@Linguist_CIOL OCTOBER/NOVEMBER The Linguist 23 FEATURES text edition however – going through the texts word by word, referring to high resolution photographs of the original stone, and comparing them with one another – forces you to think more carefully about how the texts were composed and translated. For example, the closer you look at the versions in the three languages, the more difficult it becomes to figure out the direction of translation. It now looks as though the process of composition and translation was in some way collaborative. Thanks to the work of projects such as the Digital Rosetta Stone at the University of Leipzig, 2 it is now easier to compare the relevant portions of the three texts side by side. Puns of the ancients Less well-known inscriptions are just as rewarding to work on. A trilingual edict of King Ptolemy X Alexander I from 96 BC has a multilingual, multiscript pun, which few people can have laughed at over the last couple of thousand years. Let me spoil the joke by explaining it. A man named Ptolemaios is mentioned in the decree. As a close associate of the king, he has the Greek title syngenes, meaning 'relation' or 'kinsman'. He was also dioiketes – head of the royal financial administration. Neither of these terms has a precise counterpart in the Pharaonic Egyptian administration, so Egyptian words had to be found to represent them. Dioiketes is usually translated as snti or snty (Egyptian scripts do not mark short vowels). Syngenes can be either borrowed into Egyptian or translated as sn nsw ('brother of the king'). This gives the translator an opportunity to be playful. The demotic text translates the Greek syngenes and dioiketes as p[3] sngns p[3] snti ('the syngenes [and] the snti'). The translator of the hieroglyphic text, however, produces this: The hieroglyphic script can be written in any direction, but the general rule is that human and animal signs face the beginning of the text, so this inscription is read from right to left. The script is composed of signs which represent phonemes and signs which represent meaning or word classes, called 'determinatives'. The first sign to be read is the square box in the top right corner. It represents the sound 'p'. Hieroglyphic Egyptian does not have a definite article, but demotic Egyptian does. Because this text was composed by someone who spoke a later form of the language, some lexical interference creeps in. The writer has given the word syngenes a masculine singular definite article, which in demotic is p3, where '3' represents a long 'a' sound. If this were a strictly accurate hieroglyphic text, there would be no word for 'the', but this kind of mistake is quite common in texts written in the Ptolemaic period. Next we have the Greek word syngenes, borrowed into Egyptian: (s - ḳ - n - s; don't forget that we are reading from right to left and top to bottom). It is not clear why the translator used the letter ḳ, which was probably originally pronounced like the Arabic qāf. Sometimes we have to contend with mysteries like this when we work with texts whose authors are long dead. The sign after sḳns – the kneeling man – is a determinative and is not pronounced. It tells us that this word represents a male human. So far, believe it or not, this is a straightforward hieroglyphic text. Students who take my introductory Egyptian hieroglyphs course at the University of Reading would have no problem with it. The next part is where it gets clever. The pot with the two lines under it is the standard writing of the word sn.nw, which means 'second'. What is the word 'second' doing here? The two lines are also a way of writing the dual ending in Egyptian; if this word were grammatically feminine this would have given us sn-ty – the Egyptian word for dioiketes. The final two signs – the plant and seated figure – give us the word nsw ('king'). We could therefore read the text (with some reservations about the scribe's command of hieroglyphic Egyptian) as p[3] sḳns snty nsw ('the syngenes [and] dioiketes [of the] king'). SIGNS OF THE TIMES Ancient inscriptions at the Ptolemaic temple in Kom Ombo, Egypt (above); and a reproduction of the Rosetta Stone in Figeac, France (left) © SHUTTERSTOCK