For over two thousand years, the secrets of the ancient Egyptians were lost to history. All the tombs, trinkets, statues and cenotaphs were pretty but indecipherable, covered as they were in a pictographic script that had no meaning. It wasn’t decades of research, the intricate technologies of archaeology or the explanation of some ancient king risen from the dead that unlocked the lost language of the ancient Egyptians. In fact, it was the accidental discovery of some half buried rock that came to be known as the Rosetta stone, by a French soldier that would change the face of Egyptology and provide a much needed window into the language and belief systems of the most celebrated ancient culture.

It was 1799 and Napoleon’s troops were preparing to defend against the encroaching Ottoman Army as they grew closer and closer to the city of Rosetta on Egypt’s West bank just miles from the sea.  As they cleared away rocks to improve their fortifications, a small group of soldier engineers led by 28 year old Lieutenant Bouchard discovered a large polished rock with a dark surface and what seemed to be some engraved text.

On closer inspection, Bouchard noticed three separate texts on the rock: hieroglyphs at the top, an unknown text in the middle and Greek at the bottom.  It was not just the middle text that didn’t make sense; it was the stone’s location inside an Arab fort far from the ancient tombs in Luxor’s Valley of the Kings. Speculation as to possible ancient structures below the fort were quickly dismissed and the stone sent to Cairo for further research by Napoleon’s famed Commission of Arts and Sciences.

The stone was almost a meter high with missing pieces at the top and bottom right. After a thorough cleaning the group of French scholars was able to read the Greek inscription. It was nothing sensational, just an inscription of an anniversary. That was until they read the last sentence.

“This decree shall be inscribed on stelae of hard rock, in sacred characters, both native and Greek, and they shall be erected in each of the temples of the first, second and third category, next to the image of the king living eternally.”

The realization that what was written in Greek was also written in hieroglyphics was a revelation. Finally, here was the chance to understand what the ancients had been whispering for all these centuries.  A group of notable scholars and archeologists gathered in Cairo to work on the stone, including trying to figure out what the middle language on the Rosetta stone actually was.

Disappointedly the Egyptian elite had little interest in the stone, perhaps due to the constant influx of Greeks, French and British in their country with every new ‘discovery’ of the ancient Egyptian world. For Islamic Egyptians, pyramids were pagan relics of the past with little bearing on their advanced culture.

Copyists went to work, reproducing the text on the stone and disseminating it to colleagues around the world. Although other texts had been discovered, the connecting language, the middle language on the stone, remained a mystery. It wasn’t Aramaic and it wasn’t Coptic. And in 1801, the British stole the stone making its middle text even more elusive for its French discoverers.  

By 1802, the Rosetta stone would find its permanent, if not definitely legal, home in the British Museum. It would be another thirty years before hieroglyphics would be understood enough for full decipherment and the middle text would be designated as hieratic, a simple version of the hieroglyphs. Through the dedicated efforts of Jean Francois Champollion, a French scholar who was only nine years old when the stone was first discovered by Bouchard, the text and dictionary of ancient Egyptian

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languages was first published. His work showed that the ancient text didn’t contain vowels and used pictures to represent both sounds and statements.

To this day, the Rosetta stone sits in the British Museum, a highlight of the Egyptian collection and a testament to perseverance and scholarship.  The ability to read hieroglyphics helped archaeologists and Egyptologists to understand the succession of dynasties, the religion and cults of the dead, the ancient gods and their followers and of course, the secret world of one history’s most fascinating cultures - Ancient Egypt.

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It was the Italians of the Renaissance that first referred to the art and architecture of the middle or medieval period as ‘gothic’ and it had little to do with the infamous Goths that sacked Rome in the 4^th century. In fact, ‘gothic’ was meant as a derogatory term for the heavy, dark and ornate decoration and symbolism that covered the churches and paintings of the middle ages. Stone roofs, flying buttresses, highly vaulted ceilings and pointed arches marked this change in architectural taste that the Renaissance men felt moved the art of building in the wrong direction after the end of the Romanesque period.

Despite such famous examples of Gothic architecture as Notre Dame Cathedral and York Minister Abbey, the Italians never really allowed the form to take hold in their region. Gothic architecture spread quickly across the rest of Europe during the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries bringing with it innovations in the designs of buildings, specifically churches and castles.

The flying buttress was introduced during the period as a way of providing extra support to high church and castle walls that had in the past buckled under the weight of the stones used in their construction. By attaching pillars of stone to the outside of the building, the Gothic architect was able to transfer the weight of the interior wall by a connecting arch to the pillars and increase the amount of available height and light inside the building. This innovation paved the way for the medieval stained glass window.

Pointed arches were another change from the preceding Romanesque period that had favored the rounded arch. The pointed arch allowed for higher arches that supported more weight and therefore more decorative application. They worked well with the flying buttress and by extending the height and width of a building, adding to its grandeur and the amount of light within its walls.

The ribbed vault also allowed for greater experimentation and artistic expression in Gothic architecture. By connecting three separate arches and having them traverse each other rather than one single arch, the ribbed vault provided better distribution of weight during construction and can be compared with the use of steel in the modern skyscraper: essential and strengthening.

The Cathedral at Notre Dame remains one of the most famous examples of the Gothic style. Within the high and impressive walls of this medieval cathedral, Napoleon was crowned in 1804 showing that centuries after it was built in 1160s, Notre Dame was well regarded for its beauty and permanence among the French landscape. Highlighting all the innovations of the Gothic period from flying buttresses and stained glass windows to pointed arches and ribbed vaults, Notre Dame has both inspired architects and engineers as well as writers and composers.

The church and castle of the medieval period were not only designed to impress but also to intimidate. The Roman Catholic church of the period wanted to instill a sense of fear and awe of a god just out of reach to the layman, thereby impressing the importance of the pope and his various cadres. The medieval castle was a show of strength meant to deter any wayward rival from making an attack. For the most part, the effect seems to have worked with many examples of Gothic architecture surviving unharmed until the modern period when the bombs and bullets of the first and second world wars caused major damage to some of the finest examples of Gothic architecture in existence.

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So it was that Gothic architecture pulled away from the sense of balance and smooth lines that had ingratiated European and Near Eastern design for centuries and moved the continent into a moodier, more self expressive form of architecture that allowed many artist and engineers to see that Roman styles were not the only ones available anymore. The unconscious colonialism of the Roman Empire was not so deeply embedded in the European psyche as it had once been. Well, if we discount the Italians of the Renaissance that is.

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