Books about translating – Day 6

As a student of the classics and ancient history, I had to translate lots of bits of books from the Greek or Latin. As an historian, I became interested in the archaeologists, classicists, and historians who took on the difficult task of translating inscriptions on buildings and in archaeological finds.

One of the early important manuscripts translated was "The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Papyrus of Ani in the British Museum" discovered by E. A. Wallis Budge in 1888. He took on the task of translating hieroglyphics. 

You can read a contemporary book about this topic in "The Book of Two Ways" published in 2020 by  Jody Picoult where the main character was an archaeology student who was fascinated by Egyptian culture.

 

 

There are several books on translating Egyptian hieroglyphs including the newest book on the topic "The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone" by Edward Dolnick. I just love reading about the Rosetta Stone. It is the key to understanding hieroglyphics. The trilingual stone was inscribed in Ancient Egyptian using hieroglyphic and Demotic scripts respectively, while the bottom is in Ancient Greek.

 

An older book on the topic is "The Linguist and the Emperor: Napoleon and Champollion's Quest to Decipher the Rosetta Stone" by Daniel Meyerson. 

 

             

As a student who studied Greek, I became fascinated by proto-Greek defined as Linear B, and the indecipherable, earlier language, Linear A. These tablets were discovered in mainland Greece by Heinrich Schliemann and on Crete by Sir Arthur Evans. 

While Michael Ventris is given credit for translating the symbols, the work was begun and the symbols cracked by Alice Kober as described in "Riddle of the Labyrinth:The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code" by Margalit Fox. Kober was a talented linguist who determined that the symbols were a combination of sounds and symbols. Sadly, she died before was recognized for her translating achievement.

One of my favorite archaeological finds are the winged creatures and the five legged bulls found at Nineveh. Austen Henry Layard found these monumental architectural sculptures as he excavated the city.

He wrote about his discoveries in"Nineveh and Its Remains." 

  The sculptures are covered with bands of cuneiform, seen to the left. The other archaeologist who wrote about finding monumental cuneiform inscriptions was Sir Henry Rawlinson.

 

My favorite book about languages that are seeking translation is "Forgotten Scripts: Their Ongoing Discovery and Decipherment" by Cyrus H. Gordon. 

No matter what language, there's always a need to translate it into another. The older the language, the fewer specialists. In the best cases, historians or archaeologists find bilingual or tri-lingual texts as with the Rosetta stone. As readers, we are the beneficiaries of the gift of language of talented translators.

 

Stay tuned to the last day of my journey, "Reading in Translation," posted tomorrow!