Edward DolnickRecensioni
Autore di L'universo meccanico. Il racconto dell'astronomia moderna
Recensioni
The Forger’s Spell di Edward Dolnick
Edward Dolnick's account of Van Meegeren and the contexts within which he worked is at times an interesting one, but choppy and oddly structured. It didn't feel like Dolnick had quite enough to say to justify the book's length. Lukewarm recommendation.
This fascinating and very fun book is about the long quest to understand how reproduction and growth happen, especially in the years before the invention of the microscope and the discovery of genetics and DNA. But it could be subtitled “How the Persistence of Misogyny and Religion Warped Science and Impeded Scientific Advancement for Literally Thousands of Years” and could serve as a case study in epistemology.
From the time of the Enlightenment, there has been the assumption (and more strongly, assertion) that science was grounded in observations and experimental data. But in fact, observers don’t operate in a vacuum; rather, the very questions they ask, the language they use, and the sense they impart to what they see is determined by the sociopolitical environment in which they live, helping to shape their understanding. Knowledge thus rests upon social and historical conditions from which escape is often difficult if not impossible, because, in part, such a supporting framework is invisible.
Moreover, as Erich Fromm argued in Escape From Freedom, “the influence of any doctrine or idea depends on the extent to which it appeals to psychic needs in the character structure of those to whom it is addressed.” (p. 83)
As for gender bias and the resultant devaluing of women’s importance, it has long influenced scientific inquiry. Until relatively recently, scientists studying the question of “where do babies come from” were convinced that women were inferior, or mutilated men. They could not even conceive [sic] of a significant role for women in creating life. Since their conceptual lenses were thus shaded with bias, they fit what they could see into a Procrustean bed which ensured men played a dominant role in such an important process.
The greatly influential Aristotle (384 BC-322 BC), for example, believed that it was male sperm that caused the development of an embryo in the female uterus. According to this theory, the male produces a ‘seed' which forms an ‘egg' when mixed with menstrual blood (the ‘soil’). The ‘egg’ then develops into a fetus inside the mother according to the information contained within the male 'seed’ alone. That theory survived for some 2000 years, with only slight modifications. (It was Aristotle who promulgated the idea that females were just “mutilated males.”) After all, the role that semen played was more evident than women’s role in the process. Wasn't she just the field into which the seed was sown? (But then, why did so many babies resemble their mothers?)
Religious concerns and beliefs have also muddied the waters. How could new life develop without the active involvement of a designer?
As Dolnick tells the story, the main theories about reproduction reflected both gender and religious prejudices. They were split between the belief in and search for a seminal [sic] role for semen from men, or a mysterious (but invisible) egg in the female. (Such theorists were known as either “spermists” or “ovists.”)
A popular argument, informed by religious beliefs, was one Dolnick calls the “Russian Nesting Dolls” theory, or more formally, preformationism - i.e., the idea that God (who, the Bible said, created all of life in seven days) put tiny versions of all human bodies for all time into the semen, and these got passed on through the generations until that human’s time had come. That had to be a lot of semen! [And if actual lives were part of semen, how could God let so many of them be eliminated when, for example, semen was spilled out through masturbation? Indeed, this widespread practice aroused (sic) religious wrath in part because it did seem to involve the killing of potential human beings.]
The growth of beings was another conundrum. Something had to be providing a template, and DNA was totally beyond the imagination of pre-20th Century scientists. No one even thought to look for a mechanism by which such a process could occur at least until Darwin.
Some came close, like the Dutch microbiologist, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, but as Dolnick laments, he “was done in by ideological blinders,” mainly related to gender bias. Nevertheless, his pioneering work with microscopy led the way for others to see the smaller elements that are involved in conception.
Lazzaro Spallanzani, an Italian Catholic priest and biologist (1729-1799) came close with his meticulous experiments. Most notably, he crafted “boxer shorts” for frogs to see if pregnancy could result if no sperm were released by the male frogs. (It could not, of course.) Still, the truth eluded scientists who could not see anything smaller than the “little animals” (spermatozoa) they took for parasites.
The biggest breakthrough prior to the discovery of DNA did not take place until 1876. Oscar Hertwig (1849-1922) was a German biologist working in Naples, Italy who studied sea urchins, inter alia. The beauty of studying sea urchins, as Dolnick reports, is not only that fertilization takes place outside of the body where the process is visible, but that sea urchin eggs are transparent. Thus, Hertwig could actually see that fertilization occurred when a single sperm penetrated an egg and their nuclei fused. He even speculated that something in the nuclei of these reproductive cells passed on hereditary characteristics. (It was 1944 before experiments demonstrated that the substance responsible for biological inheritance is a nucleic acid, DNA.)
The book ends with the discoveries of Hertwig - the question of where babies come from had pretty much been answered. Dolnick concludes on a wry note:
“We think there is something magical about getting a rabbit out of a hat, the writer John Stewart Collis once observed. Not so. The real magic is getting a rabbit out of a rabbit.”
Evaluation: I thoroughly enjoyed this exploration of how people came to understand the most basic question about existence: how does it even happen? As Dolnick points out, if you think about it, in a time when you had no technological tools to see inside the body, and knew nothing about the mechanism of inheritance, how would you make sense of it all? His tour through the history of theories, false starts, and stabs at answers, is wonderfully entertaining.
In addition, the dust jacket implies (not sure if this is the author's doing or the publisher's) that there was this great contest to be the first to decipher Hieroglyphs, but it doesn't come out that way in the book. The English side gets barely a few mentions throughout the book, mainly as an aside to the French narrative.
Towards the end, I predominately found myself thinking that this could have been such a better book in the hands of a better writer.
(Part of the book deals with the farcically frequent thefts of art from Russborough House in Ireland. This created some of the bigger irritations of the book for me. Dolnick refers to it as “British” (no) and describes Glandore in Cork as being “outside Dublin” (technically true, but a little like saying that NYC is “outside Boston”). The audiobook narrator had apparently never spoken to an Irish person in his life, given the occasional burst of cod-Oirish accent and the persistent inability to pronounce Martin Cahill’s name.)
Highly recommended.
In our modern world we seek out the new, the improved, the cutting edge. Art, for example, has progressed through many Schools, and what is considered Art today is constantly evolving. Banksy's works have little in common with cubist paintings considered cutting edge just over a century ago.
In Ancient Egypt, on the other hand, Art served the State, and its symbols and metaphors persisted for not just one century but many. Dolnick tells of a depiction of a Pharaoh, who grabs his enemy by the hair while raising his other hand to strike him. The same image recurs in drawings a thousand years apart. For the Egyptian what was old was true and proven, and not to be improved upon.
Egypt fell to Rome in 30 BC. With the rise of Christianity, Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was formally banned in 400 BC as a way to force Egypt to break from its “pagan” past. Understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphs gradually fell away. Hieroglyphs were unable to be read or interpreted for many centuries. The discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 changed that. The Stone is inscribed with the same story told in two known languages. A third section of the Stone includes hieroglyphs assumed to tell the same story. After over a thousand years, the Stone offered a way to break the centuries of hieroglyphic silence.
Dolnick tells the story of the race between the British scientist Thomas Young and the French scholar Jean-François Champollion to be the first to “break the code” of hieroglyphic writing using the Rosetta Stone as the key. It took over 20 years.
In Dolnick’s telling, Young's contribution was in identifying key clues to reading known names, without himself actually being able to read them. Champollion's insight was that Coptic, a language not well known in the West, but that he had studied, was related to the language of Ancient Egypt in the same way that modern Italian derives from Latin. It was this insight, along with his persistence, that allowed him to go further than Young. Coptic served as a bridge, allowing Champollion to identify sounds within known names and thus identify the hieroglyphs that represented those sounds. Champollion was eventually able to read the hieroglyphs of the Rosetta Stone, and other Egyptian texts as well.
Beyond the main story Dolnick also gives us additional insights on Egypt and language. He includes chapters on the history and culture of Egypt; the history of writing; Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt; Britain's seizing of the Stone from the French; the Nazi Enigma machine, and more. Along the way we learn lots of interesting tidbits, including that our modern alphabet is the descendant of the Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Altogether this is a fascinating look at the Rosetta Stone and written language itself. I give The Writing of the Gods Four Stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐.
> Egyptians knew about wheels, which had been in use in neighboring empires for five centuries. They chose not to use them. (About a thousand years after the pyramid era, they began building war chariots.) We might think we understand the appeal of tradition and the fear of change, but Egyptian culture was conservative to a degree we can scarcely fathom. Art highlights the point. The same drawings turn up again and again in temples built two thousand years apart. Here the pharaoh grabs his enemies by the hair with one hand and raises the other to strike a mighty blow, and there—a thousand miles and a thousand years away—the identical image recurs. … “When you go into a museum,” Brier continues, “you can look at a statue from 2500 BC, and 1500 BC, and 500 BC, and they’re not really different. And that’s why you can recognize Egyptian art at a glance, because it didn’t change.”
> Some archaeologists believe that we overestimate how much thought Egyptians gave to death. In ancient Egypt, towns typically rose up on wet, fertile ground, while tombs and cemeteries were relegated to the desert’s edge. As a result, the most abundant and best-preserved relics are those associated with death. “This has given us a very distorted view of the culture,” writes the Egyptologist Richard Parkinson. “Imagine if only municipal cemeteries were preserved from Victorian Britain.”
> Most of the trouble arose from a single root: the ruling family were outsiders. They were not Egyptian but Greek. Alexander the Great had conquered Egypt in 332 BC; after his death, one of his generals became pharaoh, and Ptolemy was a descendant of that general. … None of the rulers in the Ptolemaic line bothered to learn the local language. On the evening before one battle, Ptolemy IV (the father of the Rosetta Stone’s Ptolemy) delivered a speech meant to rally the troops in “band of brothers” fashion. But the speech fell flat because an interpreter had to translate the pharaoh’s Greek into Egyptian.
> The heyday of Coptic dated from around the third century AD until shortly after the Arabs conquered Egypt in 642 AD. Within the following few centuries, Islam would displace Christianity and Arabic would displace Coptic. By the 1600s, a once-thriving language had become a relic. … Coptic had one crucial feature that set it apart from Egyptian. It was written not with hieroglyphs but using the Greek alphabet, augmented by half a dozen symbols for sounds not found in Greek.
> A decade later, after Napoleon had been defeated and the looted texts returned to the Vatican, one scholar found Champollion’s scribbled notes in the margins. “ I think there are few Coptic books in Europe he has not examined… There is no book in the Vatican in that language that has not remarks of Champollion in almost every page, which he made when the manuscripts were at Paris.”
> Demotic looks like “row upon row of agitated commas,” one modern Egyptologist observes. “It is perfectly dreadful stuff to read.”
> Nowadays starting with names is standard practice for decipherers. … Young had made a conceptual breakthrough. By deciphering Ptolemy on the Rosetta Stone, he had shown that hieroglyphs sometimes stood for sounds.
> According to the myth, Minos’s daughter Ariadne gave Theseus a ball of string—a clewe, in Middle English—so that, after he had slain the Minotaur, he could follow the string and find his way back out of the labyrinth. Eventually the word clewe became clue, still retaining its original sense of a hint to unraveling a mystery. The usage is so deeply embedded in the language that to this day we talk about “following the thread” of a difficult explanation.
> During World War II he served as a navigator for the Royal Air Force. When he flew back to base from bombing raids over Germany, one journalist wrote, “Ventris would set course and then, clearing a space on the navigator’s table, happily set to work on his Linear B documents, while the aircraft groaned its way home, searchlights stretched up their probing fingers, and bursts of flak shook the bomber.”
> "Hieroglyphics" was not discovered until 1419, a thousand years after Horapollo’s death, when an Italian monk happened on a Greek translation. Where the book had been in the meantime and how it had come to be translated in the first place, no one knows. But as soon as it was unearthed, the work was hailed as the key to hieroglyphs, and it retained that status for four centuries. … Horapollo hammered home his central theme—hieroglyphs were emblems and allegories, and they conveyed symbolic messages. “When [Egyptians] wish to symbolize a god, or something sublime,” he wrote, “… they draw a hawk.” Why a hawk in particular? Because “other birds, when they wish to fly, proceed on a slant, it being impossible for them to rise directly. Only the hawk flies straight upwards.”
> A Greek historian named Diodorus Siculus had visited Egypt in the first century BC and reported that Egyptian writing was different from all others; it was not based on letters or syllables but on pictures that carried metaphoric meaning. A crocodile stood for evil, for instance, and an eye for justice. In around 120 AD Plutarch, a Greek historian far more prominent than Diodorus, had explained that a hieroglyph of a fish symbolized hatred because the sea, which teems with fish, devours the Nile, which provides life. A hippopotamus stood for violence and immorality because male hippos kill their fathers and mate with their mothers.
> Like ciphers in wartime, the experts insisted, hieroglyphs were designed to be difficult. That belief, all but universal until the 1800s, sent would-be decipherers in the wrong direction. Rather than burrow into the ground in search of mundane meanings behind the cryptic symbols, they sailed aloft into ever more far-fetched realms of hot air and learned silliness. With hindsight, it seems bewildering that deep thinkers insisted even into the Age of Science that hieroglyphs concealed mystic truths behind elaborate masks. The trouble began with misplaced faith. Plutarch and Horapollo and the others were names to reckon with
> in the 1950s, when scholars were still wrestling futilely with Mayan glyphs. That New World picture-writing was finally deciphered in the 1970s, in one of the great linguistic and archaeological triumphs of modern times. The story is told thrillingly (by one of the participants) in Michael Coe’s Breaking the Maya Code. The story has uncanny echoes of the Egyptian tale, although there was no Mayan counterpart of the Rosetta Stone.
> Isaac Newton, who lived more than a thousand years after Horapollo, fervently believed that ancient Egyptians had grasped all the secrets of nature’s cosmic choreography. The task of modern thinkers, Newton and his peers believed, was not to break new ground but to recover those ancient insights. … he insisted that the ancient Egyptians had made all his most important discoveries thousands of years before him. They had known the law of gravitation and all the other secrets of the cosmos; the point of hieroglyphs was to hide that knowledge from the unworthy. “The Egyptians,” Newton wrote, “concealed mysteries that were above the capacity of the common herd under the veil of religious rites and hieroglyphic symbols.” … The view that thinkers who lived thousands of years ago knew more than we do, even about scientific matters, upends everything that we believe today. But in the 1600s and 1700s, it was common sense. The doctrine was called “the wisdom of the ancients.” In ancient days thinkers had been privy to nature’s secrets, scholars proclaimed, but then corrupt and sinning humankind had fumbled away those divine gifts. As the world decayed intellectually and morally, countless truths vanished.
> The key bit of good fortune was that Ptolemy and Cleopatra contained several letters in common, namely P, T, O, and L. Young had guessed years before that the Rosetta cartouches spelled out Ptolemy (actually the Greek form of the name, Ptolemaios) in hieroglyphs. Now Champollion did the same.
> The Cleopatra cartouche had helped speed Champollion on his way. For Young, the same cartouche represented an enormous missed chance. Bankes had sent him his obelisk inscriptions, too, and Young had immediately spotted something odd. He knew, from the Greek inscription, that Bankes’s second cartouche likely spelled out Cleopatra. (The first cartouche spelled out Ptolemy, which Young recognized from the Rosetta Stone.) But the copyist who had recorded the hieroglyphs had made a mistake—the first symbol in Cleopatra’s name should have been a hieroglyph that stood for the sound k, but instead the copyist had written the hieroglyph for t. Young had frowned and put the inscriptions aside. “As I had not leisure at the time to enter into a very minute comparison of the name with other authorities, I suffered myself to be discouraged with respect to the application of my alphabet to its analysis.” Young had tripped over a typo.
> It was fire, the destroyer of libraries ever since Alexandria, that saved the texts from the earliest libraries, which were written not on paper or papyrus but on clay. “When in wars and invasions the great Mesopotamian cities were burned down,” writes the historian Stephen Greenblatt, “the sun-dried tablets in the libraries and royal archives were in effect baked into durable form. In their death agonies, the palace and the temples had become kilns.”
> sometimes there were errors in the originals, because the craftsmen who carved hieroglyphs into stone or painted them on walls and monuments were seldom literate; they worked from texts written by scribes, but they could not read what they were copying. In contrast, texts on papyrus were written by the scribes themselves and therefore far less likely to contain mistakes.
> The Incas were the exception to the rule—the only known example of an empire that made no use of a writing system. The knotted cords the Incas called quipu did provide a sophisticated way of recording numbers (but apparently not words).
> In Assyria, for instance, thousands upon thousands of inscriptions and carvings depict tortures and massacres in careful detail. This royal reminiscence, from a king named Sennacherib who ruled around 700 BC, is typical: “I cut their throats like lambs… With the bodies of their warriors, I filled the plain, like grass. Their testicles I cut off, and tore out their privates like the seeds of cucumbers.”
> Each pharaoh had several names, including a birth name and a throne name chosen when the king’s reign began. Ozymandias was a Greek version of Ramesses’s throne name
> As a teenager Champollion had boasted, “I give myself up entirely to Coptic,” and “I dream in Coptic.” By 1822 he had been steeping in Coptic for more than a decade. Now, it seems likely, Champollion rolled the pharaohs’ names across his tongue, drawing out the syllables. Ra-mes-ses. Toth-mes. And he thought of the Coptic word mise (pronounced me-say), which meant birth. So Ramesses and Tothmes were not merely names, but names with meanings. Born of Ra, the Sun God. Born of Toth, the God of Writing.
> The Bible never specifies just what kind of fruit grew on the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Genesis refers only to a generic fruit. The apple didn’t come along until around 400 AD, when Saint Jerome produced a new Latin translation of the Bible. Because the Latin word malum happens to mean both apple and evil, Jerome had the bright idea of placing a pun at the heart of one of the Western world’s founding myths.
> a given hieroglyph could change roles without warning. A duck might mean son in one context; in another setting it might mean an ordinary, quacking duck, such as you might see on any pond; and still elsewhere it could mean the sound sa, the sound of the Egyptian word for duck.
> Champollion’s task was to find every hieroglyphic text he could lay his hands on and read it aloud while listening intently for words that sounded like Coptic.
> Roughly speaking, it was as if English were written with consonants only and scholars had to decide whether crt meant carrot or create. For Champollion, the lack of vowels brought an unexpected difficulty in its wake. In ancient Egypt, the notion of “homonym” was broader than it is for us—so long as the consonants in two words matched, that would do. You could draw a picture of one to stand for the other. The words might have sounded the same, but they might not have. A scribe might have drawn a pear to mean pair, but a pear could equally well have meant any of a host of words with the consonants pr—it might have meant pier or peer or poor or pour or pore or pry or even pyre.
> Characters in old novels were always wandering into pubs with names like Ye Fox and Hounds. In past eras, ye was pronounced the. The use of Y for Th was just a typographical convention (like f for s in we hold these truths to be felf-evident).
> One of the most familiar verses in the Bible—Give us this day our daily bread—contains a word that has tormented writers and translators since ancient times. The Greek word epiousios, which is customarily translated as daily, occurs in the Lord’s Prayer and nowhere else in the Bible or in Greek literature. (The original language of the New Testament was Greek.) No one knows for sure what it meant, and Greek had a perfectly ordinary word for daily
> Shakespeare in vented thousands of words, including many that are now familiar, such as horrid, vast, and lonely. But some words occur only once, and in phrases where context does not come to the rescue. In one of the history plays, for instance, Shakespeare refers to soldiers killed in battle and says they were “balk’d in their own blood.” No one knows what he meant. One theory is that balk’d was a typo for baked.
> Little to do with Egyptian determinatives was simple. Determinatives for verbs were often harder to decode than those for nouns, for instance, because actions were hard to capture in pictures. A determinative that showed a pair of walking legs meant hunt and go and hurry (and also linger and even stop). Ideas were harder still. Even so, there was a determinative—a picture—for things that cannot be pictured. A drawing of a rolled-up papyrus scroll signaled an abstraction, like writing. … A hieroglyph might look exactly like any other hieroglyph but function solely as a silent guide to the meaning of other hieroglyphs. And, if Champollion had it right, determinatives were not exotic features that turned up only in rare settings. They were everywhere, and until you had made sense of them, every text you looked at would trip you up.
> Another eighty-odd hieroglyphs stand for two consonants. A hieroglyph that looks like a bowl, for instance, stands for the letters nb (pronounced, by convention, as neb). That is decidedly odd, because the alphabet already has perfectly fine hieroglyphs for n and b … Some hieroglyphs stand for three consonants. (The ankh symbol— —is one.
> The word snake in hieroglyphs. The first four signs stand for sounds. The long, bent snake represents the sound j (as in jail), the hand is d, the horned viper is f, and the half-loaf of bread stands for t. (The word was pronounced, roughly, djedfet.) The third, wriggly snake is a determinative, a silent reminder that the entire string of symbols represents snake.
> the complexity of the hieroglyphic system never counted against it in the minds of its Egyptian users. The reason was that ease was never the point. Reading and writing were specialized skills in ancient Egypt, and those who had mastered those arts saw no reason to hand down a ladder so that others might climb to the same heights. The difficulty of the hieroglyphic script was a feature, not a bug.
> Young’s problem was partly that he had run out of ideas, and partly that so many subjects fascinated him. In the winter of 1816, he sent a note to the editor of theEncyclopedia Britannica, who had asked Young if he would write an essay on acoustics. Young took that assignment and added some ideas of his own. “I would also suggest Alphabet, Annuities, Attraction, Capillary Action, Cohesion, Colour, Dew, Egypt, Forms, Friction, Halo, Hieroglyphic, Hydraulics, Motion, Resistance, Ship, Strength, Tides, and Waves,” and “anything of a medical nature.” Over the next half-dozen years, Young wrote sixty-three articles for the Britannica, including his groundbreaking “Egypt” essay.
> In the ruins of the ancient city of Tanis, near Alexandria—Tanis was the sand-buried city in Raiders of the Lost Ark—Lepsius discovered a counterpart of the Rosetta Stone. Until Lepsius unearthed it, no one had any idea that it existed. This new stone contained a long passage in Greek and the same passage written out in demotic and in hieroglyphs. The message, which was composed a few decades earlier than the Rosetta Stone, is nothing special—it praises the pharaoh and talks about fixing glitches in the calendar. But the message wasn’t the point. The point of the Canopus Stone (it was named for the city where it was written) was that its text differed from that of the Rosetta Stone.
> Napoleon brought artists and scientists with him to Egypt. When they returned home in the early 1800s, their accounts of the wonders they had seen triggered a craze for all things Egyptian. The frenzy, called Egyptomania, lasted for decades and extended to America as well as Europe. (That is why the Washington Monument is an obelisk.)
The problem I had with it, was the constant insertions of 1) other times in history 2) extensive descriptions of the canyon wall and cliffs 3) modern day tales of disasters on the rivers.
I enjoyed the book, but not not as much I wanted too.
The story of the Egyptian civilization which lasted 30,000 years? How Bonaparte brought not only an army of warriors, but an army of savants to Egypt? How ancient Egypt spurred the imagination of Europeans, with collectors and amateur Egyptologists scrambling to discover and buy up ancient artifacts?
The story of the Rosetta stone with its three sections of ancient languages, and how brilliant, eccentric scholars vied to be the first to decode it?
The history of writing, from mercantile records to historic records to literature, and from symbols to the alphabet?
The history of decoding?
The Egyptian God Toth was the god of writing
The Writing of the Gods by Edward Dolnick covers it all, wrapped in an engaging and accessible book.
Ancient Egyptian was a dead language when the Rosetta stone was found. The writing on the stone included Egyptian hieroglyphics, Greek, and an unknown section which turned out to be an ancient Egyptian shorthand for the hieroglyphics.
Ancient Egypt had been a stable society with few changes. The hieroglyphics did not change, unlike, say English. I can’t pick up Beowulf (circa 1000 AD) and read it without translation. The Egyptians knew about the wheel, but were not inspired to create a cart. All those pyramids were built without wheels! They made ramps of sand and pushed those stones into place! Christianity and the Mamelukes and the bubonic plague came along, and Egypt became a has-been. By the time Bonaparte arrived, magnificent temples were used for garbage dumps and sand buried the Sphinx up to her chin.
Dolnick leads readers step by step to understand how the hieroglyphics were decoded. It had long been believed that they were symbols not representative of spoken language, but mysterious and esoteric messages from the gods. Two scholars with different backgrounds and approaches took up the challenge of decoding the stone. First, the cartouches were considered, believing they were the names of the pharaohs seen in the Greek section of the Rosetta stone. These pharaohs were Greek, for Greece had conquered Egypt. Perhaps the symbols stood for sounds of the Greek names. The symbols were connected to sounds; the lion symbol stood for the sound “l’ in Ptolemy and Cleopatra, for instance. One scholar believed that Coptic was born out of ancient Egyptian and he determined to learn it although it was nearly a dead language, only surviving in the Coptic Church. This aided in understanding how the letters were pronounced.
Cracking the names of the pharaohs in the cartouches was just the beginning of the long process of decoding hieroglyphics.
Utterly fascinating and always engaging, I much enjoyed this book.
I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.
More than luck was involved, of course, yet Powell and the others certainly were lucky, as Edward Dolnick explains in his adventurous 2001 book “Down the Great Unknown.”
Consider that Powell himself, leader of the expedition, had but one arm, having lost the other in the Battle of Shiloh. Consider that their large wooden boats were totally unsuitable for running river rapids and and no less suitable for carrying around the worst of the rapids. Consider that the rowers faced backwards. Consider that none of the men wore lifejackets or helmets. Consider that, because they were the first, they had no idea what might be beyond the next curve in the river. Many others, including some in recent years, have died trying to go down this river. That Powell and the others succeeded in their first attempt had something to do with luck.
Most of the 10 men who started the 99-day, 1,000-mile river trip that started in Wyoming Territory were Civil War veterans. Having survived the war, they figured they could survive anything. They were all eager for adventure, although Powell himself was also in pursuit of science. He wanted to map the river and study geology along the way. Names he gave to rapids, canyons and other features along the way are still in use today.
Only six of the 10 completed the trip, the others bailing out along the way because of the hardships they endured. Powell was cautious, choosing to avoid the worst rapids whenever possible, but to his crew carrying those heavy boats long distances over rocks often seemed worse than taking their chances with the rapids.
Dolnick makes a nail-biting adventure story out of this river trip, describing what happened each day along the way. At the same time he tells us much about river rapids in general, about the Grand Canyon's history and geology and about others who have ventured down it. His book makes exciting and informative reading.
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