In the Beginning was Information

and there are 468 Greek words. This stone, known as the RosettaStone (Figure 10), is now in the possession of the British Museumin London. It played a key role in the deciphering of hieroglyphics,and its first success was the translation of an Egyptian pictorial textin 1822 8 .Because the meaning of the entire text was found, it was establishedthat the hieroglyphics really represented information. Todaythe meanings of the hieroglyphic symbols are known, and anybodywho knows this script is able to translate ancient Egyptian texts.Since the meaning of the codes is known (again), it is now possibleto transcribe English text into hieroglyphics, as is shown in Figure11, where the corresponding symbols have been produced bymeans of a computer/plotter system.This illustrative example has now clarified some basic principlesabout the nature of information. Further details follow.8 Decoding of hieroglyphics: The Greek text was easy to read and to translate,and already in Cairo it was found to be a homage to king Ptolemy inscribed bypriests of Memphis in the year 196 BC. With the obvious assumption that thecontents of all three texts were identical, it appeared to be possible to decipherthe pictorial writing symbol by symbol. This assumption proved to be correct,but the decoding process took quite some time, since a 1400 years old presuppositionstood in the way. Horapollon, an Eqyptian living in the fourth century,described hieroglyphics as being a purely pictorial script, as it indeed seemed tobe. But this assumption resulted in some grotesque findings. When studying theDemotic text, a Swedish linguist, Åkerblad, recognised all the proper namesappearing in the Greek version, as well as the words for “temple” and “Greeks”.Subsequently Thomas Young, a medical physicist, recognised the namesBerenice and Cleopatra in the cartouches (the symbol groups appearing in theovals in the sixth line from the top in Figure 10). Instead of looking for pictorialsymbols, Young boldly suggested that the pictures were phonetic symbols representingsounds or letters. But he was just as reluctant as everybody else to pursuethis idea – another example of the inhibiting effect that presuppositionshave on the truth. The eventual breakthrough was made by the French founderof Egyptology, Jean Francois Champollion (1790 – 1832). He correlated singlehieroglyphic symbols with the corresponding Greek letters appearing in thenames Ptolemy and Cleopatra, and could then begin with the deciphering.51