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The conclusion explores the legacies of religious change among Delta blacks, including those who left for Chicago as part of the Great Migration of African American southerners northward beginning in the mid-1910s. It tracks the explosive career of Rosetta Tharpe, a Gospel and blues singer from the Arkansas Delta who embodied the new intersection between the sacred and commercial world. It also reveals how key features of modern black sacred life in Chicago actually took root during in the rural South the post-Reconstruction era, especially black nationalism and Garveyism, the linking of spiritual identity and consumption, and civil rights protests that focused on boycotting racist stores.

Although most of the evidence for the history of Ptolemaic Egypt comes from texts on papyrus, Egypt has also produced a large number of inscriptions on stone, the type of document that makes up most of the surviving evidence in other parts of the ancient Greek world. This chapter examines the nature of this epigraphical evidence from Egypt and asks what contribution it makes. There the Greek inscriptions co-exist with a native epigraphical tradition of an entirely different sort, the hieroglyphic texts written on temple walls. There are also inscriptions in Demotic, the late cursive form of Egyptian, which connect more readily with the Greek documents. Some types of Greek inscriptions in Egypt are distinctive, such as the proskynema dedications with which visitors to temples left a permanent mark of their presence in words before the god.The trilingual decrees of synods of Egyptian priests (most famously the Rosetta Stone) are also without close parallel. And the asylum decrees of the late Ptolemaic period concerning temples raise major issues about the relative power of the king and the temples.

This chapter examines the changing waterway geography of the western Delta from the beginning of Egypt’s Islamic era through to the early modern period. It examines the contributions of medieval texts, particularly the geographers Ibn Hawqal and al-Idrisi, to our understanding of western Delta geography. While the nomenclatures of their era are quite different, the topological approach of these authors allows us to identify the Rosetta branch in much its modern form by the 10^th century A.D. The chapter considers the apparent demise of the Canopic branch as a natural distributary, possibly in the 8^th century A.D. and identifies the subsequent struggle to keep Alexandria connected to the Nile, by various artificial canals, as a key preoccupation of the medieval period. It also looks at the coastal lagoons of the western Delta, and their openings to the Mediterranean Sea. The chapter is to be read in conjunction with Appendices 1–3 of the book.

This chapter focuses on the main sea-facing ports of the western Nile Delta in the medieval period, principally Alexandria and Rosetta, in the context of the navigational connections to them. It demonstrates the relative insignificance of Rosetta relative to Alexandria, despite it being close to the mouth of the main distributary of the western Nile Delta. Rosetta was a garrison town, but not an important commercial hub at any time when the canal to Alexandria was well maintained. Alexandria prospered, meanwhile, despite the lack of a natural waterway connecting it to the river network. Indeed, substantial resources were expended on canals that created such a connection. The reason for the medieval emphasis on keeping Alexandria connected is explained in the light of the dangerous conditions navigators faced at the Rosetta mouth. The role of the town of Fuwa in the Alexandria route is also explored.

With the advent of the Napoleonic Expedition to Egypt in 1798, Egypt came fully into European awareness. Although the expedition was primarily military and colonial in intent, and although it ultimately failed, it also brought unprecedented attention to ancient Egypt with the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and publication of the great Description de l’Égypte. Napoleon took with him a large commission of scholars, or savants, that included such luminaries as the artist Vivant Denon and mathematician Joseph Fourier, who documented ancient Egypt to an unprecedented degree. Egyptian antiquities began to flood into Europe and especially into the British Museum after the British appropriated most of those that the French had assembled in Egypt.

The initial hope that the Rosetta Stone would quickly lead to decipherment of the hieroglyphs and translation of the ancient Egyptian language were disappointed. Several scholars, including Silvestre de Sacy, made determined efforts, but with marginal results at best. The first significant steps were taken by the Scottish polymath Thomas Young, and the breakthrough was achieved by Jean François Champollion in 1822, although controversy lingers about the respective values of their accomplishments. With patronage from the influential Duke of Blacas, Champollion extended his initial work through study in European museums and moved beyond cracking the hieroglyphic script to some understanding of the ancient Egyptian language. Blacas also secured a post in the Louvre for Champollion who began building that museum's Egyptian collection. Well-connected scholars like Sir William Gell ensured interchange of information.

This chapter considers translation in terms of how a particular relationship to language is born with the decoding of the Rosetta Stone. It shows how the Rosetta Stone is transformed from an object to a text to be deciphered, decoded, and analyzed by an international network of scholars. What is discovered with the Rosetta Stone, the chapter argues, is less an object than a particular textuality based on an understanding of language as a code. It also explains how the translational ethic that points to the equivalence of Greek and hieroglyphics actually levels the political and theological distinctions between the three languages: the Greek language, the language of politics, demotic, and hieroglyphics, the language of the gods. This phenomenological leveling of languages is ultimately read in relation to the comparative gesture of world literature, which levels distinctions between literature and scripture under an emergent paradigm of modern literary reading.

This chapter explores the scale of Egyptian Oedipus and how it impressed people of an age accustomed to scholarly grandiosity. To the modern reader, however, it is the book's substance that most astonishes. Egyptian Oedipus promises a complete “restoration of the hieroglyphic doctrine,” all the lost secrets of religion and science that ancient Egyptians supposedly encoded on their monuments. The massive final volume gathers almost every hieroglyphic inscription known to Europeans at that time, as well as other ancient artifacts, including mummies, sarcophagi, Canopic jars, sphinxes, idols, lamps, and amulets, found in Rome, other Christian cities, Istanbul, and Egypt. Kircher glosses each object with a learned explanation of its ancient significance. Without a Rosetta Stone, he translates the hieroglyphic inscriptions, character by character, into Latin prose.

This chapter analyzes Rosetta (1999), the first Belgian film to win the Cannes film festival's top award, the Palme d'Or. The film also received a special mention in the contest for the Directors' Ecumenical Prize, while the actress playing Rosetta, Emilie Dequenne, received the award for Best Female Performance. The success of Rosetta hastened the passing of a Belgian law that became known as the “Rosetta Law,” which prohibits employers from paying less than the minimum wage to teenage employees and decrees a 3 per cent minimum of young employees in any work force comprising more than fifty workers. Asking what kind of world we had created for ourselves at the end of the twentieth century, Rosetta sharply criticizes a society that can sacrifice its willing workers on the altar of economic efficiency.

From the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517 until the second half of the eighteenth century, Egyptian farmers initiated and oversaw the construction and repair of small-scale irrigation and other infrastructural works in their local environments. They controlled how and when their labor was used. At the end of the eighteenth century, rural labor in Egypt dramatically changed. It became coerced, required the large-scale movement of peasant laborers, resulted in enormous environmental manipulation, and was often deadly. This chapter explains this massive sea change in environmental labor in Egypt. It makes clear how and why forced labor, deleterious environmental exploitation, extractive economics, and population movements emerged at the end of the eighteenth century and how they have come to characterize the relationship between work and the environment in rural Egypt from that period until today.

This chapter examines the role in the marker design of buried objects intended to be inscribed with messages. Modeled on works like the Rosetta Stone, the stele of Hammurabi, and cuneiform tablets, this part of the design turned the marker system into an artificial archaeological site. Debates are explored about how meanings are effectively communicated, with an emphasis on parallel languages as securing transmission of meaning countered by historical evidence of English literary texts that rapidly became difficult to read. The chapter explores how Rosetta Stone came to be treated as a metaphor for a key to decipherment that would have been familiar to the expert consultants. Archaeological context demonstrates that the models used never actually were aimed to communicate into long-term futures. An interlude after the chapter explores the experts’ understanding of how Land Art worked, and how the artists creating such works understood them.

The granite obelisk with inscriptions in Hieroglyphic and Greek which was transported by W. J. Bankes from Philae in Egypt to his home at Kingston Lacy in Dorset in 1829 played an important role in the story of the decipherment of hieroglyphs by Young and Champollion. Coinciding with the launch of the Rosetta Spacecraft mission in 2014, new digital images of the inscriptions on the base of the obelisk were made by a team from the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents, University of Oxford, using the technique of Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) and allowed improved versions of the texts to be corrected and verified.

The author worked with the European Space Agency to help plan its first mission to a comet, intended to analyse its thin atmosphere and land on the solid nucleus, and perhaps even to bring a core sample back to Earth. Decades later, the mission eventually flew under the name Rosetta, encountering Comet 67/P Churyumov–Gerasimenko in 2014 and going into orbit around it about thirty kilometres above its curiously shaped, rocky and icy surface. The Oxford group formed part of an international team, led by Italy, which developed the Visible-Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer for the mission. From orbit, VIRTIS was mapping the surface of the comet and its gas emissions to measure their composition, and watching from close by as the Philae lander is deployed.

The English poet of empire Rudyard Kipling penned the much quoted lines, ‘East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet’. Even if, by the early twentieth century, European observers had become overwhelmed by what they saw as fundamental differences between attitudes and styles of life in East and West, this was not true of the nineteenth century. Then, the ideal became the joining of East and West: a physical joining, through the Suez Canal, but also a cultural joining, as western Europeans relished the cultures of the Near East, and as the rulers of Near Eastern lands – the Ottoman sultans and their highly autonomous viceroys in Egypt – looked towards France and Great Britain in search of models they could follow in reviving the languishing economy of their dominions. This was, then, a reciprocal relationship: despite the claims of those who see ‘orientalism’ as the cultural expression of western imperialism, the masters of the eastern Mediterranean actively sought cultural contact with the West, and saw themselves as members of a community of monarchs that embraced Europe and the Mediterranean. Ismail Pasha, viceroy of Egypt between 1863 and 1879, always dressed in European clothes, though he would occasionally top his frock-coat and epaulettes with a fez; he spoke Turkish, not Arabic. Equally, the Ottoman sultans, and more particularly their courtiers (like Ismail, frequently Albanian), often sported western dress. They would, of course, be selective in their use of western ideas. The Egyptian viceroys were happy to send clever subjects to study at the École Polytechnique in Paris, a Napoleonic foundation; at the same time they discouraged excessive mixing in the French salons: they wished to import radical ideas, but about technology, not government. What had almost entirely disappeared by the early nineteenth century was the idea of the Ottoman realms as the seat of conquering warriors of the faith. Having lost their military and naval superiority in the East, the Ottomans were no longer the subject of fear but of fascination. Traditional ways of life caught the attention of western artists such as Delacroix, but other westerners, notably Ferdinand de Lesseps, the builder of the Suez Canal, were keen to promote modernization.