AHSS101 - Seminar
Bilcan Bladanli
Rosetta stone, House of Wisdom,
Translation Movement, Grand Tour,
Tower of Babel
Rosetta Stone
 The Rosetta Stone is a stone with writing on it in two languages
(Egyptian and Greek)
 using three scripts (hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek)
 carved in 196 B.C.
 It is written in three scripts because when it was written, there were
three scripts being used in Egypt.
 So that the priests, government officials and rulers of Egypt could
read what it said.
 The first was hieroglyphic
which was the script used for
important or religious
documents.
 The second was demotic
which was the common script
of Egypt.
 The third was Greek which
was the language of the rulers
of Egypt at that time.

...
Although it is believed to have originally been displayed
within a temple, the stone was probably moved during
the early Christian or medieval period and used as
building material in the construction near the town of
Rashid (Rosetta) in the Nile Delta.
 And discovered there in 1799 by French
soldiers, during their Napoleonic expedition to Egypt.
 It is called the Rosetta Stone because it was discovered
in a town called Rosetta (Rashid).
What does the Rosetta Stone say?
 The Rosetta Stone is a text written by a group of priests in Egypt to
honour the Egyptian pharaoh.
 It lists all of the things that the pharaoh has done that are good for the
priests and the people of Egypt.
...
 Many people worked on deciphering hieroglyphs over several hundred
years. However, the structure of the script was very difficult to work
out.
 After many years of studying the Rosetta Stone and other examples of
ancient Egyptian writing, Jean-François Champollion deciphered
hieroglyphs in 1822.
 it was the essential key to modern understanding of Ancient
Egyptian literature and civilization.
 It’s translation provided the key to the modern
understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphs.
 The term Rosetta Stone is now used in other contexts as the name
for the essential clue to a new field of knowledge.
The House of Wisdom Baghdad
 The House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma) was
a major intellectual
centre during the Islamic Golden Age. The House of Wisdom
was founded by Caliph Harun al-Rashid and culminated
under his son al-Ma'mun who is credited with its formal
institution.
 Based in Baghdad from the 9th to 13th centuries
 Al-Ma'mun is also credited with bringing many well-known scholars
scholars including those of Persian or Christian background to share
information, ideas, and culture in the House of Wisdom. These
scholars were paid handsomely for teaching and translating texts into
Arabic. Also caliph Al Ma'mun paid some of the best translators a
books equivalent weight in gold.
 Al Ma'mun sent representatives to the libraries of Constantinople and
Sicily to borrow or copy their books to add to the library in the House
of Wisdom.
 Besides translating books into Arabic and preserving them, scholars
associated with the House of Wisdom also made many remarkable
original contributions to diverse fields.
 During the reign of al-Ma‘mun, astronomical







observatories were set up, and the House was an
unrivalled centre for the study of humanities
and for science in medieval Islam, including;
mathematics,
astronomy,
medicine,
alchemy and chemistry,
zoology,
geography and cartography.
Drawing on Indian, Greek, and Persian texts,
the scholars accumulated a great collection of
world knowledge, and built on it through their
own discoveries. By the middle of the ninth
century, the House of Wisdom was the
largest repository of books in the world.
TRANSLATION MOVEMENT
 One night in Baghdad, the 9th century Caliph Al-Ma’mun was
visited by a dream. The philosopher Aristotle appeared to him,
saying that the reason of the Greeks and the revelation
of Islam were not opposed. On waking, the Caliph demanded that
all of Aristotle’s works be translated into Arabic, and they were.
Over the next 300 years (about 800 A.D. to 1150 A.D.) major
works in philosophy, medicine, engineering and mathematics in
Greek, Syrian and other languages were translated into Arabic.
This attempt became known as the “translation movement”
 It’s led by a limitless excitement to import knowledge from
across the world, and it was a movement of extraordinary depth
and scope, and according to many scholars, awakened the
European Renaissance, and future generations.
TOWER OF BABEL
 The Tower of Babel is a story
told in the Book of Genesis
(also referred to as the Hebrew
Bible) meant to explain the
origin of different languages.
 The story of the city of Babel is
recorded in Genesis . Everyone
on earth spoke the same
language. As people migrated
from the east, they settled in
the land of Shinar.
Engraving The Confusion of Tongues by
Gustave Doré (1865)
 People there sought to make bricks and build a city and a tower with its
top in the sky, to make a name for themselves, so that they not be
scattered over the world.
 Then God came down and confounded their speech, so that they could
not understand each other, and scattered them over the face of the
earth, and they stopped building the city. Thus the city was called Babel.
 The 1st-century Jewish interpretation explains the construction of
the tower as a hubristic act of defiance against God ordered by the
arrogant tyrant Nimrod.
 But The Bible does not specifically mention that Nimrod ordered the
building of the tower.
 As the King James version of the Bible puts it:
 4 And they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose






top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be
scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.”
5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of
men had built.
6 And the Lord said, “Indeed the people are one and they all have one
language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose
to do will be withheld from them.
7 Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, that they may
not understand one another’s speech.”
8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the
earth, and they ceased building the city.
9 Therefore its name is called Babel, because there the Lord confused the
language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad
over the face of all the earth.
—Genesis 11:4–9
The Grand Tour
 The Grand Tour was the traditional trip of Europe undertaken by
mainly young English elites of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries often spent two to four years travelling around Europe in
an effort to broaden their horizons and learn about language,
architecture, geography, and culture in an experience known as the
Grand Tour.
 The Grand Tour began in the sixteenth century and gained
popularity during the eighteenth century.
 The term Grand Tour was introduced by Richard Lassels in his
1670 book Voyage to Italy. And Samuel Johnson observed in 1776 that
“A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an
inferiority from his not having seen what is expected a man should
see”
 The idea was for wealth young travellers to finish their education
with an extensive trip to Europe to experience its natural beauties,
its cultural treasures.
 The Grand Tourists were primarily interested in visiting those cities
that were considered the major centres of culture at the time - Paris,
Rome, and Venice were not to be missed. But the destination par
excellence was Italy with its Renaissance glories and classical
Splendours.
 Upon their return to England, Tourists were supposedly ready to
being the responsibilities of an aristocrat. The Grand Tour as an
institution was ultimately worthwhile for the Tour has been given
credit for an dramatic improvement in British architecture and
culture. The French Revolution in 1789 marked the end of the
Grand Tour for in the early nineteenth century.