0:00 How often does the person who changes the world get written out of the story?0:05 Last week, we talked about Stanislav Petrov, the man who saw the truth on a screen and saved us all from nuclear war by doing nothing.0:15 Mm-hm, a moment of profound, quiet judgment.0:19 He held the world in his hands and just… waited.0:22 Exactly.0:23 And this week, we have another quiet moment.0:26 Not one that prevented an ending, but one that created a beginning.0:31 It’s the story of the man who found the key to a lost civilization, and then had to watch as someone else unlocked the door.0:41 You’re talking about the Rosetta Stone.0:44 But you’re not talking about Champollion.0:47 I’m not.0:48 I’m talking about Pierre-François Bouchard.0:51 An engineer, a lieutenant in Napoleon’s army, standing in the dust and heat of Egypt in July, seventeen ninety-nine.1:00 Not a scholar or a linguist.1:02 He was there as part of a military campaign, in charge of rebuilding a fort near the town of Rosetta.1:09 A totally practical job.1:11 And his men are tearing down an old wall when they find it.1:16 A slab of dark stone, about four feet high.1:19 It’s heavy—nearly a ton.1:21 And it’s covered in writing.1:23 And not just one kind of writing.1:25 That’s the crucial part.1:27 At the top, the pictorial script of the pharaohs: hieroglyphics.1:32 In the middle, a cursive script called Demotic.1:36 And at the bottom, a language the French scholars could read: Ancient Greek.1:41 And Bouchard, this engineer, looks at this slab and has the single most important insight.1:48 He doesn't know what it says.1:50 But he knows, instinctively, that it probably says the SAME thing, three times.1:56 Which would make it a dictionary.1:59 A key.1:59 The newspaper in Cairo, the Courier de l’Egypte, reported it almost immediately.2:05 They said, "maybe it will even prove to be the key to understanding them." The potential was obvious from day one.2:14 So Bouchard makes sure the stone is protected.2:18 It’s sent to Cairo, to Napoleon’s new institute, where scholars immediately start making casts and prints of the inscriptions.2:27 The race to decipher it is on, and Bouchard has fired the starting pistol.2:33 But then, the tide of war turns.2:35 Things did not go well for the French in Egypt.2:39 By eighteen oh-one, they are defeated by British and Ottoman forces.2:44 And everything changes.2:46 The British General, a man named Hutchinson, declares that all the archaeological treasures the French have collected are now spoils of war.2:56 They are the property of the British Crown.2:59 Spoil of war is such a… sanitized phrase.3:03 It was plunder.3:04 It was.3:04 The French scholars tried to resist.3:07 They said the British could have their cannons, but not their discoveries.3:13 But the general was insistent.3:15 And the prize he wanted most was that "beautiful black granite stone." So the stone is seized.3:22 It’s put on a captured French frigate, renamed the Egyptienne, and shipped to England.3:28 A letter from the British Major General escorting it calls it a "proud trophy of the arms of Britain." A trophy.3:37 And just like that, Pierre-François Bouchard’s discovery is no longer his.3:43 It’s not even French anymore.3:45 It belongs to someone else.3:47 He found the key, and now it’s been taken from his hand.3:51 He never sees it again.3:53 And the intellectual work continues, but now it’s happening in London and Paris, with scholars working from the copies Bouchard helped create.4:04 The stone itself is put on display in the British Museum in eighteen oh-two.4:09 And for twenty years, the puzzle remains unsolved.4:13 An English polymath, Thomas Young, makes some progress.4:17 He figures out that the ovals—the cartouches—contain royal names.4:22 But he can’t quite make the final leap.4:25 That leap was for Jean-François Champollion.4:28 The man who truly cracked the code.4:31 He was obsessed.4:32 He knew Coptic, the descendant of the ancient Egyptian language, and that was his advantage.4:39 In eighteen twenty-two, he finally understands that the hieroglyphs are a mix of phonetic sounds and ideas.4:47 He deciphers the names Ptolemy and Cleopatra.4:51 And his name becomes legend.4:53 Champollion, the genius who unlocked the secrets of the pharaohs.4:58 His name is forever tied to the Rosetta Stone.5:01 And Bouchard’s is not.5:03 Bouchard’s is a footnote.5:05 He went on with his military career, was even taken as a prisoner of war for a time.5:11 He did his duty.5:13 But the discovery that could have defined his life… it happened, and then it simply moved on without him.5:20 Because history so often remembers the person who provides the answer, not the one who first understood the question.5:29 Exactly.5:30 Bouchard understood the question posed by that slab of stone.5:35 But he never got the chance to find the answer.5:38 He was just the man in the right place, at the right time, with just enough insight to change the world—before the world moved on and forgot his name.
