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By Root 1306 0

of individual hieroglyphs in what were presumably equivalent texts. There were many fewer of the former, again suggesting that the hieroglyphs were mainly letters and syllables. But which hieroglyphs correspond to which letters? Fortunately, Champollion had available to him an obelisk, which had been excavated at Philae, that included the hieroglyphic equivalent of the Greek name Cleopatra. The two cartouches for Ptolemy and for Cleopatra, rearranged so they both read left to right, are shown on p. 000. Ptolemy begins with P; the first symbol in the cartouche is a square. Cleopatra has for its fifth letter a P, and in the Cleopatra cartouche in the fifth position is the same square. P it is. The fourth letter in Ptolemy is an L. Is it represented by the lion? The second letter of Cleopatra is an L and, in hieroglyphics, here is a lion again. The eagle is an A, appearing twice in Cleopatra, as it should. A clear pattern is emerging. Egyptian hieroglyphics are, in significant part, a simple substitution cipher. But not every hieroglyph is a letter or syllable. Some are pictographs. The end of the Ptolemy cartouche means “Ever-living, beloved of the god Ptah.” The semicircle and egg at the end of Cleopatra are a conventional ideogram for “daughter of Isis.” This mix of letters and pictographs caused some grief for earlier interpreters.

In retrospect it sounds almost easy. But it had taken many centuries to figure out, and there was a great deal more to do, especially in the decipherment of the hieroglyphs of much earlier times. The cartouches were the key within the key, almost as if the pharaohs of Egypt had circled their own names to make the going easier for the Egyptologists two thousand years in the future. Champollion walked the Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak and casually read the inscriptions, which had mystified everyone else, answering the question he had posed as a child to Fourier. What a joy it must have been to open this one-way communication channel with another civilization, to permit a culture that had been mute for millennia to speak of its history, magic, medicine, religion, politics and philosophy.

Today we are again seeking messages from an ancient and exotic civilization, this time hidden from us not only in time but also in space. If we should receive a radio message from an extraterrestrial civilization, how could it possibly be understood? Extraterrestrial intelligence will be elegant, complex, internally consistent and utterly alien. Extraterrestrials would, of course, wish to make a message sent to us as comprehensible as possible. But how could they? Is there in any sense an interstellar Rosetta stone? We believe there is. We believe there is a common language that all technical civilizations, no matter how different, must have. That common language is science and mathematics. The laws of Nature are the same everywhere. The patterns in the spectra of distant stars and galaxies are the same as those for the Sun or for appropriate laboratory experiments: not only do the same chemical elements exist everywhere in the universe, but also the same laws of quantum mechanics that govern the absorption and emission of radiation by atoms apply everywhere as well. Distant galaxies revolving about one another follow the same laws of gravitational physics as govern the motion of an apple falling to Earth, or Voyager on its way to the stars. The patterns of Nature are everywhere the same. An interstellar message, intended to be understood by an emerging civilization, should be easy to decode.

We do not expect an advanced technical civilization on any other planet in our solar system. If one were only a little behind us—10,000 years, say—it would have no advanced technology at all. If it were only a little ahead of us—we who are already exploring the solar system—its representatives should by now be here. To communicate with other civilizations, we require a method adequate not merely for interplanetary distances but for interstellar distances. Ideally, the method should be inexpensive, so that a huge amount