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By Root 975 0

told was clearly a work of fiction, his idea that all the gods were representations of people who had once lived had significant influence for centuries, even carrying over into the Christian era. The belief that all of the Greek myths were based on actual events was used by early Christians to dismiss what they called pagan mythology as a purely human invention. In other words, Christians argued that the Greek gods—who were later adapted by the Romans—were not divine at all, and everyone should acknowledge the one true Christian God.*

This line of thinking about myths—that the gods were once humans—was later called “euhemerism” in honor of Euhemerus. It has continued into modern times, as people search for the historical foundations of many mythic characters and events, whether the historical reality of the Trojan War or the existence of the biblical Abraham or Moses. Even the greatest scientist of the Enlightenment, Isaac Newton (1642–1727), once attempted to document the myths as if they were actual events that could be identified. Universally recognized as a giant of science for his laws of physics, Newton was also a very devout Christian who devoted the last years of his life to an esoteric quest to bring his astronomical calculations in line with biblical history. Although it seems an odd activity for such an eminent man of science, Newton tried to base his chronology of world events on a mythical occurence—the famed voyage of Jason and the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece, one of the great quest stories of ancient Greece. Like other Christians, Newton credited the doctrine of Euhemerus and, accordingly, thought that the mythical voyage of the Greek hero Jason aboard his ship, the Argo, must have been a fact. Using his own, carefully kept astronomical records, Newton believed he could fix this event to an actual date. Accomplishing this, Newton argued, would also lead to calculating an exact date of the fall of Troy and hence of the founding of Rome by Aeneas, a refugee from the destroyed city of Troy. Newton, who may have been going mad in his later years from mercury poisoning, was never successful in this endeavor.

But a century after Newton, the search for the history behind myths took another great leap. Major archaeological discoveries during the nineteenth century transformed the European view of ancient civilizations. With the power of church and kings weakened after the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment-era quest for rational explanations of natural events began to replace the orthodox Christian view of the ancient world as simply barbarous. One of the key events spurring this quest was the discovery of the Rosetta Stone by Napoleon’s army in 1799. Half-buried in the mud near Rosetta, a city not far from Alexandria, Egypt, the stone is made of black basalt. Measuring 11 inches (28 centimeters) thick, it is about 3 feet 9 inches (114 centimeters) high and 2 feet 41/2 inches (72 centimeters) across. This stone had been carved to commemorate the crowning of Ptolemy V Epiphanes, king of Egypt from 203 to 181 BCE. (The Ptolemies were the rulers of Egypt who were heirs to Alexander the Great after he conquered Egypt. The line of the Ptolemies ended with Cleopatra and her royal machinations and disastrous affair with Julius Caesar and marriage to Marc Antony.) The Rosetta Stone contained three separate inscriptions: the first inscription was in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics; the second was in demotic, the commonly spoken language of Egypt at that time; and, at the bottom, the message appeared again in Greek.

Until this time, the language of ancient Egypt had been a mystery to the world. But a French scholar named Jean François Champollion (1790–1832) was able to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphics. With a knowledge of Coptic—a form of Egyptian that was written mainly with Greek letters—and using the Greek text as a guide, he was able to pick out the same names in the Egyptian text and learn the sounds of many of the Egyptian hieroglyphic characters, which enabled him to translate many Egyptian