Rosetta Stone

The message was a secret troop briefing laying out French and Allied positions just weeks before Austria went to war.

A European history researcher told the site that AI has the ability to act like a Rosetta Stone for translating all sorts of coded historical messages.

[upbeat music] A picture is worth a thousand words, and there's a few that might be worth more than that.

Nikon is on its annual hunt to find the funniest photos from the animal kingdom for its Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.

That's cool

... of the Rosetta Stone, and we all know the story-

Yes

... of the Rosetta Stone, that we didn't know how to, how to read Egyptian hieroglyphics-

Right

... until the Rosetta Stone had a different language on the same, the same passage In, I think, three languages, and so they were able-

Right

... to compare and start to unlock the language.

That's cool

... of the Rosetta Stone, and we all know the story-

Yes

... of the Rosetta Stone, that we didn't know how to, how to read Egyptian hieroglyphics-

Right

... until the Rosetta Stone had a different language on the same, the same passage.

In, I think, three languages, and so they were able-

Right

It is a short climb from the river, but the view is always worth the effort.

The square is dominated by the giant Rosetta Stone, a sculpture that reminds everyone why this town is famous.

Jean-François Champollion was born here in 1790, and he is the man who deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs.

It is a source of immense local pride.

Its timbered facade leaning slightly, as if it is whispering secrets to the street.

There are not many people out yet, just a few early joggers and a baker sweeping the steps of a shop.

I pause to look at the inscription on the Rosetta Stone itself, carved in French, Greek, and Demotic script.

It is a reminder of how language connects us, how a key found in one place can unlock the history of an entire civilization.

And we were like, gosh, that's really pretty, but who knows what it is.

And then somebody found that very famous and very convenient artifact known as the Rosetta Stone.

And they were like, aha, it's in Greek, which we know what it says.

And it's in Coptic, which we know what it says.

Demotic.

And the Egyptian bit turned out to be also demotic, but in the fancy old-timey religious way of writing it, which was hieroglyphs.

And because the Rosetta Stone contained a lot of proper nouns, they were able to figure it out because proper nouns almost never change, other than to fit the necessary changes between languages, like, oh, I don't actually have that letter in my alphabet, so I'm going to approximate it.

And they were like, oh, I can start to match up the names, and now I see that this is the same thing over and over, and I can, you know, whatever.

It's

the Rosetta Stone for you.

It's going to be

awful.

While some AI models have suggested Hebrew or other ancient languages as potential linguistic bases The translations they produce are often nonsensical or require so many manual adjustments that they lose scientific credibility.

So until a Rosetta Stone for the Voynich manuscript is found, it remains a silent witness to a forgotten mind, a 600-year-old secret that refuses to be told.

Next, the Tunguska event.

Now, the Tunguska event of 1908 is the largest impact event on Earth in recorded history, yet it left behind no crater, no fragments of a meteorite, and no definitive explanation that satisfies every branch of science.