The Rosetta Stone and the Origins of Our Life by Carlos Carnicero

There are only a handful of places or objects that have profoundly touched my soul. Without a doubt, the Vatican Crypt is one of them; I had the privilege of visiting it for the first time on a gloomy and cold day several years ago, early in the morning: the Japanese tourists were still asleep, and the solitude of the place where the Popes are buried overwhelmed me. I must return. There is a special light there and an atmosphere that cannot be defined because it is simply reserved. It penetrates the skin and resonates in small doses within each individual's personality, if one is aware of the embers of our civilization that lie forever in such a simple, solemn, and concentrated space.

Something similar occurs every time I visit the British Museum: an unavoidable visit to the Rosetta Stone to quietly offer a secular prayer for the intelligence of many individuals quietly woven throughout humanity without any multinational having to select these executives from history. Now that in Catalonia they want to mandate the dubbing of films, due to legal obligations, in a country where our children still struggle with English, the Rosetta Stone could represent a modern contribution to a multiculturalism that was structured more than two thousand years ago. There is no news of any Egyptian merchant being fined for labeling in any of the three languages instead of one of the other two.

The Stone impresses and exerts a magnetism that fades as more observers are drawn by the magnet of civilization contained within the very concepts of its existence. Nobody knows the deep reason why, of all the objects exhibited in the British Museum, the Rosetta Stone is the most visited.

The three languages in Ptolemaic Egypt - hieroglyphic, exclusive to priests; demotic, the common language of citizens; and Greek, used for administration and government - repeat a series of priestly decrees that affirm and bolster royal power.

Aside from the importance of the discovery of this stele, in perfect state of preservation, by the researchers who accompanied Napoleon during the conquest of Egypt, which allowed for the translation and understanding of hieroglyphic writing, it reveals something of a multiculturalism that today we find it difficult to mesh in our advanced societies.

Every language is a treasure that belongs to humanity, and its preservation is an unequivocal obligation. Living languages must remain active so that their dormancy does not endanger them with extinction, because every small link in our civilization is indispensable for understanding the resultant.

Now we face the challenge of expansive, instantaneous communication with little room for reflection and calm, which greatly complicates communication among people from different cultures, forced into a dizzying integration consistent with this globalized world.

Perhaps the Rosetta Stone should be moved to the room where the UN Security Council meets as a mantra of the duty we have at the beginning of the 21st century to serve the understanding among all with the great resultant of humanity's advances through the evolution of its culture. Without a doubt, if there is a pillar that underpins our history, it is in this massive block of black granite carefully sculpted by scribes who captured in all the languages at their disposal something that was so important that no one could fail to understand it. In the end, there are not so many things left to discover; it is enough to go to the sources of life. Without forcing anyone to choose which language they want to express themselves in.