The Rosetta Stone

British physicist Dr. Thomas Young who, with Jean Francois Campolion, was largely responsible for deciphering the Rosetta stone, the first and major key to our understanding of hieroglyphics. But it was a synchronicity that led the way.

In 1822, Young was studying a manuscript written in hieroglyphics, but except for 3 names written in Greek characters, he couldn’t decipher a word of it. The names were Apollonius, Antigonus, and Antiochus – which he read as Antimachus. He finally put the papyrus away and opened up another shipment that had arrived recently. It contained another papyrus and as he scanned it, he noticed the same names he had just read in the Egyptian manuscript, but in a sightly different form – Portis Apollonii and Antimachus Antigenis.

Young suddenly realized that in front of him was a translation for the hieroglyphics. The document had somehow survived for 2,000 years and had come to him from an entirely different part of the world, at the exact moment when he needed it. He later wrote that in an earlier time, such a conspiracy of events would have been sufficient to convince people that not only had he learned hieroglyphics, but knew the secrets of Egyptian sorcery as well!

At the time, such remarkable luck was called coincidence, and it would take more than a century before Carl Jung would return some of the flavor of sorcery into such ‘co-incidents’  and label them synchronicity.