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Egyptology Egyptology Hero of the hieroglyphs Andrew Robinson traces the life of the French archaeologist Jean-François Champollion, who deciphered the tantalising inscriptions of Ancient

n 1 May 1821, an alluring 1. Detail from portrait exhibition opened in of Jean-François 2 London’s Piccadilly Champollion painted at the exotic Egyptian in 1832 (the year of O his death) by Léon Hall, built in 1812 and inspired by the Egyptomania created by French Cogniet. Musée du archaeological discoveries in Egypt Louvre, Paris. © The Art Archive/Alamy. under Napoleon Bonaparte. A reviewer in The Times called it a 2. and 3. The Egyptian ‘singular combination and skilful Hall, built in 1812, in arrangement of objects so new London’s Piccadilly, and in themselves so striking’. It engraving from an ran for a year. 1828 drawing by On display was the interior of an Thomas Shepherd. Egyptian tomb in Thebes (modern This was an early example of the effect ), discovered in 1817, from of Egyptomania, what would soon come to be called which permeated the (by Jean-François Champollion) design of everything the Valley of the Kings. Actually, from buildings it was a one-sixth scale model, and monuments to 1821, no one – not even Champollion the Royal Society: a professional over 15 metres (50 feet) in length, fashion and jewellery. – knew the answer, because no one physician, a great physicist and a complemented by a full-sized Inside the Hall was could confidently read the hiero- brilliant polymath who had been reproduction of two of the tomb’s a reconstruction of glyphic script, despite the tanta- studying ancient Egyptian writing a pharaoh’s tomb most impressive chambers. lising Greek alphabetic clues in the since 1814. Young had examined chamber arranged The bas-reliefs and polychrome by Belzoni. After Stone, which had arrived in Belzoni’s and Ricci’s paintings and wall decoration, showing gods, Champollion’s London in 1799 and had been on observed a similarity between a goddesses, animals, the life of the decipherment, it was display at the British Museum since prominent hieroglyphic – pharaoh and manifold coloured identified as that of 1802. According to Belzoni, the that is, a small group of hieroglyphs hieroglyphs, had been re-created Seti I. tomb was ‘Presumed to be the Tomb inscribed within an oval ring – in the from wax moulds taken of the © The Trustees of the of Psammis’. This name came, very tomb, and similar carved original reliefs, and from paintings British Museum?. tentatively, from Dr Thomas Young on obelisks in and Egypt. The made on the spot by the tomb’s (1773–1829), foreign secretary of latter cartouches Young had already Italian discoverer, Giovanni Belzoni, and his compatriot, Alessandro Ricci, a physician-turned-artist who would go on to work extensively with Champollion in Egypt from 1828 to 1829. But perhaps the most startling object from the tomb arrived late from Egypt, and was temporarily deposited in the British Museum. This was a creamy-white calcite (Egyptian alabaster) sarcophagus carved outside and inside with hieroglyphs originally inlaid with ‘Egyptian blue’, that is, calcium copper tetrasilicate. Unlike the rest of Belzoni’s exhibition, it can still be seen as a key attraction in Sir John Soane’s Museum, not far from the British Museum, following its purchase by Soane in 1824. 1 For which pharaoh was this tomb, 3 and its sarcophagus, intended? In

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6. and 7. Sketches by called Paris ‘Babel’. But he did not grammatica, a grammar Champollion of the enjoy the spartan conditions as a of the Ethiopic script, which his Sphinx at and of boarder at Grenoble’s state lycée, bibliophile brother did his best to Ramesses IV’s tomb which he attended from 1804–7 procure. By 1807, he had focused in the Valley of the on the insistence of his brother, on , stimulated Kings, the abode of who struggled to pay his school by the presence in Grenoble of the Franco-Tuscan expedition in 1829. fees. Immediately he entered the Joseph Fourier, one of Napoleon’s school, he took refuge in philo- cultural savants in Egypt, who 8. A graffito made on logical research that had nothing had a major collection of Egyptian a pillar of the temple to do with his proper studies. His antiquities and who was at of Karnak in Luxor in schoolboy letters to his brother that time researching his presti- 4 1829. © Tony Roddam/ demanded numerous erudite gious ‘historical preface’ to the Alamy. works, such as Ludolphi Ethiopica first volume of the government’s identified with Psammis, Psamm1¡– 4. The Franco- however, Champollion went on to of royalist rule, and his frequently Description de l’Égypte with the uthis, or even Psammetichus, Tuscan Expedition read these earlier cartouches, and poor health. As Jacques-Joseph help of the Champollion brothers. the name of an Egyptian ruler to Egypt at Thebes, indeed hieroglyphic writing as a remarked after Champollion’s 5 6 In 1807–9, supported by Fourier mentioned in the writings of painted 1834–6 by whole. Thanks to Champollion’s premature death at the age of 41, and by his brother, Champollion Giuseppe Angelelli Herodotus, Manetho and Pliny: decipherment, the world came to just after his appointment as the studied in Paris at the School of (1803–44), a member three celebrated ancient historians of the expedition. know that Belzoni’s sarcophagus is world’s first professor of Egyptology Oriental Languages, again under of Egypt, who were Greek, Egyptian Champollion is shown from the tomb of Seti I, a militarily at the College of France: ‘I was, by spartan conditions. Working and Roman, respectively. Yet when seated (just to the successful pharaoh who was turns, his father, his master and his excitedly on a collection of the exhibition moved to Paris in the right of centre) with succeeded on his death in 1279 BC pupil.’ In later life, Jacques-Joseph Coptic manuscripts that had been second half of 1822, there was no a sword and wearing by his son Ramesses II, ‘the Great’. himself would become a noted ‘borrowed’ by Napoleon from mention of Psammis in the French Eastern garb and a red Jean-François Champollion was scholar. Known as Champollon- the Vatican Library, he convinced catalogue. Its author, Champollion cap. Archaeological born in 1790 in Figeac, in south- Figeac, he edited his late brother’s himself that Coptic might be similar Museum, Florence. – though writing under a precau- western France, at the edge of papers for publication in the 1830s to the language of the © Scala, Florence, tionary pseudonym – did not accept courtesy of the the Massif Central, far from the and after. section beneath the hieroglyphic of Young’s attribution. At this very Ministero Beni intellectual centres of France. In 1801, Jean-François moved the . Demotic was the moment, in his famous Lettre à M. e Att Culturali. Without the support of his elder from Figeac to Grenoble, to script used in the later centuries of Dacier, Champollion announced he brother, Jacques-Joseph, who was 12 live with his brother. He would Ancient Egyptian civilisation, before could read the cartouches of rulers 5. The tentative years his senior, he would probably reside there until 1821, with the Greek alphabet’s arrival in the from the Graeco-Roman period of hierogylphic ‘alphabet’ be unknown to the world today, breaks in Figeac and Paris, and Graeco-Roman period. In 1808, ancient Egypt, such as Alexander, published by Thomas given his modest family background, would regard Grenoble as home. using a copy of the Rosetta Stone, he Young in his article Cleopatra and Ptolemy, but he was his volcanic personality, his talent for Although Paris made him famous, translated Greek alphabetic words on Egypt, published not so confident about deciphering in the Encyclopaedia creating devoted enemies as well as he dreaded the city because of its into Coptic words using Coptic those of earlier Egyptian rulers. Britannica, 1819. close friends, his political sympathy poor sanitary conditions and its dictionaries, and tried to match During the rest of the 1820s, for republicanism during a period political infighting: he privately them with undeciphered demotic

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words. But he failed: the first of his 9. ‘Cleopatra’s Obelisk’ many failed attempts to decipher the in , Egyptian scripts. watercolour by In 1814-15, now as a professor Dominique Vivant Denon painted in at the University of Grenoble, July 1798, after the Champollion tried again, after arrival of the French appealing to London for an expedition. © Searight accurate copy of the Rosetta Collection, London. Stone, which brought him into contact with Thomas Young, who 10. The Rosetta cautiously agreed to help. But Stone, inscribed in again he abandoned the attempt, 196 BC: at the top is the hieroglyphic as politics intervened. Napoleon script; in the middle escaped from Elba and arrived in is the demotic; at the Grenoble, where Champollion’s bottom, the Greek elder brother became his secretary. alphabet. First studied At a meeting with the two brothers, by Champollion the Egyptophile Napoleon enthu- in 1808, it proved siastically offered to publish crucial to Thomas Champollion’s Coptic dictionary Young’s early steps in decipherment in and grammar in Paris. But after 1814-19. © The Napoleon’s fall from power a few Trustees of the months later, the Champollion British Museum. brothers lost their positions in Grenoble and were exiled to Figeac 11. Illustration of a in 1816–17. In Paris, Champollion’s bas from Abu 9 most influential professor, Sylvestre Simbel showing de Sacy, who was a royalist by Ramesses II in a chariot, from inclination, warned Young that and, in 1819, published a pioneering other words in demotic with their Champollion’s 11 Champollion was a potential Monuments de article on Egypt in Encyclopaedia hieroglyphic equivalents, spelt with a plagiarist of his British colleague’s L’Egypte et de la Britannica. This included his obser- mixture of phonetic and symbolic work and probably a ‘charlatan’. Nubie. © Bibliothèque vation, based on the Rosetta Stone signs, of which some 80 words, correctly analysed two hiero- 12. A manuscript page Further analysis led to his most Champollion’s brilliant insight In 1815, Young had hardly begun Nationale de France, and other inscriptions, of a almost half, are correct. glyphic cartouches on an obelisk from Champollion’s important publication in 1824, enabled the cartouche of another his research, but during the next Paris. ‘striking resemblance’ between During this period, Champollion from published by the British Grammaire égyptienne, Précis du système hiéroglyphique unknown pharaoh to be immedi- three years he was highly productive demotic signs and their ‘corre- made little progress. On return to traveller William Bankes (1786– published in 1836. des anciens Égyptiens. In it, he ately read by its discoverer, Howard sponding hieroglyphs’. Young Grenoble from exile in Figeac, he 1855). Judging from the obelisk’s stated: ‘Hieroglyphic writing is Carter – as ‘Tutankhamun’. n 13. Monuments de concluded that the demotic became a schoolteacher and even Greek base-block, the cartouches L’Egypte et de la a complex system, a script all at script consisted of ‘imitations considered becoming a notary – spelt ‘Ptolmes’ (Ptolemy) and Nubie by Champollion, once figurative, symbolic, and • Cracking the Egyptian Code: of the hieroglyphics… mixed not least to satisfy the expecta- ‘Cleopatra’: the beginnings of a published after his phonetic, in one and the same text, The Revolutionary Life of death by his brother 10 with letters of the alphabet’. tions of his potential father-in-law, promising hieroglyphic ‘alphabet’. in one and the same sentence, and, Jean-François Champollion by In other words, the demotic a Grenoble glove-maker. He finally Then, in September 1822, he Jacques-Joseph in I might even venture, in one and Andrew Robinson is published in script included both symbolic married Rosine Blanc in 1818 and was shown a four-sign cartouche 1835–45. Bibliotheque the same word.’ A century later, in paperback by Thames and Hudson (logographic) and phonetic had a daughter six years later. from drawn by a Nationale de France, 1922, in the Valley of the Kings, at £9.99. Paris. elements. His only notable publication on French architect who had visited But Young was unsure ancient Egypt in 1817–21 turned the site with Bankes. He read the 12 13 whether this was also true out to contain a blunder, a claim first sign as ‘ra’ from the Coptic for of the hieroglyphic script, that none of the hieroglyphic or ‘sun’ (which the sign appeared to which in 1819 was demotic signs had phonetic values. symbolise), and the final two signs considered to be purely A few months later he withdrew as a double ‘s’ (from the ‘s’ sign in symbolic, apart from the publication and never referred ‘Ptolmes’). He then guessed that the some phonetic spellings to it again. second, wholly unknown, sign might of Graeco-Roman By late 1821, he had been forced to represent ‘m’ – because the four signs names in cartouches. leave Grenoble when he was prose- would then spell ‘ramss’: the name Two of these, Ptolemy cuted by the city’s royalist author- of the Egyptian pharaoh, Rameses, and Berenice, Young ities for supposedly taking part in mentioned in Manetho’s Aegyptiaca. analysed into a chart a rebellion, at the very time of the The same ‘m’ sign appeared on the of 13 phonetic Egyptian Hall exhibition in London. Rosetta Stone, again with the ‘s’ symbols, which he Though acquitted of the charge, in sign, as part of a group of hiero- cautiously labelled deep despair and declining health he glyphs with the Greek translation ‘SOUNDS?’: six of settled with his brother in Paris. But ‘genethlia’, meaning ‘birthday’, which are today the unwanted move turned out to which reminded Champollion of the considered correct, lead to his breakthrough – possibly, Coptic word for ‘give birth’, ‘mise’. three partly correct though not provably, provoked by This was close, but not quite correct: and four incorrect. In Champollion’s reading in Paris of today we know that the sign stands addition, Young was able, Young’s article, ‘Egypt’, with its not for ‘m’ but is, instead, a bicon- with the help of the Greek prescient mixture of (partly correct) sonantal sign standing for ‘ms’. portion of the Rosetta Stone, to phonetic and symbolic signs. Even so, Champollion had nailed compile a vocabulary of names and In early 1822, Champollion Rameses.

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