A World Beneath the Sands, page 6
Indeed, it is the plates – all 974 of them – for which the Description remains most famous, and which have stood the test of time. Although the artists failed to reproduce many of the hieroglyphic inscriptions accurately, not knowing what they were copying, the images of monuments are much more reliable; in some cases, they are the only record of buildings which were subsequently damaged or destroyed. Nearly four hundred engravers were involved in the project; Denon himself contributed 140 drawings. The magnificent frontispiece to the first volume (dated 1809 but published the following year) was a masterpiece of propaganda, which both ‘framed and claimed Egyptian antiquity’.8 It shows a composite, mythical scene of pharaonic ruins: a winding road leads from an obelisk in the foreground, past sphinxes, a pyramid, temples, colonnades and columned halls into the far distance. The frame, under the protection of an Egyptian winged disc, captures the heroic nature of the expedition in a classical idiom. Along the top, Napoleon is shown in the guise of Alexander the Great, mounted on a chariot, spear in hand, and preceded by the French imperial eagle, bearing down on a group of hapless enemies. The sides, surmounted by further eagles, comprise a series of trophies bearing the names of the ‘conquered’ locations – from Alexandria via the pyramids and Thebes all the way to Abukir (the site of Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of the Nile, but included, nonetheless, without a hint of irony). The bottom register shows supplicant groups of Egyptians, complete with their horses and camels, parading before Napoleon’s imperial monogram. And, to complete the symbolism, a pair of cartouches – the oval rings within which pharaohs wrote their names – appear, each containing a star and Napoleon’s personal emblem, the bee.
By the time the final volume of the Description was published, in 1828, the emperor had been deposed, the Bourbon monarchy had been restored and was itself on the way to abolition. But the Description stood as a testament to France’s cultural superiority, proof of France’s ownership of Egypt’s ancient past. Champollion’s breakthrough of September 1822 merely confirmed that conviction.
Even before the last hieroglyphic inscription was carved, on 15 August AD 394, detailed understanding of the script had all but died out in the Nile Valley. Beyond Egypt’s borders, knowledge gave way to speculation, and all sorts of fanciful theories began to spring up about the meaning of the signs. As early as the first century BC, the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus had adumbrated that Egyptian writing was ‘not built up from syllables to express the underlying meaning, but from the appearance of things drawn and by their metaphorical meaning learned by heart’.9 Thus began the erroneous belief that hieroglyphic was a symbolic rather than a phonetic script; while this may have been true of some of the Ptolemaic-era signs, it was a fundamental misconception, a red herring which would deflect scholars from the path of successful decipherment for the next nineteen centuries.
European interest in the writing of the ancient Egyptians was revived at the beginning of the Renaissance, when a manuscript of the fourth-century work, Horapollo’s Hieroglyphika, was discovered on a Greek island and subsequently published in Italy in 1505. It caused a stir, and went through thirty editions (one of them with accompanying illustrations by Albrecht Dürer); but its whole approach, influenced by Neoplatonic mysticism, only served to obfuscate rather than illuminate the inner workings of the hieroglyphic script. Indeed, Horapollo’s readings were ‘more like a collection of conceits and enigmas than an exploration of a real system of serious literature’.10 Nonetheless, the idea that the key to Egyptian writing lay in mythology, not philology, became firmly lodged in European consciousness. The first post-classical work on the subject, the influential 1556 book Hieroglyphica (full title Hieroglyphica, sive, De sacris Aegyptiorum literis commentarii, ‘Hieroglyphics, or, Commentaries on the Sacred Letters of the Egyptians’) by the Venetian scholar Pierio Valeriano, followed the same, flawed approach, as did the wildly speculative publication by Kircher, a century later, of the inscription on a Roman obelisk. The bald truth was that, for over forty generations, no living soul had been able accurately to read an ancient Egyptian text.
Scholars began to think the task impossible. By the early eighteenth century, the English antiquarian, William Stukeley, could confidently assert that: ‘The hieroglyphics of the Egyptians is a sacred character . . . The characters cut on the Egyptian monuments are purely symbolical . . . The perfect knowledge of ’em is irrecoverable.’11 Pococke, in the 1743 account of his journey to Egypt, made the important realization that: ‘As far, therefore, as hieroglyphics are emblematical, they seem to stand for things; but as they are inscriptions, they stand for words or sounds as well as things, and might be read in the vulgar language by the children of the priests.’12 Two decades later, a French cleric, Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, correctly surmised that the cartouches might contain royal or divine names. But these were pinpricks of insight in an enveloping fog of misapprehension. Even the great French orientalist, Antoine Silvestre de Sacy, regrettably concluded that full decipherment was ‘too complicated, scientifically insoluble’.13
Only at the very end of the eighteenth century did a brave Danish scholar, Georg Zoëga, dare to suggest, against received wisdom, that some hieroglyphs might be phonetic after all. In the foreword to his book De origine et usu obeliscorum (‘On the origin and purpose of obelisks’), published in 1797, Zoëga suggested that: ‘When Egypt is better known to scholars, and when the numerous ancient remains still to be seen there have been accurately explored and published, it will perhaps be possible to learn to read the hieroglyphs and more intimately to understand the meaning of the Egyptian monuments.’14 It was a prescient statement. Just a year later, Napoleon launched his expedition to Egypt, exploring and publishing the country’s ancient remains and, in the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, providing scholars with the key that would finally unlock the mysteries of Egyptian writing.
In Cairo, one of Napoleon’s savants, the engineer Jean-Joseph Marcel, recognized the script in the middle section of the stone as demotic and correctly identified the royal name ‘Ptolemy’, by comparison with the Greek text where it occurred eleven times. He also guessed that the first two signs in the group must therefore be the letters ‘P’ and ‘T’; but was unable to take this hunch any further.15 So, when copies of the stone’s inscription began to circulate in Europe, it was a happy circumstance that they came to the attention of two of the most brilliant minds of the age – two men who could not have been more different in talent or temperament. One was a dazzling polymath, the other a single-minded obsessive; one a man of easy, self-effacing erudition, the other a self-conscious and jealous intellectual; for added piquancy, one was English, the other French. The rivalrous race to decipherment had begun.
Thomas Young was a man of his time. Born into a prosperous Quaker family that placed a high value on learning, he showed an early aptitude for languages alongside a fascination for science. By all accounts, he was able to read by the time he was two years old, and by the age of fourteen had gained some proficiency in French and Italian, Latin and Greek, Hebrew and Syriac, Arabic and Persian, Turkish and Ethiopic, as well as the obscure ancient languages Chaldaean and Samarian. He was encouraged in his studies by a great-uncle who moved in London’s fashionable intellectual circles. However, Young was not wealthy, and needed a profession to support himself. Medicine seemed to offer a socially respectable and financially rewarding career; so he enrolled, first at the University of Edinburgh, then at Göttingen (renowned in the eighteenth century for its outstanding library). A paper on the workings of the human eye gained him election to a fellowship of the Royal Society at the precocious age of twenty-one. (He would later serve as the society’s foreign secretary.) Finally, to gain the MD needed to practise as a doctor, he went up to Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1797 (a move which also required him to renounce his Quaker faith and join the Church of England), where his fellow students nicknamed him ‘Phenomenon Young’. It was a barbed compliment. Absorbed in his studies, Young attended few lectures, remaining instead in his room, carrying out his own experiments in the exciting new field of physics.
The year he entered Cambridge was a bittersweet one for Young. His great-uncle died, depriving Young of an influential and supportive mentor, but giving him financial independence thanks to a large legacy of property and money. Young was now able to pursue his own passions. Moving to London in 1799, he began practising as a doctor, but science remained his passion. An autodidact – while still at Cambridge, he had written to one of his brothers that, ‘Masters and mistresses are very necessary to compensate for want of inclination and exertion: but whoever would arrive at excellence must be self-taught’16 – he nonetheless achieved remarkable insights and breakthroughs. Alongside his observations on the human eye – explaining how the lens accommodates, describing astigmatism, and proposing a theory of colour vision – he also demonstrated the wave theory of light, an insight which Einstein regarded, after Newton’s Opticks, as ‘the next great theoretical advance’ in the subject.17 Among many other accomplishments, Young formulated the modulus of elasticity (still used by engineers), advised the Admiralty on shipbuilding, served as secretary of the Board of Longitude, and was an expert on life insurance. In 1802–3, when still only in his late twenties, Young gave a series of lectures at the Royal Institution in London, covering virtually every aspect of science; for sheer breadth of knowledge, it has never been surpassed. Also that year, during a brief lull in the Napoleonic Wars, Young was able to visit France and to hear Napoleon – fresh from his Egyptian adventures – speak at the Institut National in Paris. Little did either man know that Young would soon come closer than anyone else to snatching the crown of Egyptology from the French.
With his prodigious knowledge of languages, ancient and modern, and his supreme gifts as a linguist, it is not, perhaps, surprising that Young should have become interested in the philological conundrum of the age, the decipherment of hieroglyphics. In his own words, he could not resist ‘an attempt to unveil the mystery, in which Egyptian literature has been involved for nearly twenty centuries’.18 The challenge seems first to have piqued his curiosity in 1814 when he reviewed a recent German publication on the history of languages, Johann Christoph Adelung’s Mithridates, oder allgemeine Sprachkunde. At the same time, Young began studying a copy of the Rosetta Stone inscription. Blessed with an almost photographic memory, he started to discern patterns and resemblances that had escaped other, less punctilious observers. In particular, he noticed similarities between some of the signs in the demotic and hieroglyphic scripts (until then believed to be unrelated). His intuition was confirmed the following year when he consulted a borrowed copy of an early volume of the Description which included facsimiles of ancient Egyptian papyri. Young thus became the first scholar to suggest, correctly, that monumental hieroglyphs, cursive hieroglyphs and demotic were closely connected. Not only did this insight require an extraordinary combination of gifts, it also demanded a leap of imagination and the abandonment of centuries of false theories about ancient Egyptian writing. Young did not demur from rejecting Horapollo’s readings as ‘puerile’, nor from pouring scorn on Kircher’s attempts at translation: ‘according to his interpretation, which succeeded equally well, whether he happened to begin at the beginning, or at the end of each of the lines, they all contain some mysterious doctrines of religion or of metaphysics’.19 As for Kircher’s famous drawings of Egyptian obelisks, Young damned with faint praise, calling them ‘tolerably faithful, though inelegant, representations of the principal monuments of Egyptian art, which had before his days been brought to Europe’.20 Young also broke with received wisdom by correctly proposing that demotic combined both symbolic and phonetic signs. By contrast, other scholars working on the Rosetta Stone at the time, notably Champollion’s teacher Silvestre de Sacy and the Swedish diplomat Johan Åkerblad, wrongly concluded that demotic was entirely alphabetic. However, not even Young made the logical step of realizing that hieroglyphic, too, was a hybrid script. That breakthrough would have to wait for the laser-like brilliance of Champollion.
In common with many gentleman scholars of the early nineteenth century, Young kept up a lively correspondence with his contemporaries, in Britain and beyond, sharing observations and theories, and keeping abreast of new discoveries. However, Young never corresponded directly with Champollion. The reason was a remarkable letter, written by Silvestre de Sacy to Young on 20 July 1815. In it the French orientalist warned: ‘If I might venture to advise you, I would recommend you not to be too communicative of your discoveries to M. Champollion. It may happen that he may hereafter make pretension to the priority.’21
The teacher evidently knew his former pupil well, and his prediction would come true. As a result of Silvestre de Sacy’s letter – probably prompted by a political row with Champollion; the latter was a Bonapartist, while the teacher was a royalist, and Louis XVIII had been restored to the throne less than a month earlier – Young never shared his work on hieroglyphics with the only other scholar who could have truly appreciated it.
Alongside his scholarship on Egypt, Young’s research continued to be prodigious in its scope. His contributions to the 1816 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica ranged from annuities to waves. His article on languages was the first to use the term ‘Indo-European’, for Young recognized that languages as diverse as English, Latin and Greek all belonged to the same family. (He had achieved this insight while still in his teens, by comparing the key features of hundreds of languages.) But, naturally reserved and conditioned by his Quaker upbringing to value modesty, Young rarely wrote under his own name. Most of his articles, groundbreaking as they were, were published anonymously. For Young, the intellectual adventure was reward enough. All through 1816 and 1817, he continued to work on decipherment, eagerly studying any new publications of Egyptian manuscripts he could lay his hands on. Indeed, in 1817 he founded the Egyptian Society of London, for the express purpose of publishing pharaonic texts. Ever the gentleman scholar, he had no intention of following in Belzoni’s footsteps and going to Egypt to secure manuscripts himself. Instead, he appealed for funds ‘for employing some poor Italian or Maltese to scramble over Egypt in search of more’.22
In 1818, Young summed up his knowledge of hieroglyphic and demotic scripts in a further article for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published the following year in a supplement to the fourth edition. It was entitled, simply, ‘Egypt’. In it, he correctly established the phonetic values of some demotic signs, and a number of correspondences between the demotic and hieroglyphic scripts. Once again, the article was anonymous; Young did not publish it under his own name until 1823, a year after Champollion’s Lettre à M. Dacier. However, Young’s authorship of ‘Egypt’ was well known and recognized at the time of publication by those in his intellectual circle (which of course excluded Champollion). Henry Salt used the article to read the cartouches of Ptolemy on the temple of Dakka in Nubia, and mentioned the fact in a letter written to William Hamilton from Cairo on 1 May 1819.23 In 1820, Belzoni wrote of Young’s ‘discovery of the alphabet of the Egyptians’24 and included the article ‘Egypt’ as an appendix to his own work: ‘An Explanation of some of the principal Hieroglyphics, extracted from the Article Egypt in the supplement of the Encylopædia Britannica; with additional Notes’. However, the anonymity of the published article would subsequently allow Champollion to claim all the credit for decipherment, just as Silvestre de Sacy had predicted.
Champollion was seventeen years Young’s junior. Born in the town of Figeac, in the Lot, to a bookseller and his wife, Champollion grew up surrounded by writings and displayed a precocious genius for languages. Until the age of eleven, Jean-François was educated at home by his elder brother, Jacques-Joseph, himself a gifted scholar and linguist.25 In 1798, Jacques-Joseph asked to participate in the Napleonic expedition to Egypt, reflecting his established interest in the subject, but his request was turned down. Despite this disappointment, he continued to take an interest in the emerging discipline of Egyptology, and evidently transmitted his enthusiasm to his younger brother. When Jean-François turned eleven, he enrolled in the lycée in the city of Grenoble, 500 km from the family home, and renowned as a centre of learning. According to legend, it was during a visit to Grenoble in April 1802 by Fourier, eminent mathematician and participant in the Napoleonic expedition, that the young Champollion was invited to see the great scholar’s private collection of antiquities, sparking a lifelong fascination for ancient Egypt. Sadly, the known historical facts do not support the story; but it is likely that both Champollion brothers attended the soirées held by Fourier at his official residence in Grenoble between 1804 and 1806. (Fourier had been appointed prefect of the département of Isère by Napoleon on their return from Egypt in 1801.) Certainly, Jean-François first saw a copy of the Rosetta Stone in 1804, and started to learn Coptic the following year. In 1806, he presented a paper to the Grenoble Academy in which he (correctly) argued that Coptic was a direct descendant of ancient Egyptian; it was this insight, and his later fluency in Coptic, that would prove decisive in the decipherment of hieroglyphics. That same summer, the mayor of Grenoble is reported to have asked Champollion if he intended to study the fashionable natural sciences. ‘No, Monsieur,’ Jean-François is said to have replied. ‘I wish to devote my life to knowledge of ancient Egypt.’26
For a young man with such an ambition, there was only one place to go: Paris, the centre and beacon of French scholarship. So, in 1807, he enrolled at the Ecole Spéciale des Langues Orientales Vivantes where his teachers included Silvestre de Sacy. During two years in Paris, Champollion not only vigorously pursued his studies, but also wrote a major part of his first book, Introduction à l’Egypte sous les Pharaons (1811) and completed a second, L’Egypte sous les Pharaons, ou Recherches sur la géographie, la religion, la langue, les écritures et l’histoire de l’Egypte avant l’invasion de Cambyse. Description géographique (1814). On completing his studies in Paris, Champollion returned home to take up a teaching post in history and politics at Grenoble, being promoted to a chair at the town’s Collège Royal in 1818. This brought a measure of professional and financial security, and finally allowed Champollion to devote more of his time to the serious study of ancient Egypt. At exactly the same time, across the Channel in England, Thomas Young was writing his seminal article on ‘Egypt’. Almost entirely unaware of each other’s work, the two greatest minds of the age were engaged in a race to crack the code of hieroglyphic writing.
