A World Beneath the Sands, page 8
Sacred to the memory of Thomas Young M.D. Fellow and Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society Member of the National Institute of France. A man alike eminent in almost every department of human learning. Who, equally distinguished in the most abstruse investigations of letters and science, first established the undulatory theory of light and first penetrated the obscurity which had veiled for ages the hieroglyphicks of Egypt. Endeared to his friends by his domestic virtues, honoured by the World for his unrivalled acquirements, he died in the hopes of the Resurrection of the just. Born at Milverton in Somersetshire June 13th 1773, died in Park Square London May 10th 1829, in the 56th year of his age.46
A more poignant acknowledgement had to wait nearly a century and a half, for the 1972 exhibition in Paris marking the 150th anniversary of decipherment. In a unique act of scholarly cooperation, the British Museum lent France the Rosetta Stone. In a reciprocal gesture, Paris displayed the stone next to pictures of Champollion and Young – both of equal size.47
TWO
In the footsteps of Napoleon
Frontispiece of the Napoleonic Description de l’Egypte, which ‘framed and claimed’ the Nile Valley for European scholarship.
A single column from Karnak is more of a monument on its own than all four facades of the courtyard of the Louvre.1
JEAN-FRANÇOIS CHAMPOLLION, 1829
In the summer of 1824, Jean-François Champollion was riding high. His breakthrough Lettre à M. Dacier, followed two years later by his landmark Précis du système hiéroglyphique, had firmly (if not fairly) established his reputation as the undisputed decipherer of ancient Egyptian. By means of his scholarly exertions, he had also done a great service to his country and, most gratifyingly of all, bested the British. As his nephew was to put it in a later biography, Champollion’s discovery belonged ‘not only to him, ultimately to France’.2 In return for such a patriotic achievement, Champollion’s aristocratic patron, the Duke of Blacas, saw to it that appropriate rewards were forthcoming. He successfully petitioned the king to finance a study tour of Italy, to enable Champollion to examine, at first hand, the antiquities brought back from Egypt since the days of the Roman emperors.
Setting off from Paris that same summer, Champollion travelled first to Turin, capital of the Kingdom of Sardinia and seat of the House of Savoy. Thanks to his connections in Paris, the Frenchman came armed with letters of introduction from the Duke and Duchess of Orléans to the King and Queen of Sardinia. Turin’s Museo Egizio (Egyptian Museum) was a magnet for scholars, as it housed one of the longest-established collections of Egyptian antiquities anywhere in Europe. Seven decades earlier, in 1753, King Carlo Emanuele III (r.1730–73) had sent a botanist, Vitaliano Donati, on an expedition to Egypt to bring back objects for the royal collection. Donati had returned with 300 antiquities, largely from Karnak and Coptos, and these still formed the nucleus of the Museum’s holdings. Then, only a few months before Champollion’s arrival, the current King of Sardinia, Carlo Felice (r.1821–31), had greatly augmented the collection by purchasing part of the vast hoard of antiquities amassed by the French consul Drovetti. The sale comprised over five thousand objects, including a hundred statues, stelae, mummies and 170 papyri. When Champollion arrived in Turin, many of the treasures were still in their boxes, waiting to be unpacked.
As well as studying the objects, he was also keen to test his skills at decipherment on a whole host of new inscriptions. One papyrus, in particular, promised exciting new revelations for someone who could read the hieratic script in which it was written: the so-called Royal Canon of Turin dated from ancient Egypt’s New Kingdom and contained not one, but two extensive texts. One side of the papyrus listed tax returns from various districts along the Nile Valley; but – of far greater interest to scholars like Champollion – the other side was inscribed with eleven columns listing all the rulers of Egypt from the time of the gods down to the threshold of the New Kingdom. When the papyrus had been acquired by Drovetti, it was virtually complete. Champollion eagerly looked forward to reading it and discovering hitherto unknown details of ancient Egyptian chronology. When he came to unpack it, however, he was utterly dismayed and bitterly disappointed. During its long transit from Egypt to Turin, the papyrus had crumbled into pieces. Champollion was faced, not with a roll, but with a mass of jumbled fragments.3 He lamented: ‘I confess that the greatest disappointment of my literary life is to have discovered the manuscript in such a desperate condition. I shall never get over it – it is a wound that will bleed for a long time.’4
The condition of the Turin Canon, and Champollion’s attempts to piece it back together, weighed altogether more heavily on his mind than the death, during his stay in Turin, of the French king Louis XVIII. Despite Champollion’s revolutionary past, he had found royal favour, which both protected him from his enemies and enabled him to undertake his study tour. Indeed, feted by Turin’s nobility and invited by the King of Sardinia to catalogue the Drovetti collection, Champollion’s republican sympathies seem to have faded somewhat. He was enjoying his fame as the decipherer of hieroglyphics, and only too happy to accept invitations into the aristocratic salons of Piedmont. A still more exalted audience awaited him on the next leg of his tour, in Rome.
Ever since the days of Julius Caesar, the eternal city had been home to a glittering collection of Egyptian monuments, most notably obelisks. At least fifteen of these stone needles had been transported to the city during the Roman empire, of which thirteen still remained. A century and a half before Champollion’s arrival, Athanasius Kircher had copied (badly) and interpreted (fancifully) the hieroglyphic inscriptions on the most prominent obelisks. Now, as the first scholar truly able to read the inscriptions since Roman times, Champollion embarked on a systematic study. Very quickly he realized the deficiencies in Kircher’s work, and determined to produce accurate copies that would stand the test of time. (This would become something of a theme for the remainder of Champollion’s career.) However, before he could complete his study, Champollion – not usually one to be deflected from his scholarship – had to break off from his work. In June 1825, he was faced with an altogether more delicate assignment; for he had been summoned by the pope, Leo XII (r.1823–9), to a private audience at the Vatican.
Best known for his reactionary views, Leo XII was not particularly interested in Egyptology. He was, however, concerned with the infallibility of Church doctrine, and was therefore acutely aware of a debate that had raged over the date of the Dendera zodiac ever since its discovery by Napoleon’s expedition and subsequent removal to Paris by Lelorrain in 1821. By studying the positions of the stars portrayed in the inscription, no less a scholar than Jomard, the editor-in-chief of the Description de l’Egypte, had proposed a date of 15,000 BC. This was anathema to the Catholic Church which still held that the world had been created in 4004 BC. Louis XVIII, with his traditional views, had been scandalized, the arch-conservative Leo XII, appalled. A rival astronomer had suggested a much later date, 747 BC, and this scholarly dispute had come to epitomize the clash between religion and science. In the end Champollion had shown that the answer lay not in the position of the zodiac’s stars, but in the hieroglyphs of its accompanying text. In the summer of 1822, as he was finalizing his system of decipherment, he had read the cartouche in the lower right-hand corner of the zodiac as the title ‘autocrator’, firmly dating the monument to the Roman period. (The zodiac, along with the foundation of the temple of Dendera, is now dated to the reign of Cleopatra VII, shortly before the Roman conquest of Egypt). Jomard was incandescent, and would remain Champollion’s implacable opponent, frustrating his ambitions whenever he had the chance. But the Church was delighted, and relieved: the traditional date of creation could stand, unchallenged. When Champollion presented himself before a grateful pontiff in Rome, Leo XII is said to have repeated, three times and in perfect French, that the scholar had rendered ‘a beautiful, great and good service to the Church’.5 He even offered to make him a cardinal. Champollion politely declined. Insistent that so valuable a service demanded official recognition, the pope instead suggested to the French government that Champollion be admitted to the Légion d’honneur. What the scientific and political revolutionary made of all this is not recorded. It was certainly one of the strangest moments in Champollion’s illustrious career.
Escaping Rome two days later, and moving on to Florence, Champollion found himself in more familiar territory. Not to be outdone by the King of Sardinia, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Leopoldo II (r.1824–59), had also recently acquired a large collection of Egyptian antiquities. This one had been amassed by an Italian diplomat, Giuseppe di Nizzoli, who had served for seven years as chancellor of the Austrian consulate in Cairo. He had sold the first part of his collection in 1821 to the Austrian government. Three years later, he put a second part on the market, taking advantage of the interest (and high prices) generated by the Drovetti sale. Leopoldo II seized his chance and secured the collection for Tuscany. And who better to catalogue the objects than the greatest and most famous scholar of ancient Egypt in all of Europe, Jean-François Champollion? It was a relationship that would prove crucial for the next phase of Champollion’s studies.
On this first visit, however, Champollion stayed in Florence for only two weeks. He was anxious to head back to Turin to immerse himself for a second time in the spectacular Drovetti collection. En route, he received word that a further collection, amassed by Drovetti’s great rival Henry Salt, had been sent to Europe for sale and currently lay in store at the Livorno docks. Champollion’s interest was piqued, so in July 1825 he made a detour via Livorno to see Salt’s antiquities for himself. What he found more than lived up to expectations. The British consul had clearly enjoyed a flair for acquiring rare and important artefacts. With the Drovetti and di Nizzoli collections having been snapped up by ambitious rulers in Turin, Vienna and Florence, Champollion determined, there and then, that the Salt collection should come to Paris. Champollion’s motives were not entirely unselfish. If Paris were to acquire a significant collection of Egyptian antiquities, then the Louvre would have to appoint a curator to look after them; and Champollion saw himself firmly in the frame for such a prestigious appointment. All he needed to do was to persuade the French government, and, in particular, France’s new king, Charles X (r.1824–30).
In November 1825, just before the route across the Alps became impassable with the winter snows, Champollion made the journey from Turin to stay with his family in Grenoble, before returning to Paris to begin his lobbying. Unfortunately, the Salt collection was not the only one on the market; nor, Champollion discovered, was he the only plausible candidate for the Louvre curatorship. One by one, hoards of antiquities amassed by European collectors were being auctioned off to rival European courts, taking advantage of the newfound fashion for all things ancient Egyptian that the Description and decipherment had prompted. The latest collection to come onto the market was an extensive group of objects formed by an Italian horse-dealer-turned-excavator, Giuseppe Passalacqua. Among those advocating its purchase by the French state was Champollion’s arch-nemesis, Jomard, who rather fancied himself as inaugural curator of Egyptian antiquities at the Louvre. Once again, the Duke of Blacas came to Champollion’s rescue. Thanks to the duke’s powers of persuasion, Charles X issued a royal grant in February 1826 which enabled Champollion to return to Livorno to make a full study of the Salt collection and estimate its value. Champollion’s assessment was sufficiently favourable that, just two months later, after further intervention by Blacas, the French king approved the purchase of the Salt collection, and, a few weeks later, confirmed Champollion’s appointment to the plum new job at France’s national museum.
Champollion stayed in Livorno for a full six months, to supervise the shipment of the collection to Le Havre. Even this enforced delay turned out to be another stroke of luck. For Grand Duke Leopoldo II of Tuscany had sent a young scholar, a professor of oriental languages at the University of Pisa named Ippolito Rosellini (1800–43), to meet Champollion, hoping the great man might take the twenty-five-year-old under his wing. Rosellini asked Champollion directly if he would take him as his pupil. As Rosellini later recalled: ‘I immediately determined to follow him wherever he should go.’6 Not only did the two get on famously, beginning a lasting friendship and collaboration, but together they hatched an audacious plan: for a joint Franco-Tuscan expedition to Egypt, following in the footsteps of Napoleon but with all the advantages that decipherment had brought to the study of pharaonic civilization. It seemed fitting that a medal had recently been struck in France to celebrate the second edition of the Description de l’Egypte. The obverse showed a conqueror in Gaulish-Roman attire unveiling a voluptuous female personification of Egypt.7 If Egypt were to be uncovered anew, it was only right that it should fall to a Frenchman and an Italian to accomplish the task. Rosellini joined Champollion in Paris at the end of the year to discuss their plan in more detail.
For Champollion, who had devoted his entire adult life to the study of ancient Egypt, the prospect of actually visiting the land of the pharaohs, rather than reading about it in books, now lodged itself firmly in his imagination. But, on a more prosaic level, there was the overwhelming task of his day job. The Salt collection of 5,000 objects was followed, in 1827, by the second Drovetti collection. As a consequence of these two purchases, the Louvre now had the best holdings of ancient Egyptian antiquities outside Egypt itself. It fell to Champollion, as curator, to sort, study and arrange the objects in the new Egyptian galleries. Breaking with tradition, he determined to present the collection not as mere objets d’art but in historical order, to chart the development of pharaonic culture. It was an immense undertaking, not helped by his many enemies in the French capital and the vested interests at the Louvre. The old Parisian courtiers did not take kindly to this upstart scholar from the provinces with his radical ideas, and they worked to frustrate him at every turn. Already in November 1826, Champollion had written to Rosellini:
My life has become a fight . . . My arrival at the Museum has disturbed the whole place, and all my colleagues are conspiring against me, because instead of treating my position as a sinecure, I busy myself with my department, which inevitably makes it appear that they are doing nothing with theirs . . . Fortunately the minister is on my side, but I regret having constantly to involve him and weary him with all these political manoeuvres. How I long to be camped on the deserted plain of Thebes! Only there will it be possible for me to find at the same time both pleasure and rest.8
To add insult to injury, in 1827 Champollion was blocked from election to the Académie des Inscriptions; his radical views on politics and history seemed increasingly out of favour with the deeply conservative bent of Charles X’s government. Beset with frustrations and disappointments on every side, Champollion found Egypt calling him ever more loudly.
While the Description had brought the monuments of the Nile Valley to the forefront of European consciousness, in truth it had recorded an Egypt that was fast disappearing. Muhammad Ali’s modernization of Egypt gathered momentum throughout the 1820s and, as more land was brought under cultivation and factories began to spring up along the riverbanks, it was Egypt’s ancient monuments that bore the brunt. In the quarter century following the Napoleonic expedition, the Young Memnon and the sarcophagus of Seti I had been shipped to London, the Philae obelisk to Kingston Lacy, and the Dendera zodiac to Paris. Great quantities of smaller objects had been ruthlessly collected, then sold at a tidy profit, by European consuls and adventurers. Many of the antiquities that remained in Egypt fared even worse. At Aswan, the pillared chapel on the island of Elephantine was dismantled in 1822 to build barracks and warehouses; other monuments were demolished to feed lime kilns, while ancient mud brick made excellent fertilizer to support an increase in agricultural production. Between 1810 and 1828, thirteen whole temples were lost. Muhammad Ali even encouraged his engineers to use the Giza Pyramids as a convenient source of stone for the construction of new dams across the Nile. Little by little, Egypt’s archaeological sites were being cannibalized to feed its industrial revolution. And what economic development spared, treasure-hunting and slapdash excavation often claimed. The burial site of an ancient Egyptian hero, General Djehuty, was discovered by Drovetti in 1824, but the sumptuous contents were dispersed, unrecorded, and even the location of the tomb was lost.
As reports of this orgy of destruction began to reach Europe, scholars became increasingly concerned. A desire to record and preserve Egypt’s ancient patrimony before it was lost forever became a key motivation for nineteenth-century Egyptologists, starting with Champollion. In his case, a further spur to action may have been the sense of growing British activity in Egypt, as witnessed by the burgeoning number of travellers’ accounts. France may have lost the Battle of the Nile, but it wasn’t about to lose the battle of ideas or of science – not if Champollion had anything to do with it.
Rosellini’s patron, Grand Duke Leopoldo II, supported the idea of a Franco-Tuscan joint expedition from the outset. It would bring glory to his dynasty – then vying with the House of Savoy for pre-eminence in Italy – and promised to enrich his Florentine collection with further treasures. Charles X of France was rather less enthusiastic. However, the prospect of closer political ties with Tuscany and the opportunity to split the cost (a French-led expedition at half the price), coupled, no doubt, with further persuasion by the tenacious Duke of Blacas, finally won over the king. Royal permission for the expedition to proceed was granted on 26 April 1828 at an audience secured by La Rochefoucauld, minister of the royal household.
