Hieroglyphic writing, hitherto regarded as formed purely of signs that represent ideas and not sounds or pronunciations, was, on the contrary, formed of signs of which the vast majority express the sounds of words in the spoken Egyptian language, that is to say phonetic characters.
(Jean-François Champollion, Précis du système hiéroglyphique des anciens Égyptiens, 1824)
Ancient Egypt was as celebrated in ancient Athens and ancient Rome as it was in 19th-century Paris and London. It had exerted a powerful influence on the world of learning for well over two millennia, ever since the historian Herodotus travelled in Egypt around 450 BC, perhaps reaching as far south as Aswan. In his Histories, written in Greek, Herodotus shrewdly identified the pyramids at Giza as places of royal burial, and provided important information about the process of mummification. Yet the works of Herodotus were of little or no help to modern scholars such as Champollion in understanding ancient Egyptian writing.
Hieroglyphic writing fell into disuse in classical antiquity: the latest surviving hieroglyphic inscription was carved by a priest on the Gate of Hadrian, on the island of Philae, in AD 394. Although this date comes at the end of the period of Greek and Roman rule in Egypt, in reality accurate knowledge of the language and script of the pharaohs had already dwindled. Even Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, who took a Nile cruise together on board a royal barge in 47 BC and no doubt stopped to visit the Pyramids, viewed ancient Egypt essentially as ‘tourists’, the present-day Egyptologist John Ray aptly reminds us, ‘since more years stand between Cleopatra and Djoser, the king for whom the Step Pyramid was built’ – in about 2650 BC – ‘than separate Cleopatra from ourselves’.
The reason for the hieroglyphic script’s growing disuse was, of course, that the ancient civilization it described went into eclipse when Egypt was conquered first by Persians, in 525 BC, then by Macedonian Greeks, in 332 BC. (Alexander the Great, who led the campaign, founded the city of Alexandria a year later.) After Alexander, for three centuries Egypt was ruled by the Greek-speaking Ptolemaic dynasty, named after Alexander’s general, Ptolemy I; that period ended with the death of Cleopatra VII in 30 BC and the Roman occupation, which lasted until AD 395. The 4th century AD saw the rise of Christianity and Coptic Christian rule. The Library of Alexandria was destroyed by Christian edict at the end of that century, and subsequently many ancient Egyptian temples, such as the temple of Isis at Philae, were converted into Coptic churches. The word ‘Copt’ was derived from the Arabic qubti, which itself came from the Greek Aiguptos (Egypt). Spoken Coptic, the Coptic language, was descended from the language of ancient Egypt, but written Coptic, the Coptic script, was not in any way hieroglyphic; instead it was entirely alphabetic, like Greek and Latin. Invented around the end of the 1st century AD, the Coptic script’s standard form consisted of twenty-four Greek letters plus six signs borrowed from ancient Egypt – not from the older hieroglyphic script, but from the much more recent demotic (the middle of the three scripts that appear on the Rosetta Stone, as we shall see).
However, such were ancient Egypt’s historic customs and architectural magnificence, even if it lay in ruins, that the Greeks and Romans – especially the Greeks – regarded Egypt with a paradoxical mixture of reverence for its wisdom and antiquity, and contempt for its latter-day ‘barbarism’. Their attitude somewhat resembled the way British imperialists viewed ancient India’s vanished Buddhist civilization during the period of colonial rule. The very word ‘hieroglyph’ derives from the Greek for ‘sacred carving’. Herodotus calculated that 11,340 years had elapsed between the first Egyptian king and his own day on the basis of information provided to him by priests – giving Egyptian civilization a fabulous antiquity that Herodotus apparently accepted as the truth. Egyptian obelisks were taken to ancient Rome and became symbols of prestige; today, thirteen obelisks stand in Rome, while only four remain in Egypt.
Greek and Roman authors generally credited Egypt with the invention of writing, as a gift from the gods (Pliny the Elder, however, attributed it to the Mesopotamian creators of cuneiform). But no ancient Greeks or Romans seem to have learned how to speak or write the contemporary Egyptian language – surprisingly, given the cosmopolitanism of ancient Alexandria. Certainly they did not know how to read hieroglyphs, despite their claims to the contrary. Although their surviving accounts of Egyptian writing vary, they agree in dismissing any phonetic component of hieroglyphic script, while seeming to allow phoneticism in other, non-hieroglyphic, Egyptian scripts. According to the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the 1st century BC, Egyptian writing was ‘not built up from syllables to express the underlying meaning, but from the appearance of the things drawn and by their metaphorical meaning learned by heart’. In other words, the hieroglyphs were thought to be conceptual or symbolic, not alphabetic like the Greek and Latin (or Coptic) scripts – a crucial distinction in the story of their decipherment. Thus a hieroglyphic picture of a hawk was said to represent the concept of swiftness, a crocodile to symbolize all that was evil. In this firm belief, the Greek and Roman writers were encouraged by Egyptian scribes’ natural tendency to emphasize a connection between the pictorial shape of a hieroglyph and its meaning, especially during the Greco-Roman period.
By far the most important classical authority on Egyptian writing was an Egyptian magus named Horapollo (Horus Apollo), who supposedly hailed from Nilopolis in Upper Egypt. Horapollo’s treatise Hieroglyphika was probably composed in Greek during the 4th century AD or later, and then sank from view until a manuscript was discovered by an intrepid Florentine traveller and archaeologist on a Greek island in about 1419 and became known in Renaissance Italy. Published in 1505, the Hieroglyphika was hugely influential: it went through thirty editions, one of which was illustrated by Albrecht Dürer, was studied by Champollion in France in 1806, and even remains in print.
Horapollo’s readings of the hieroglyphs were a combination of the (mainly) fictitious and the genuine. Thomas Young called them ‘puerile … more like a collection of conceits and enigmas than an explanation of a real system of serious literature’. For instance, according to the esteemed Hieroglyphika,
When they wish to indicate a sacred scribe, or a prophet, or an embalmer, or the spleen, or odour, or laughter, or sneezing, or rule, or judge, they draw a dog. A scribe, since he who wishes to become an accomplished scribe must study many things and must bark continually and be fierce and show favours to none, just like dogs. And a prophet, because the dog looks intently beyond all other beasts upon the images of the gods, like a prophet.
– and so on. As we now know, thanks to Champollion, there are elements of truth in this, mixed with absurdity: the jackal (‘dog’) hieroglyph writes the name of the god Anubis, who is the ancient Egyptian god of embalming, a smelly business (hence Horapollo’s meaning ‘odour’?). A recumbent jackal writes the title of a special type of priest, the ‘master of secrets’, who would have been a sacred scribe and considered something of a prophet. A striding jackal can also stand for an official, and hence perhaps for a judge.
Cynocephalus, a fabled dog-headed man, as drawn by the Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer, inspired by Horapollo.
(Woodcut from C. Giehlow, Die Hieroglyphenkunde, 1915.)
The Arab invaders who occupied Christian Egypt in 642 and introduced Islam came to have a marginally more accurate understanding of the hieroglyphs because they at least believed that the signs were partly phonetic, not purely symbolic. (Arab scholars who attempted to read individual hieroglyphs made little progress, however.) But this belief did not pass from the medieval Islamic world to the European. Instead, stimulated by Horapollo’s writings, scholars of the Italian Renaissance came to accept the Greek and Roman view of hieroglyphs as symbols of wisdom. The first of many in the modern world to write a whole book on the subject was a Venetian with the Latin name Pierius Valerianus. He published his work in 1556, and illustrated it with delightfully fantastic ‘Renaissance’ hieroglyphs.
The most famous of these interpreters was the German Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher, whose works were thoroughly studied by Champollion. In the mid-17th century Kircher became Rome’s accepted pundit on ancient Egypt. But his voluminous writings took him far beyond ‘Egyptology’. He is ‘sometimes called the last renaissance man’ (notes the Encyclopaedia Britannica), and was even dubbed ‘the last man who knew everything’ in the subtitle of a recent academic study of Kircher, because he attempted to encompass the totality of human knowledge. The result was a mixture of folly and brilliance – with the former easily predominant – from which his intellectual reputation never recovered, fascinating though his polymathy may be to modern eyes.
In 1666, Kircher was entrusted with the publication of a hieroglyphic inscription that appears on a small ancient Egyptian obelisk in the Piazza della Minerva, Rome. The monument was erected on the orders of Pope Alexander VII and follows a design by the sculptor Bernini, in which the Egyptian inscription is mounted on a stone elephant, the whole supposedly encapsulating the concept of ‘wisdom supported by strength’. Kircher gave his (entirely conceptual) reading of a cartouche on the obelisk as follows: ‘The protection of Osiris against the violence of Typho must be elicited according to the proper rites and ceremonies by sacrifices and by appeal to the tutelary Genii of the triple world in order to ensure the enjoyment of the prosperity customarily given by the Nile against the violence of the enemy Typho.’ The accepted modern reading of this cartouche is simply the name of a late pharaoh, Wahibre (Greek name Apries), of the 26th dynasty!
Athanasius Kircher, Jesuit priest and polymath, in a 1678 portrait based on an engraving by Cornelis Bloemart II made in 1664, when Kircher was about 62 years old.
(Portrait of Athanasius Kircher. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.)
‘Wisdom supported by strength’. This Egyptian obelisk, mounted on an elephant according to a design of 1666 by Bernini, stands today in Rome. Its hieroglyphs were fancifully interpreted by Athanasius Kircher.
(Obelisk in Piazza della Minerva, Rome, resting on an elephant designed by Bernini. Photo Pierrette Guerin/istockphoto.com.)
By contrast, Kircher genuinely assisted in the rescue of Coptic when he published the language’s first European grammar and vocabulary in 1636. From the 4th to the 10th centuries, the Coptic language had flourished throughout Egypt, where it was the official language of the Christian Church. It had then been replaced by Arabic, except within the Coptic Church. By the time of Kircher, in the mid-17th century, it was headed for extinction, though it was still used in the liturgy (as Champollion would delightedly hear for himself from a Coptic priest in a Paris church in 1807). Curiously, Kircher failed to perceive a link between the spoken Coptic of Egyptian Christians and the pagan language of ancient Egypt. However, in the 18th century several European scholars came to acquire a knowledge of Coptic and its alphabet. Their learning – absorbed and deepened by Champollion – would prove essential in reconstructing the probable ancient Egyptian language during the decipherment of the hieroglyphs.
In the meantime, Kircher’s fantastic interpretations of the hieroglyphs licensed many other wrong-headed theories. For example, a Swedish diplomat, Count Palin, suggested in three publications during 1802–4 that parts of the biblical Old Testament were a Hebrew translation of an Egyptian text. It was a reasonable conjecture, given the importance of Egypt in the Bible – until, that is, Palin tried to reconstruct the Egyptian text by translating the Hebrew into Chinese. This was not quite as crazy as it sounds, given that both Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters have a very strong conceptual and symbolic component, originating from the pictorial nature of many of their earliest signs. But Palin went much too far with his hieroglyphic extravaganza. As Young coolly noted:
The peculiar nature of the Chinese characters … has contributed very materially to assist us in tracing the gradual progress of the Egyptian symbols through their various forms; although the resemblance is certainly far less complete than has been supposed by Mr Palin, who tells us, that we have only to translate the Psalms of David into Chinese, and to write them in the ancient character of that language, in order to reproduce the Egyptian papyri, that are found with the mummies.
Nevertheless, the existence of a conceptual component of the Chinese script – and, moreover, a particular element in common between Chinese characters and Egyptian hieroglyphs, discovered later – would offer important clues towards deciphering the hieroglyphs in the more cautious hands of Champollion, Young and others.
The first ‘scientific’ step in the right direction came from an English clergyman. In 1740 William Warburton, the future bishop of Gloucester, suggested that the origin of all writing, hieroglyphic included, might have been pictorial rather than divine. A French admirer of Warburton, Abbé J.-J. Barthélemy, then made a sensible guess in 1762 that obelisk cartouches might contain the names of kings or gods. (Ironically, he arrived at this conclusion on the basis of two false observations, one being that the hieroglyphs enclosed in the oval rings differed from all other hieroglyphs.) Finally, near the end of the 18th century, a Danish scholar, Georg Zoëga, hazarded another useful, though unproven, conjecture: that some hieroglyphs might, at least in some measure, be what he called ‘notae phoneticae’ – Latin for ‘phonetic signs’ – representing sounds rather than concepts in the Egyptian language. The path towards decipherment was gradually being cleared of ancient debris at last.
And now we reach a turning point: the arrival of Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion force in Egypt in 1798, and the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. The word ‘cartouche’, as applied to Egyptian hieroglyphs, dates from this fateful encounter between Occident and Orient. For the oval rings around some hieroglyphs, so easily visible to the soldiers on temple walls and other monuments in Egypt (even on the walls of mosques constructed out of ancient Egyptian inscribed stones), reminded the French soldiers of the cartouches (cartridges) in their guns.
Fortunately, the military force was almost as interested in culture as in conquest. A large party of French scholars and scientists – savants who included the mathematician Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier, Champollion’s later mentor – accompanied the army; there were also many artists, such as the dashing Dominique Vivant Denon, who was shortly to be appointed director of the Louvre Museum in Paris by Napoleon. The artists provided illustrations for the nine elephantine volumes of the Description de l’Égypte, the astonishing French government record of the savants’ Egyptian studies that would be published between 1809 and 1828, and whose hieroglyphic reproductions would dominate Champollion’s apprentice years.
Yet the great expedition did not lead to immediate progress in decipherment. In the cautionary words of Denon’s highly influential and still very readable Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt, during the Campaigns of General Bonaparte, first published in Paris in 1802 and constantly reprinted during the 19th century:
Every relic of antiquity that is discovered, furnishes ground for an assertion, but often for one that is made in support of error … each [scholar] has endeavoured to see in the first fragment of the Egyptian documents brought into Europe the proofs of a system prematurely adopted; impatient, each has endeavoured to find an explanation of the heavens, of the earth, of the principles of the government of this people, and a picture of its manners, and the ceremonies of its worship, of its arts, of its sciences, and of its labours: the hieroglyphical forms have contributed to the delirium of the imagination; and, leaning on hypotheses, each has proceeded, with equal authority, in different directions, all alike obscure and hazardous.
When a demolition squad of military engineers discovered the Rosetta Stone in July 1799 while rebuilding an old fort in the village of Rashid (Rosetta), in the Nile Delta, the officer in charge quickly recognized the importance of its three parallel inscriptions and sent it to the savants in Cairo. That October Napoleon himself, recently returned from Egypt, told the National Institute in Paris: ‘There appears no doubt that the column which bears the hieroglyphs contains the same inscription as the other two. Thus, here is a means of acquiring certain information of this, until now, unintelligible language.’ Copies of the inscriptions were made and sent to Paris in 1800. But the stone itself was captured by the British army after its victory over the French in 1801 and shipped to London. Plaster casts were made by the Society of Antiquaries for the universities at Cambridge, Dublin, Edinburgh and Oxford, and facsimiles were sent to various institutions in Europe and America, including the National Library in Paris. In 1802 the stone entered the collections of the British Museum. The left edge was inscribed: ‘Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801’, and the right edge: ‘Presented by King George III’. Immediately, the stone became an enduring symbol of Anglo-French rivalry: for example, in 1991, during the bicentenary of Champollion’s birth, Jean Leclant, a leading French Egyptologist and permanent secretary of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres in Paris, misremembered the left-edge inscription as: ‘Taken from the French army, Alexandria 1801’!
Visit by Napoleon Bonaparte to the headquarters – in a former Mamluk harem – of the recently founded Institut d’Égypte in Cairo, 1798, published in the Description de l’Égypte.
(Napoleon visits the Institut d’Égypte, Cairo, 1798. Plate from Description de l’Égypte, 1809.)
The earliest copy of the Rosetta Stone, made by French savants in Cairo in 1800, the year after its discovery at Rosetta. The hierogyphic section is the most damaged.
(Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.)
From the moment of discovery, it was clear that the inscription on the stone was written in three different scripts, the bottom one being the Greek alphabet, and the top one – unfortunately the most damaged – Egyptian hieroglyphs with visible cartouches. Sandwiched between them was a script about which little was known. It plainly did not resemble the Greek script, but it seemed to bear at least a fugitive resemblance to the hieroglyphic script above it, though without having any cartouches. Today we know this script as ‘demotic’, which developed (c. 650 BC) from a cursive form of Egyptian writing known as ‘hieratic’ – a ‘running hand’ used in parallel with the hieroglyphic script from as early as 3000 BC. (Hieratic itself does not appear on the Rosetta Stone.) The term ‘demotic’ derives from Greek demotikos, meaning ‘in common use’, in contrast to the sacred hieroglyphic, which was essentially a monumental script. ‘Demotic’ was first used by Champollion, who refused to employ Young’s earlier equivalent, ‘enchorial’, which the English scholar had coined from the designation of the middle script given in the Greek inscription: enchoria grammata, or ‘letters of the country’ – that is to say, a native script.
The obvious first step towards decipherment was to translate the Greek inscription. It turned out to be a legal decree issued at Memphis, the principal city of ancient Egypt (not far from modern Cairo), by a general council of priests from every part of the kingdom, assembled on the first anniversary of the coronation of the young Ptolemy V Epiphanes, king of all Egypt, on 27 March 196 BC. Greek was used because it was the language of court and government during the Ptolemaic dynasty. The names Ptolemy, Alexander and Alexandria, among others, occurred in the Greek inscription.
The eye of would-be decipherers was caught by the very last sentence of the Greek section. It read: ‘This decree shall be inscribed on a stela of hard stone in sacred [i.e. hieroglyphic] and native [i.e. demotic] and Greek characters and set up in each of the first, second and third [-rank] temples beside the image of the ever-living king.’ In other words, the three inscriptions – hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek – were equivalent in meaning, though not necessarily word-for-word translations of each other. This Greek sentence was what first told scholars that the Rosetta Stone bore a bilingual inscription – the kind most sought after by decipherers, a sort of Holy Grail of decipherment. The two languages represented on the stone were Greek and (presumably) ancient Egyptian, the language of the priests, which was written in two different scripts – unless the ‘sacred’ and ‘native’ characters concealed two different languages, which seemed unlikely from the context. (In fact, the Egyptian languages written in hieroglyphic and demotic are not identical but closely related, like Latin and Renaissance Italian.)
Since the hieroglyphic section was very damaged, it was at first ignored in favour of the demotic section, which was almost complete. In 1802 two scholars – a famous French Orientalist, Silvestre de Sacy, and a student of his, Johann Åkerblad, a Swedish diplomat (like Palin) – independently adopted similar techniques. They searched for a name, in particular Ptolemy, by isolating repeated groups of demotic symbols located in roughly the same position as the eleven known occurrences of the name in the Greek inscription. Having found these groups, they noticed that the names in demotic seemed to be written alphabetically, as in the Greek inscription – that is, the demotic spelling of a name apparently contained more or less the same number of signs as the number of alphabetic letters in its assumed Greek equivalent. By matching demotic sign with Greek letter, they were able to draw up a tentative alphabet of demotic signs. By applying this tentative alphabet, certain other demotic words, such as ‘Greek’, ‘Egypt’ and ‘temple’, could be identified. It looked as though the entire demotic script might be alphabetic like the Greek inscription.
But in fact it was not an alphabet in toto, unluckily for de Sacy and Åkerblad – even if some elements of the script, such as the names, were very likely written alphabetically. Young was sympathetic to his predecessors: ‘[They] proceeded upon the erroneous, or, at least imperfect, evidence of the Greek authors, who have pretended to explain the different modes of writing among the ancient Egyptians, and who have asserted very distinctly that they employed, on many occasions, an alphabetical system, composed of 25 letters only.’ Taking their cue from classical authority, neither de Sacy nor Åkerblad could cast off the preconception that the demotic inscription was written in an alphabetic script – as against the hieroglyphic inscription, which both scholars took to be wholly non-phonetic, its symbols expressing concepts, not sounds, along the lines suggested by Horapollo’s Hieroglyphika. The apparent disparity in appearance between the hieroglyphic and demotic signs, combined with the suffocating weight of European tradition, dating from antiquity, that Egyptian hieroglyphic was a conceptual or symbolic script, convinced both de Sacy and Åkerblad that the invisible principles of hieroglyphic and demotic were wholly different. They decided that the hieroglyphic had to be a conceptual/symbolic script (like Chinese, supposedly), whereas the demotic was a phonetic/alphabetic script (like Greek).
Except for one element. De Sacy deserves credit for making an original suggestion: that the foreign (i.e. non-Egyptian) names inside hieroglyphic cartouches, which he naturally assumed were those of rulers like Ptolemy, Alexander and so on, might possibly be written in an alphabet, as they almost certainly were in the demotic inscription. De Sacy was led to this suggestion by some information given to him by one of his pupils, a student of Chinese, in 1811. The Chinese script was at this time widely (if wrongly) thought in Europe to be primarily conceptual, like the hieroglyphs – as we know from Palin’s attempted decipherment – with only a vanishingly small phonetic component. Yet, as this student pointed out to de Sacy, native writers of the Chinese script were compelled by unfamiliar foreign words and names (for instance, Buddhist names and terms borrowed into Chinese from ancient Indian texts) to resort to phonetic spellings. To highlight the phoneticism, they would add a special sign to a Chinese character or group of characters indicating that these particular characters were reduced to a phonetic value and did not have their normal conceptual meaning. (To make a relevant, if inexact, comparison with English, some foreign words in printed English have their own ‘special sign’: italicization.) Were not Ptolemy, Alexander and some other Greek proper names foreign to the Egyptian language, speculated de Sacy, and might not the cartouche be the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic equivalent of the special sign in Chinese characters? But as for the rest of the hieroglyphs – that is, the vast majority that were not enclosed in cartouches – this distinguished Orientalist (and the teacher of Champollion in Paris) was sure that these signs must undoubtedly be non-phonetic, as stated by the ancient Greek and Roman authorities.
Such was the extent of understanding of ancient Egyptian writing inherited by Champollion in 1814, when he – and, independently, Young – began to concentrate on decipherment. We shall refer to many of these ideas again more fully later on. But now it is time to turn to the beginnings of Champollion’s interest in Egypt, which had its origin in provincial France during the decade following the French Revolution and prior to Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt.