M. Silvestre de Sacy, my former professor, has passed on to me no information about your paper on the Egyptian part and the hieroglyphic text of the inscription from Rosetta: which is as much as to say, Monsieur, that I would eagerly receive the copy that you have been kind enough to offer me. I beg you to address it to M. Champollion-Figeac, Rue de Lille, No. 73, in Paris, who receives my packages and my letters … I dare to hope that it will permit me to continue a correspondence in which the entire benefit is certain to be entirely on my side.
(Jean-François Champollion’s first letter to Thomas Young, from Grenoble, May 1815)
Thomas Young’s name has already cropped up numerous times in this book. Given the pivotal role he played in the decipherment of ancient Egyptian writing between 1814 and 1819 – which even Champollion, and certainly all but Young’s severest detractors, would concede in the following two centuries – it is time to say something more substantial about the background, career and personality of Young. In nearly all significant respects, these differed fundamentally from those of Champollion.
Partly for this reason, no doubt, and because of their admiration for their subject, and possibly also because of their lack of knowledge of science and English culture, Champollion’s biographers have tended to underestimate Young or to misunderstand him (or both). Champollion himself started the trend by referring to Young as simply a medical doctor, which indeed he was, professionally speaking. Champollion’s first biographer, the German-speaking Hermine Hartleben, preferred instead to call Young simply a physicist – which he also was. However, Young was very much more than a doctor and a physicist.
Reading Hartleben’s enormous biography, one receives not the faintest hint that Champollion’s English rival was one of the great physicists and scientists of his age – a scientist whom Albert Einstein would compare with Isaac Newton for his discovery of the interference of light in 1801, and certainly one of great polymaths of any period. Besides being a doctor attached to a major London hospital and a physicist associated with the Royal Institution, Young was a leading physiologist. He discovered the phenomenon of astigmatism and was the author of the three-colour theory of vision, which explains how the retina responds to light. He was an accomplished classical scholar, whose Greek calligraphy was admired by Edmund Burke and published in a well-known classical teaching text; and he was a friend of the leading British classicist of his day, Richard Porson. He was a highly gifted linguist, who compared the vocabulary and grammar of some 400 languages and in 1813 coined the term ‘Indo-European’ for the language family that contains Greek, Latin and Sanskrit. And he had expertise, which the British government and other institutions drew upon, in many other areas, such as bridge building, ship construction, the astronomical calculation of longitude for nautical almanacs, the mathematics of life insurance (for which he received a considerable salary from a life insurance company) and the tuning of musical instruments. Had Nobel prizes existed in the 19th century, Young would have received one – and perhaps even two, in physics for his work on the wave theory of light, and in physiology for his studies of the human eye and vision.
Champollion biographers more recent than Hartleben may have a better awareness of Young’s range and stature, but they still cannot really figure him out. Each biographer struggles to place Young in a suitable niche or to fit him into a comfortable stereotype.
For instance, the Egyptologist Michel Dewachter makes virtually no reference to Young’s polymathy, presumably because Dewachter regards science and polymathy as irrelevant to Egyptian decipherment. The historian Alain Faure, by contrast, emphasizes this aspect: ‘In France we hardly know this genius savant … He was an original, very much in the tradition of British savants, capable of galloping upright on two horses or of playing on the bagpipes in his consulting room: Sherlock Holmes is not far away!’ Yet in fact Young was often criticized by scientists and mathematicians precisely for relying too much on intuition and neglecting in his published work the kind of logical, step-by-step proofs beloved of a Sherlock Holmes. The political journalist Jean Lacouture writes admiringly that Young ‘was to light what Joseph Fourier was to heat’ – which is true enough. He emphasizes both Young’s science and his polymathy. But then, despite being highly perceptive about Champollion, Lacouture gets carried away with his personal passion for Enlightenment ideals, claiming that Young:
passed through life on a cloud of light, from success to triumph, seeming to find in each of his discoveries the key to unlock the following one, multifaceted and idolized, magnificent and princely, so accustomed to the top rank that he was indignant that in a domain he had casually skimmed, as in a game, following so many illustrious philologists, he should fail to vanquish straight away, exactly on the mark, and for ever. Nothing destined Young to be the decipherer of the hieroglyphs, except his genius for success. And perhaps also his desire to be at this point a man of light, in all its forms, and of the Enlightenment. Lavish, kind, curious about everything, skilled in dancing, in music, happy in society, he was born for triumphs. How could such a man put up with not being recognized by everyone as the sole conqueror?
Most of this character sketch, however striking, is a far cry from the truth. The real Young, who was no aristocrat, was far indeed from being obviously destined for success and triumph. In this respect he was like Champollion. Born in an obscure village in the county of Somerset in 1773, distant from London, first-class education and social connections, Young was the eldest son of a large and undistinguished family of moderately educated, commercially none-too-successful, generally rigid-minded Quakers. His parents largely abandoned him as a very young child to the care of his grandfather, apparently for lack of income and room in their house.
Although Young had some limited school education and later attended three universities (Edinburgh, Göttingen and Cambridge), he was essentially self-taught, as he often declared, and had no intellectual mentors. His early penchant for polymathy did him no favours in the professional world, and indeed provoked self-doubt and the worry that he would be viewed as a dilettante. In his career as a doctor, Young received little honour and enjoyed a comparatively small practice, largely because he preferred medical research to visiting patients and could not fake the over-confident ‘bedside manner’ necessary for a successful doctor in this period of yawning medical ignorance. In his career as a scientist he faced both surprising indifference and vitriolic criticism in Britain (although, ironically, he received consistent admiration and honour from scientists in France); in 1804 this criticism became so stinging that it almost persuaded him to give up science. Although he was socially accepted and conservative (with a small ‘c’), he was politically uninvolved, not at all lionized for his gifts, and was not awarded the knighthood he plainly deserved. At the Royal Society, where he was foreign secretary for a quarter of a century, he gave not a single speech at a council meeting. Compared with many of his immediate contemporaries, such as the chemist and president of the Royal Society Sir Humphry Davy, Young, far from being egotistical, was a paragon of modesty. He seldom used his own name when he published his writings in Egyptology and many other subjects, preferring anonymity as a scholar; and he showed no envy and very little rancour towards his contemporaries, even towards Champollion at the height of their dispute in 1823. Married but childless, Young spent most of his adult life as quietly and uncontroversially as other gentleman scholars living in the wealthier parts of the metropolis. Although he was comfortable financially, his lifestyle was never excessive: he was careful with money, a teetotaller, and had inexpensive habits apart from bookbuying. His chief pleasure was intellectual: to read, to think, to write and occasionally to experiment, alone in his study.
One might even say, contra Lacouture, that the solitary decipherment of ancient scripts was an activity to which the polymathic Young was predestined – not least because decipherment belongs to both the sciences and the humanities. There is a beguiling story that a friend of Young, a former army doctor and a fellow of the Royal Society, was once out stargazing in London at two o’clock in the morning, armed with a telescope and accompanied by his wife and another couple, when he happened to notice a light in the window of Young’s house; clearly Dr Young was burning the midnight oil again. When he rang the doorbell at 48 Welbeck Street, Young appeared personally in his dressing gown, and the little group was invited inside to see a piece of Egyptian papyrus, which Young was in the midst of translating. It appeared, said the polymathic physician, to be a Ptolemaic horoscope.
Thus Young and Champollion, despite their shared fascination, had highly contrasting careers and personalities that would influence their approach to decipherment. Champollion had tunnel vision about Egypt (‘fortunately for our subject’, writes the Egyptologist John Ray); was prone to fits of euphoria and despair; and would help to lead an uprising against the French king in Grenoble, for which he would be put on trial. Young, apart from his polymathy and a total lack of engagement with party politics, was a man who ‘could not bear, in the most common conversation, the slightest degree of exaggeration, or even of colouring’ (as recalled by Young’s close friend and first biographer, Hudson Gurney).
Consider their respective attitudes to ancient Egypt. Young never went to Egypt, and never wanted to go. He felt no attraction to its ancient customs and religion, which he regarded as foolish superstition. In founding an Egyptian Society in London in 1817, to publish as many ancient inscriptions and manuscripts as possible, so as to aid decipherment, Young would remark to Gurney that funds were needed ‘for employing some poor Italian or Maltese to scramble over Egypt in search of more’. Champollion, on the other hand, had dreamt of visiting Egypt and of doing exactly what Young disparaged ever since his teenage years. When he finally got there, he would be able to pass for a native, given his swarthy complexion and his excellent command of Arabic, and in due course would try to improve the harsh lot of Egyptian peasants by giving unwelcome advice to the country’s autocratic ruler, Muhammad Ali Pasha. On Egypt, as on most matters, the two scholars were poles apart intellectually, emotionally and politically.
By strange chance, Champollion entered Young’s world at the time when the English polymath had chosen to apply himself assiduously to the Rosetta Stone, in late 1814. Champollion’s letter from Grenoble formally addressed to the president of the Royal Society, accompanied by his new book on Egypt, was dated 10 November, about six months into Young’s Egyptian investigations. Possibly Champollion had confused the Royal Society, a scientific body, with the Society of Antiquaries, because his letter mentioned that he already had access to two different reproductions of the Rosetta Stone: the facsimile made by ‘your Society’ (that is, the copy made by the Society of Antiquaries in 1802, soon after the Rosetta Stone reached London), and the reproduction intended for future publication in the Description de l’Égypte (presumably the French copy made in Cairo in 1800). The two copies were somewhat inconsistent. Champollion noted: ‘They present differences, sometimes of little importance, sometimes large enough to leave me in a position of awkward uncertainty.’ Would the society be kind enough to check some passages of the inscription transcribed by him from the two copies and attached to his letter? He then confidently (and not too tactfully) continued: ‘I am convinced that I would already have settled the reading of the entire inscription if I had had under my eyes a plaster cast made from the original using the simplest process.’ In conclusion, he requested the society to create and deposit such a cast in each of the principal libraries of Europe: a gift that would be ‘worthy of the zeal and disinterestedness that animates the Royal Society’.
It so happened that at this very time in 1814 Champollion’s enemy Edme Jomard went personally to London to make a fresh plaster cast of the Rosetta Stone for the Description, with the support of the president of the Royal Society. Whether or not Champollion knew about Jomard’s visit when he wrote his letter is unclear. Nor is it clear if he knew about Young’s interest in the Rosetta Stone. Champollion-Figeac was well informed via his network in Paris and might have passed both pieces of intelligence to his brother in Grenoble.
Young, on the other hand, was unquestionably aware of Champollion’s interest – through Champollion’s estranged former teacher de Sacy – though he had seen nothing written by Champollion until he received L’Égypte sous les Pharaons. Shortly before hearing from Champollion, Young had sent de Sacy his own ‘conjectural translation’ of the Rosetta Stone, leading to a significant correspondence between Young and de Sacy in 1814–16 that would have importance consequences for Champollion. To understand the state of play in the decipherment at this time, and the way it would later develop, we need to follow the evolution of Young’s ideas as reported in his various letters in 1814–15, which were published with his ‘conjectural translation’ in a Cambridge classical journal, Museum Criticum, in 1816.
One might have expected Young to have become involved with the Rosetta Stone earlier, when it first went on display in London, in 1802. However, he was totally occupied with a series of scientific lectures at the Royal Institution, on ‘Natural philosophy and the mechanical arts’, delivered in 1802–3, and, after the mammoth task of publishing these papers in 1807, he devoted himself mainly to medicine. His active interest in Egypt therefore started almost a decade after Champollion’s.
What finally triggered it, Young tells us, was a review he wrote in 1813 of a massive work in German on the history of languages, Mithridates, oder Allgemeine Sprachenkunde, by Johann Christoph Adelung. This contained a note by the editor ‘in which he asserted that the unknown language of the Stone of Rosetta, and of the bandages often found with the mummies, was capable of being analysed into an alphabet consisting of little more than 30 letters’. When an English friend returned from the East shortly afterwards and showed Young some fragments of papyrus he had collected in Egypt, ‘my Egyptian researches began’. First he examined the papyri and reported on them to the Society of Antiquaries in May 1814. Then he took a copy of the Rosetta Stone inscription away with him from his home in London to the relative tranquillity of the seaside town of Worthing, where he was known as the resident physician, and spent the summer and autumn of 1814 studying Egyptian when he was not attending to his patients.
Apart from his exceptional scientific mind and his broad knowledge of languages, Young brought to the problem one other extremely valuable and relatively uncommon ability. He had trained himself to sift, compare, contrast, retain and reject large amounts of visual linguistic data in his mind. This ability has been a sine qua non for serious decipherers ever since Young and Champollion, as I have described in my two books on decipherment: Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World’s Undeciphered Scripts and The Man Who Deciphered Linear B: The Story of Michael Ventris. (Although outsiders to decipherment often like to imagine that, in today’s world, computers could be programmed to accomplish such sifting, in reality the human factor remains all-important – mainly because a human being can spot that two signs that objectively look somewhat different are in fact variants of the same sign. We can all learn, from our knowledge of a language, how to recognize the same phrase written in two very different kinds of handwriting; but this task is extremely difficult for computers.)
In his teens and twenties, Young had been celebrated for his penmanship in classical Greek, leading to the publication of John Hodgkin’s Calligraphia Graeca in 1794, which contained script examples by Young. From this skill he developed a minutely detailed grasp of Greek letterforms. In his mid-thirties, he was called upon to restore some Greek and Latin texts written on heavily damaged papyri dug up in Herculaneum, the Roman town smothered along with Pompeii by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. The fused mass of papyri had first to be unrolled without utterly destroying them, and then interpreted by classical scholars capable of guessing the meaning of illegible words and missing fragments. The unrolling required Young’s chemical skills (and those of Davy); the interpretation demanded his forensic knowledge of classical languages. In neither activity was Young at all satisfied with his results, but his experience with the Herculaneum papyri made him keenly aware of the relevance of his copying skills to the arcane arts of restoring ancient manuscripts. As he noted in his biography of his classicist friend Porson, ‘those who have not been in the habit of correcting mutilated passages of manuscripts, can form no estimate of the immense advantage that is obtained by the complete sifting of every letter which the mind involuntarily performs, while the hand is occupied in tracing it’.
The mass of unpublished Egyptian research manuscripts by Young, now kept at the British Library, bear out this claim. Much of his success in this field would be due to his indefatigable copying – often exquisitely and occasionally in colour – of hieroglyphic and demotic inscriptions taken from different ancient manuscripts and carved inscriptions, and also from different parts of the same inscription, followed by the word-by-word comparisons that such copying made possible. By placing groups of Egyptian signs adjacent to each other, both on paper and in his memory, Young was in a position to see resemblances and patterns that would have gone unnoticed by other scholars. As his biographer George Peacock wrote, after immersing himself in Young’s manuscripts, ‘It is impossible to form a just estimate either of the vast extent to which Dr Young had carried his hieroglyphical investigations, or of the real progress which he had made in them, without an inspection of these manuscripts.’ They also serve as a reminder, if one is still needed, of how unfounded are some modern claims that Young was a dilettante scholar.
It was Young’s exacting visual analysis of the hieroglyphic and demotic inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone that gave him an inkling of a crucial discovery, which Champollion would later claim to have made independently of Young. Young noted a ‘striking resemblance’ (as he told de Sacy), not spotted by any previous scholar, between some demotic signs and what he called ‘the corresponding hieroglyphics’ – the first intimation that demotic might relate directly to hieroglyphic and not be a completely different script, somewhat as a modern cursive handwritten script partly resembles its printed equivalent. We can see this relationship from the drawing Young published showing the last line of the Rosetta inscription in hieroglyphic (it includes a cartouche), demotic and Greek, reproduced opposite. If one examines the hieroglyphic and the demotic signs, one can see that some signs show a similarity. Equally clear, however, is that other ‘corresponding’ signs do not.
‘An Explanation of the Hieroglyphics of the Stone of Rosetta’, from the Egyptian manuscripts of Thomas Young. The hieroglyphs are related by Young to both Greek and Coptic words.
(Page from Thomas Young’s Egyptian manuscripts. British Library, London.)
The clinching evidence confirming this partial resemblance came with the publication of several manuscripts on papyrus in the Description de l’Égypte, the most recent volume of which Young was able to borrow in 1815. He later wrote:
I discovered, at length, that several of the manuscripts on papyrus, which had been carefully published in that work, exhibited very frequently the same text in different forms, deviating more or less from the perfect resemblance of the objects intended to be delineated, till they became, in many cases, mere lines and curves, and dashes and flourishes; but still answering, character for character, to the hieroglyphical or hieratic writing of the same chapters, found in other manuscripts, and of which the identity was sufficiently indicated, besides this coincidence, by the similarity of the larger tablets or pictural representations, at the head of each chapter or column, which are almost universally found on manuscripts of a mythological nature.
In other words, Young was able to trace how the recognizably pictographic hieroglyphs, showing human figures, animals, plants and objects of many kinds, had developed into their cursive equivalents in the hieratic and demotic scripts. (Unlike Champollion in 1810, Young never doubted that demotic postdated hieroglyphic.)
But if the hieroglyphic and demotic scripts resembled each other visually in many respects, did this also mean that they operated on the same linguistic principles? If so, it posed a major problem, because the hieroglyphic script was generally supposed to be purely conceptual or symbolic (except for the foreign names in the cartouches, as suggested by de Sacy in 1811), whereas the demotic script was assumed (by Åkerblad in 1802) to be purely alphabetical. These two views could not be satisfactorily reconciled if the demotic script were somehow derived from the hieroglyphic script.
So Young took the next logical step and made another important discovery. He told de Sacy in a letter in August 1815: ‘I am not surprised that, when you consider the general appearance of the [demotic] inscription, you are inclined to despair of the possibility of discovering an alphabet capable of enabling us to decipher it; and if you wish to know my “secret”, it is simply this, that no such alphabet ever existed.’ His conclusion was that the demotic script consisted of ‘imitations of the hieroglyphics … mixed with letters of the alphabet’. It was neither a purely conceptual or symbolic script, nor an alphabet, but a mixture of the two. As Young wrote a little later, employing an analogy for the demotic script that perhaps only a polymath such as he could have come up with, ‘it seemed natural to suppose, that alphabetical characters might be interspersed with hieroglyphics, in the same way that the astronomers and chemists of modern times have often employed arbitrary marks, as compendious expressions of the objects which were most frequently to be mentioned in their respective sciences’. A modern, non-scientific example of the same idea would be such ‘compendious’ signs as $, £, %, =, +, which represent concepts non-phonetically and often appear adjacent to alphabetic letters.
Drawing of the last line of the Rosetta Stone (in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek), published by Thomas Young in his Encyclopaedia Britannica article ‘Egypt’, 1819.
(Last line of the Rosetta Stone, drawing by Thomas Young, 1819. Photo Andrew Robinson.)
Young was correct in these two vital discoveries about the relationship between the hieroglyphic and demotic scripts. But we must also note that the discoveries did not now lead him to make a third discovery. He did not question the almost-sacred notion that the hieroglyphic script was essentially conceptual, without phoneticism or any alphabetic signs, although he admitted to being puzzled as to how such a non-phonetic script might have worked in practice. Bearing in mind the large but nevertheless limited number of pictographic characters in the Chinese script, he told de Sacy:
It is impossible that all the [Egyptian hieroglyphic] characters can be pictures of the things they represent: some, however, of the symbols on the stone of Rosetta have a manifest relation to the objects denoted by them, for instance, a Priest, a Shrine, a Statue, an Asp, a Month, and the Numerals, and a King is denoted by a sort of plant with an insect, which is said to have been a bee; while a much greater number of the characters have no perceptible connection with the ideas attached to them; although it is probable that a resemblance, either real or metaphorical, may have existed or have been imagined when they were first employed: thus a Libation was originally denoted by a hand holding a jar, with two streams of liquid issuing from it, but in this inscription the representation has degenerated into the form of a bird’s foot.
Despite his puzzlement, Young continued to adhere to the view that the only phonetic elements in the hieroglyphic script were to be found in the foreign names in the cartouches, as first suggested by de Sacy. The idea that the hieroglyphic script as a whole might be a mixed script like the demotic script, incorporating a hieroglyphic alphabet, was eventually to be the revolutionary breakthrough of Champollion.
In 1815, however, Champollion remained mostly unaware of the new thinking by Young described in this chapter. There was a very brief correspondence between the two of them in the first half of this year. In response to Champollion’s letter to the Royal Society of late 1814, Young wrote personally to Champollion offering to send him his ‘conjectural translation’ of the Rosetta Stone, and Champollion replied from Grenoble in May 1815, asking Young to send it to his brother in Paris. At the same time, probably mistrusting the mail from London in a troubled period – or maybe out of impatience – a curious Champollion requested his brother to ask de Sacy if he could borrow his former professor’s copy of the ‘conjectural translation’. De Sacy agreed to lend it to Champollion-Figeac (as de Sacy informed Young), who presumably showed it to his brother. But at this point the Champollion–Young correspondence fizzled out, almost before it had got started, for political reasons that will become evident in the next chapter. From mid-1815, until Champollion announced his decipherment more than seven years later, in 1822, there would be no further direct contact between the two rivals.
As far as can be gauged from his surviving letters, Champollion made little or no progress with the Egyptian scripts between 1814 and 1816, the period of Young’s correspondence with de Sacy. For instead of studying ancient Egypt, both Champollion and Champollion-Figeac were enthusiastically caught up in a political maelstrom. In early March 1815, the exiled Napoleon Bonaparte returned from Elba and landed on the south-eastern coast of France. The first French city he reached with his followers was Grenoble, which took the plunge and welcomed him. The Hundred Days had begun. Champollion and his brother were to reap the Napoleonic whirlwind with a vengeance.