4
The Language Barrier

The impenetrability of
unknown languages, the Navajo
code talkers of World War II
and the decipherment of
Egyptian hieroglyphs

While British codebreakers were breaking the German Enigma cipher and altering the course of the war in Europe, American codebreakers were having an equally important influence on events in the Pacific arena by cracking the various Japanese ciphers such as Purple. For example, in June 1942 the Americans deciphered a message outlining a Japanese plan to draw U.S. naval forces to the Aleutian Islands by faking an attack, which would allow the Japanese navy to take their real objective, Midway Island. Although American ships played along with the plan by leaving Midway, they never strayed far. When American cryptanalysts intercepted and deciphered the Japanese order to attack Midway, the ships were able to return swiftly and defend the island in one of the most important battles of the entire Pacific war. According to Admiral Chester Nimitz, the American victory at Midway “was essentially a victory of intelligence. In attempting surprise, the Japanese were themselves surprised”.

To protect their own communications, American forces used mechanical devices similar to the Enigma cipher. Unlike Enigma, these machines were never cracked, but during the Pacific campaign, American commanders began to realize that cipher machines had a fundamental drawback. Although electromechanical encryption offered relatively high levels of security, it was painfully slow. Messages had to be typed into the machine letter by letter, the output had to be noted down letter by letter, and then the completed ciphertext had to be transmitted by the radio operator. The radio operator who received the enciphered message then had to pass it on to a cipher expert, who would carefully select the correct key and type the ciphertext into a cipher machine, to decipher it letter by letter.

The time and space required for this delicate operation is available at headquarters or on board a ship, but machine encryption was not ideally suited to more hostile and intense environments, such as the islands of the Pacific. One war correspondent described the difficulties of communication during the heat of jungle battle: “When the fighting became confined to a small area, everything had to move on a split-second schedule. There was not time for enciphering and deciphering. At such times, the King’s English became a last resort – the profaner the better.” Unfortunately for the Americans, many Japanese soldiers had attended American colleges and were fluent in English, including the profanities. Valuable information about American strategy and tactics was falling into the hands of the enemy.

One of the first to react to this problem was Philip Johnston, an engineer based in Los Angeles, who was too old to fight but still wanted to contribute to the war effort. At the beginning of 1942 he began to formulate an encryption system inspired by his childhood experiences. The son of a Protestant missionary, Johnston had grown up on the Navajo reservations of Arizona, and as a result, he had become fully immersed in Navajo culture. He was one of the few people outside the tribe who could speak their language fluently, which allowed him to act as an interpreter for discussions between the Navajo and government agents. His work in this capacity culminated in a visit to the White House, when, as a nine-year-old, Johnston translated for two Navajos who were appealing to President Theodore Roosevelt for fairer treatment for their community. Fully aware of how impenetrable the language was for those outside the tribe, Johnston was struck by the notion that Navajo, or any other Native American language, could act as a virtually unbreakable code. If each battalion in the Pacific employed a pair of Native Americans as radio operators, secure communication could be guaranteed. This would be much simpler than a mechanical encryption device and much harder to crack.

He took his idea to Lieutenant Colonel James E. Jones, the area signal officer at Camp Elliott, just outside San Diego. Merely by throwing a few Navajo phrases at the bewildered officer, Johnston was able to persuade him that the idea was worthy of serious consideration. Two weeks later he returned with two Navajos, ready to conduct a test demonstration in front of senior marine officers. The Navajos were isolated from each other, and one was given six typical messages in English, which he translated into Navajo and transmitted to his colleague via a radio. The Navajo receiver translated the messages back into English, wrote them down, and handed them over to the officers, who compared them with the originals. The game of Navajo whispers proved to be flawless, and the marine officers authorized a pilot project and ordered recruitment to begin immediately.

At the time of Americas entry into the Second World War, the Navajo were living in harsh conditions and being treated as an inferior people. Yet their tribal council supported the war effort and declared their loyalty: “There exists no purer concentration of Americanism than among the First Americans.” The Navajos were so eager to fight that some of them lied about their age, or gorged themselves on bunches of bananas and swallowed great quantities of water in order to reach the minimum weight requirement of 55 kilos. Similarly, there was no difficulty in finding suitable candidates to serve as Navajo code talkers, as they were to become known. Within four months of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, twenty-nine Navajos, some as young as fifteen, began an eight-week communications course with the Marine Corps.

Before training could begin, the Marine Corps had to overcome a problem that had plagued the only other code to have been based on a Native American language. In northern France during the First World War, Captain E. W. Horner of Company D, 141st Infantry, ordered that eight men from the Choctaw tribe be employed as radio operators. Obviously, none of the enemy understood their language, so the Choctaw provided secure communications. However, this encryption system was fundamentally flawed because the Choctaw language had no equivalent for modern military jargon. A specific technical term in a message might therefore have to be translated into a vague Choctaw expression, with the risk that this could be misinterpreted by the receiver.

The same problem would have arisen with the Navajo language, but the Marine Corps planned to construct a lexicon of Navajo terms to replace otherwise untranslatable English words, thus removing any ambiguities. The trainees helped to compile the lexicon, tending to choose words describing the natural world to indicate specific military terms. Thus, the names of birds were used for planes, and fish for ships. For example, an owl (Da-he-tih-hi) was a fighter plane, a frog (Chal) meant an amphibious vehicle and an iron fish (Besh-lo) meant a submarine. Commanding officers became “war chiefs”, platoons were “mud-clans”, fortifications turned into “cave dwellings” and mortars were known as “guns that squat”.

Even though the complete lexicon contained 274 words, there was still the problem of translating less predictable words and the names of people and places. The solution was to devise an encoded phonetic alphabet for spelling out difficult words. For example, the word Pacific would be spelled out as “pig, ant, cat, ice, fox, ice, cat,” which would then be translated into Navajo as bi-sodih, wol-la-chee, moasi, tkin, ma-e, tkin, moasi. The complete Navajo alphabet is given in Table 8. Within eight weeks, the trainee code talkers had learned the entire lexicon and alphabet, thus preventing the need for codebooks, which might fall into enemy hands. For the Navajos, committing everything to memory was trivial – traditionally their language had no written script, so they were used to memorizing their folk stories and family histories. As William McCabe, one of the trainees, said, “In Navajo everything is in the memory – songs, prayers, everything. That’s the way we were raised.”

At the end of their training, the Navajos were put to the test. Senders translated a series of messages from English into Navajo and transmitted them, and then receivers translated the messages back into English, using the memorized lexicon and alphabet when necessary. The results were word-perfect. To check the strength of the system, a recording of the transmissions was given to navy intelligence, the unit that had cracked Purple, the toughest Japanese cipher. After three weeks of intense cryptanalysis, the naval codebreakers were still baffled by the messages. They called the Navajo language a “weird succession of guttural, nasal, tongue-twisting sounds … we couldn’t even transcribe it, much less crack it.” The Navajo code was judged a success. Two Navajo soldiers, John Benally and Johnny Manuelito, were asked to stay and train the next batch of recruits, while the other twenty-seven Navajo code talkers were assigned to four regiments and sent to the Pacific.

Japanese forces had attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and not long afterwards, they dominated large parts of the western Pacific. Japanese troops overran the American garrison on Guam on December 10. They took Guadalcanal, one of the islands in the Solomon chain, on December 13; Hong Kong fell on December 25; and U.S. troops on the Philippines surrendered on January 2, 1942. The Japanese planned to consolidate their control of the Pacific the following summer by building an airfield on Guadalcanal, creating a base for bombers that would enable them to destroy Allied supply lines, thus making any Allied counterattack almost impossible. Admiral Ernest King, chief of American naval operations, urged an attack on the island before the airfield was completed, and on August 7 the First Marine Division spearheaded an invasion of Guadalcanal. The initial landing parties included the first group of code talkers to see action.

Table 8 The Navajo alphabet code.

Although the Navajos were confident that their skills would be a blessing to the marines, their first attempts generated only confusion. Many of the regular signal operators were unaware of this new code, and they sent panic messages all over the island, stating that the Japanese were broadcasting on American frequencies. The colonel in charge immediately halted Navajo communications until he could convince himself that the system was worth pursuing. One of the code talkers recalled how the Navajo code was eventually brought back into service:

The colonel had an idea. He said he would keep us on one condition: that I could out-race his “white code” – a mechanical ticking cylinder thing. We both sent messages, by white cylinder and by my voice. Both of us received answers and the race was to see who could decode his answer first. I was asked, “How long will it take you? Two hours?” “More like two minutes,” I answered. The other guy was still decoding when I got the roger on my return message in about four and a half minutes. I said, “Colonel, when are you going to give up on that cylinder thing?” He didn’t say anything. He just lit up his pipe and walked away.

The code talkers soon proved their worth on the battlefield. During one episode on the island of Saipan, a battalion of marines took over positions previously held by Japanese soldiers, who had retreated. Suddenly a salvo exploded nearby. They were under friendly fire from fellow Americans who were unaware of their advance. The marines radioed back in English explaining their position, but the salvos continued because the attacking American troops suspected that the messages were from Japanese impersonators trying to fool them. It was only when a Navajo message was sent that the attackers saw their mistake and halted the assault. A Navajo message could never be faked and could always be trusted.

The reputation of the code talkers soon spread, and by the end of 1942 there was a request for eighty-three more men. The Navajo were to serve in all six Marine Corps divisions, and were sometimes borrowed by other American forces. Their war of words soon turned the Navajos into heroes. Other soldiers would offer to carry their radios and rifles, and they were even given personal bodyguards, partly to protect them from their own comrades. On at least three occasions code talkers were mistaken for Japanese soldiers and captured by fellow Americans. They were released only when colleagues from their own battalion vouched for them.

Figure 40 The first twenty-nine Navajo code talkers pose for a traditional graduation photograph.

The impenetrability of the Navajo code was a result of the fact that Navajo belongs to the Na-Dene family of languages, which has no link with any Asian or European language. For example, a Navajo verb is conjugated not solely according to its subject, but also according to its object. The verb ending depends on which category the object belongs to: long (e.g., pipe, pencil), slender and flexible (e.g., snake, thong), granular (e.g., sugar, salt), bundled (e.g., hay), viscous (e.g., mud, faeces) and many others. The verb will also incorporate adverbs, and will reflect whether or not the speaker has experienced what he or she is talking about or whether it is hearsay. Consequently, a single verb can be equivalent to a whole sentence, making it virtually impossible for foreigners to disentangle its meaning.

Figure 41 Corporal Henry Bake Jr. (left) and Private First Class George H. Kirk using the Navajo code in the dense jungles of Bougainville in 1943.

As the war in the Pacific intensified, and as the Americans advanced from the Solomon Islands to Okinawa, the Navajo code talkers played an increasingly vital role. During the first days of the attack on Iwo Jima, more than eight hundred Navajo messages were sent, all without error. According to Major General Howard Conner, “without the Navajos, the marines would never have taken Iwo Jima”. The contribution of the Navajo code talkers is all the more remarkable when you consider that, in order to fulfill their duties, they often had to confront and defy their own deeply held spiritual fears. The Navajo believe that the spirits of the dead, chindi, will seek revenge on the living unless ceremonial rites are performed on the body. The war in the Pacific was particularly bloody, with corpses strewn across the battlefields, and yet the code talkers summoned up the courage to carry on regardless of the chindi that haunted them. In Doris Paul’s book The Navajo Code Talkers, one of the Navajo recounts an incident that typifies their bravery, dedication and composure:

If you so much as held up your head six inches you were gone, the fire was so intense. And then in the wee hours, with no relief on our side or theirs, there was a dead standstill. It must have gotten so that this one Japanese couldn’t take it anymore. He got up and yelled and screamed at the top of his voice and dashed over our trench, swinging a long samurai sword. I imagine he was shot from 25 to 40 times before he fell.

There was a buddy with me in the trench. But that Japanese had cut him across the throat, clear through to the cords on the back of his neck. He was still gasping through his windpipe. And the sound of him trying to breathe was horrible. He died, of course. When the Jap struck, warm blood spattered all over my hand that was holding a microphone. I was calling in code for help. They tell me that in spite of what happened, every syllable of my message came through.

Altogether, there were 420 Navajo code talkers. Although their bravery as fighting men was acknowledged, their special role in securing communications was classified information. The government forbade them to talk about their work, and their unique contribution was not made public. Just like Turing and the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park, the Navajo were ignored for decades. Eventually, in 1968, the Navajo code was declassified, and the following year the code talkers held their first reunion. Then, in 1982, they were honoured when the U.S. government named August 14 National Navajo Code Talkers Day. However, the greatest tribute to the work of the Navajo is the simple fact that their code is one of very few throughout history that was never broken. Lieutenant General Seizo Arisue, the Japanese chief of intelligence, admitted that although they had broken the American air force code, they had failed to make any headway on the Navajo code.

DECIPHERING LOST LANGUAGES AND ANCIENT SCRIPTS

The success of the Navajo code was based largely on the simple fact that the mother tongue of one person is utterly meaningless to anybody unacquainted with it. In many ways, the task that confronted Japanese cryptanalysts is similar to that faced by archaeologists attempting to decipher a long-forgotten language, perhaps written in an extinct script. If anything, the archaeological challenge is much more severe. For example, while the Japanese had a continuous stream of Navajo words they could attempt to identify, the information available to the archaeologist can sometimes be just a small collection of clay tablets. Furthermore, the archaeological codebreaker often has no idea of the context or contents of an ancient text, clues that military codebreakers can normally rely on to help them crack a cipher.

Deciphering ancient texts seems an almost hopeless pursuit, yet many men and women have devoted themselves to this difficult enterprise. Their obsession is driven by the desire to understand the writings of our ancestors, allowing us to speak their words and catch a glimpse of their thoughts and lives. Perhaps this appetite for cracking ancient scripts is best summarized by Maurice Pope, the author of The Story of Decipherment: “Decipherments are by far the most glamorous achievements of scholarship. There is a touch of magic about unknown writing, especially when it comes from the remote past, and a corresponding glory is bound to attach itself to the person who first solves its mystery.”

The decipherment of ancient scripts is not part of the ongoing evolutionary battle between codemakers and codebreakers, because although there are codebreakers in the shape of archaeologists, there are no codemakers. That is to say, in most cases of archaeological decipherment there was no deliberate attempt by the original scribe to hide the meaning of the text. The remainder of this chapter, which is about the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, is therefore a slight detour from the book’s main theme. However, the principles of archaeological decipherment are essentially the same as those of conventional military cryptanalysis. Indeed, many military codebreakers have been attracted by the challenge of unravelling an ancient script. This is probably because archaeological decipherments make a refreshing change from military codebreaking, offering a purely intellectual puzzle rather than a military challenge. In other words, the motivation is curiosity rather than animosity.

The cracking of Egyptian hieroglyphs is the most famous, and arguably the most romantic, of all archaeological decipherments. For centuries, hieroglyphs remained a mystery, and archaeologists could do no more than speculate about their meaning. However, thanks to a classic piece of codebreaking, the hieroglyphs were eventually deciphered, and ever since, archaeologists have been able to read firsthand accounts of the history, culture and beliefs of the ancient Egyptians. The decipherment of hieroglyphs has bridged the millennia between ourselves and the civilization of the pharaohs.

The earliest hieroglyphs date back to 3000 BC, and this form of ornate writing endured for the next three and a half millennia. Although the elaborate symbols of hieroglyphs were ideal for the walls of majestic temples (the Greek word hieroglyphica means “sacred carvings”), they were overly complicated for keeping track of mundane transactions. Hence, evolving in parallel with hieroglyphs was hieratic, an everyday script in which each hieroglyph was replaced by a stylized representation that was quicker and easier to write. In about 600 BC, hieratic was replaced by an even simpler script known as demotic, the name being derived from the Greek demotika, meaning “popular”, which reflects its secular function. Hieroglyphs, hieratic and demotic are essentially the same script – one could almost regard them as merely different fonts.

All three forms of writing are phonetic, which is to say that the characters largely represent distinct sounds, just like the letters in the English alphabet. For over three thousand years, the ancient Egyptians used these scripts in every aspect of their lives, just as we use writing today. Then, towards the end of the fourth century AD, within a generation, the Egyptian scripts vanished. The last datable examples of ancient Egyptian writing are to be found on the island of Philae. A hieroglyphic temple inscription was carved in AD 394, and a piece of demotic graffiti has been dated to AD 450. The spread of Christianity was responsible for the extinction of the Egyptian scripts, with the Church outlawing their use in order to eliminate any link with Egypt’s pagan past. The ancient scripts were replaced with Coptic, a script consisting of twenty-four letters from the Greek alphabet supplemented by six demotic characters used for Egyptian sounds not expressed in Greek. The dominance of Coptic was so complete that the ability to read hieroglyphs, demotic and hieratic vanished. The ancient Egyptian language continued to be spoken, and evolved into what became known as the Coptic language, but in due course both the Coptic language and script were displaced by the spread of Arabic in the eleventh century. The final linguistic link to Egypt’s ancient kingdoms had been broken, and the knowledge needed to read the tales of the pharaohs was lost.

Interest in hieroglyphs was reawakened in the seventeenth century, when Pope Sixtus V reorganized the city of Rome according to a new network of avenues, erecting obelisks brought from Egypt at each intersection. Scholars attempted to decipher the meanings of the hieroglyphs on the obelisks but were hindered by a false assumption: nobody was prepared to accept that hieroglyphics represented phonetic characters, or phonograms. Everybody assumed they were picture writing.

In 1652 the German Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher published a dictionary of interpretations entitled Œdipus œgyptiacus, and used it to produce a series of weird and wonderful translations. A handful of hieroglyphs, which we now know merely represent the name of the pharaoh Apries, were translated by kircher as “the benefits of the divine Osiris are to be procured by means of sacred ceremonies and of the chain of the Genii, in order that the benefits of the Nile may be obtained”. Today Kircher’s translations seem absurd, but their impact on other would-be decipherers was immense, because Kircher was more than just an Egyptologist. He wrote a book on cryptography, constructed a musical fountain, invented the magic lantern (a precursor of cinema) and lowered himself into the crater of Vesuvius, earning himself the title of “father of vulcanology”. The Jesuit priest was widely acknowledged to be the most respected scholar of his age, and consequently his ideas were to influence generations of future Egyptologists.

A century and a half after Kircher, in the summer of 1798, the antiquities of ancient Egypt came under renewed scrutiny when Napoleon Bonaparte dispatched a team of historians, scientists and draftsmen to follow in the wake of his invading army. These academics, or “Pekinese dogs”, as the soldiers called them, did a remarkable job of mapping, drawing, transcribing, measuring and recording everything they witnessed. In 1799, the French scholars encountered the single most famous slab of stone in the history of archaeology, found by a troop of French soldiers stationed at Fort Julien in the town of Rosetta in the Nile Delta. The soldiers had been given the task of demolishing an ancient wall to clear the way for an extension to the fort. Built into the wall was a stone bearing a remarkable set of inscriptions: the same piece of text had been inscribed on the stone three times, in Greek, demotic and hieroglyphs. The Rosetta stone, as it became known, appeared to be the equivalent of a cryptanalytic crib, just like the cribs that helped the codebreakers at Bletchley Park to break Enigma. The Greek, which could easily be read, was in effect a piece of plaintext that could be compared with the demotic and hieroglyphic ciphertexts. The Rosetta stone was potentially a way to unravel the meaning of the ancient Egyptian symbols.

The scholars immediately recognized the stone’s significance and sent it to the National Institute in Cairo for detailed study. However, before the institute could embark on any serious research, it became clear that the French army was on the verge of being defeated by the advancing British forces. The French moved the Rosetta stone from Cairo to the relative safety of Alexandria, but ironically, when the French finally surrendered, Article XVI of the Treaty of Capitulation handed all the antiquities in Alexandria to the British, whereas those in Cairo were allowed to return to France. In 1802, the priceless slab of black basalt (measuring about one metre 16 centimetres in height, seventy-six centimetres in width and thirty centimetres in thickness, and weighing about 725 kilos) was sent to Portsmouth on board HMS L’Egyptienne, and later that year it took up residence at the British Museum, where it has remained ever since.

Figure 42 The Rosetta stone, inscribed in 196 BC and rediscovered in 1799, contains the same text written in three different scripts: hieroglyphs at the top, demotic in the middle and Greek at the bottom.

The translation of the Greek soon revealed that the Rosetta stone bore a decree from the general council of Egyptian priests issued in 196 BC. The text records the benefits that the pharaoh Ptolemy had bestowed upon the people of Egypt, and details the honours that the priests had, in return, piled upon the pharaoh. For example, they declared that “a festival shall be kept for King Ptolemy, the ever-living, the beloved of Ptah, the god Epiphanes Eucharistos, yearly in the temples throughout the land from the first of Thoth for five days, in which they shall wear garlands and perform sacrifices and libations and the other usual honours.” If the other two inscriptions contained the identical decree, the decipherment of the hieroglyphic and demotic symbols would seem to be straightforward. However, three significant hurdles remained. First, the Rosetta stone is seriously damaged, as can be seen in Figure 42. The Greek text consists of fifty-four lines, of which the last twenty-six are damaged. The demotic consists of thirty-two lines, of which the beginnings of the first fourteen lines are damaged (note that demotic and hieroglyphs are written from right to left). The hieroglyphic text is in the worst condition, with half the lines missing completely and the remaining fourteen lines (corresponding to the last twenty-eight lines of the Greek text) partly missing. The second barrier to decipherment is that the two Egyptian scripts convey the ancient Egyptian language, which nobody had spoken for at least eight centuries. Although it was possible to find a set of Egyptian symbols that corresponded to a set of Greek words, which would enable archaeologists to work out the meaning of the Egyptian symbols, it was impossible to establish the sound of the Egyptian words. Unless archaeologists knew how the Egyptian words were spoken, they could not deduce the phonetics of the symbols. Finally, the intellectual legacy of Kircher still encouraged archaeologists to think of Egyptian writing in terms of semagrams, representing whole ideas, rather than phonograms, representing sounds. Hence few people even considered attempting a phonetic decipherment of hieroglyphs.

One of the first scholars to question the prejudice that hieroglyphs were picture writing was the English prodigy and polymath Thomas Young. Born in 1773 in Milverton, Somerset, Young was able to read fluently at the age of two. By the age of fourteen he had studied Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Hebrew, Chaldean, Syriac, Samaritan, Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Ethiopie, and when he became a student at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, his brilliance gained him the nickname “Phenomenon Young”. At Cambridge he studied medicine, but it was said that he was interested only in the diseases, not the patients who had them. Gradually he began to concentrate more on research and less on caring for the sick.

Figure 43 Thomas Young.

Young performed an extraordinary series of medical experiments, many of them with the object of explaining how the human eye works. He established that colour perception is the result of three separate types of receptors, each one sensitive to one of the three primary colours. Then, by placing metal rings around a living eyeball, he showed that focusing did not require distortion of the whole eye, and proposed that the internal lens did all the work. His interest in optics led him towards physics and another series of discoveries. He published “The Undulatory Theory of Light”, a classic paper on the nature of light; he created a new and better explanation of tides; he formally defined the concept of energy and he published groundbreaking papers on the subject of elasticity. Young seemed to be able to tackle problems in almost any subject, but this was not entirely to his advantage. His mind was so easily fascinated that he would leap from subject to subject, embarking on a new problem before polishing off the last one.

When Young heard about the Rosetta stone, it became an irresistible challenge. In the summer of 1814 he set off on his annual holiday to the coastal resort of Worthing, taking with him a copy of the three inscriptions. Young’s breakthrough came when he focused on a set of hieroglyphs surrounded by a loop, called a cartouche. His hunch was that these hieroglyphs were ringed because they represented something of great significance, possibly the name of the pharaoh Ptolemy, because his Greek name, Ptolemaios, was mentioned in the Greek text. If this were the case, it would enable Young to discover the phonetics of the corresponding hieroglyphs, because a pharaoh’s name would be pronounced roughly the same regardless of the language. The Ptolemy cartouche is repeated six times on the Rosetta stone, sometimes in a so-called standard version, and sometimes in a longer, more elaborate version. Young assumed that the longer version was the name of Ptolemy with the addition of titles, so he concentrated on the symbols that appeared in the standard version, guessing sound values for each hieroglyph (Table 9).

Although he did not know it at the time, Young managed to correlate most of the hieroglyphs with their correct sound values. Fortunately, he had placed the first two hieroglyphs (), which appeared one above the other, in their correct phonetic order. The scribe has positioned the hieroglyphs in this way for aesthetic reasons, at the expense of phonetic clarity. Scribes tended to write in such a way as to avoid gaps and maintain visual harmony; sometimes they would even swap letters around, in direct contradiction to any sensible phonetic spelling, merely to increase the beauty of an inscription. After this decipherment, Young discovered a cartouche in an inscription copied from the temple of Karnak at Thebes that he suspected was the name of a Ptolemaic queen, Berenika (or Berenice). He repeated his strategy; the results are shown in Table 10.

Table 9 Young’s decipherment of the cartouche of Ptolemaios (standard version) from the Rosetta stone.

Table 10 Young’s decipherment of the cartouche of Berenika from the temple of Karnak.

Of the thirteen hieroglyphs in both cartouches, Young had identified half of them perfectly, and he got another quarter partly right. He had also correctly identified the feminine termination symbol, placed after the names of queens and goddesses. Although he could not have known the level of his success, the appearance of in both cartouches, representing i on both occasions, should have told Young that he was on the right track, and given him the confidence he needed to press ahead with further decipherments. However, his work suddenly ground to a halt. It seems that he had too much reverence for Kircher’s argument that hieroglyphs were symbolic, and he was not prepared to shatter that theory. He excused his own phonetic discoveries by noting that the Ptolemaic dynasty was descended from Lagus, a general of Alexander the Great. In other words, the Ptolemys were foreigners, and Young hypothesized that their names would have to be spelled out phonetically because there would not be a single natural symbol within the standard list of hieroglyphs. He summarized his thoughts by comparing hieroglyphs with Chinese characters, which Europeans were only just beginning to understand:

It is extremely interesting to trace some of the steps by which alphabetic writing seems to have arisen out of hieroglyphical; a process which may indeed be in some measure illustrated by the manner in which the modern Chinese express a foreign combination of sounds, the characters being rendered simply “phonetic” by an appropriate mark, instead of retaining their natural signification; and this mark, in some modern printed books, approaching very near to the ring surrounding the hieroglyphic names.

Young called his achievements “the amusement of a few leisure hours”. He lost interest in hieroglyphs and brought his work to a conclusion by summarizing it in an article for the 1819 Supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Meanwhile, in France a promising young linguist, Jean-François Champollion, was prepared to take Young’s ideas to their natural conclusion. Although he was still only in his late twenties, Champollion had been fascinated by hieroglyphs for the best part of two decades. The obsession began in 1800, when the French mathematician Jean-Baptiste Fourier, who had been one of Napoleon’s original “Pekinese dogs”, introduced the ten-year-old Champollion to his collection of Egyptian antiquities, many of them decorated with bizarre inscriptions. Fourier explained that nobody could interpret this cryptic writing, whereupon the boy promised that one day he would solve the mystery. Just seven years later, at the age of seventeen, he presented a paper entitled “Egypt Under the Pharaohs”. It was so innovative that he was immediately elected to the Academy in Grenoble. When he heard that he had become a teenage professor, Champollion was so overwhelmed that he immediately fainted.

Figure 44 Jean-François Champollion.

Champollion continued to astonish his peers, mastering Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Ethiopic, Sanskrit, Zend, Pahlavi, Arabic, Syrian, Chaldean, Persian and Chinese, all in order to arm himself for an assault on hieroglyphs. His obsession is illustrated by an incident in 1808, when he bumped into an old friend in the street. The friend casually mentioned that Alexandre Lenoir, a well-known Egyptologist, had published a complete decipherment of hieroglyphs. Champollion was so devastated that he collapsed on the spot. (He appears to have had quite a talent for fainting.) His whole reason for living seemed to depend on being the first to read the script of the ancient Eygptians. Fortunately for Champollion, Lenoir’s decipherments were as fantastical as Kircher’s seventeenth-century attempts, and the challenge remained.

Table 11 Champollion’s decipherment of and , the cartouches of Ptolemaios and Cleopatra from the Bankes obelisk.

In 1822, Champollion applied Youngs approach to other cartouches. The British naturalist W. J. Bankes had brought an obelisk with Greek and hieroglyphic inscriptions to Dorset, and had recently published a lithograph of these bilingual texts, which included cartouches of Ptolemy and Cleopatra. Champollion obtained a copy, and managed to assign sound values to individual hieroglyphs (Table 11). The letters p, t, o, l and e are common to both names; in four cases they are represented by the same hieroglyph in both Ptolemy and Cleopatra, and only in one case, t, is there a discrepancy. Champollion assumed that the t sound could be represented by two hieroglyphs, just as the hard c sound in English can be represented by c or k, as in cat and kid. Inspired by his success, Champollion began to address cartouches without a bilingual translation, substituting whenever possible the hieroglyph sound values that he had derived from the Ptolemy and Cleopatra cartouches. His first mystery cartouche (Table 12) contained one of the greatest names of ancient times. It was obvious to Champollion that the cartouche, which seemed to read a-l-?-s-e-?-t-r-?, represented the name alksentrs – Alexandras in Greek, or Alexander in English. It also became apparent to Champollion that the scribes were not fond of using vowels, and would often omit them; the scribes assumed that readers would have no problem filling in the missing vowels. With three new hieroglyphs under his belt, the young scholar studied other inscriptions and deciphered a series of cartouches. However, all this progress was merely extending Young’s work. All these names, such as Alexander and Cleopatra, were still foreign, supporting the theory that phonetics was invoked only for words outside the traditional Egyptian lexicon.

Then, on September 14, 1822, Champollion received reliefs from the temple of Abu Simbel, containing cartouches that predated the period of Graeco-Roman domination. The significance of these cartouches was that they were old enough to contain traditional Egyptian names, yet they were still spelled out – clear evidence against the theory that spelling was used only for foreign names. Champollion concentrated on a cartouche containing just four hieroglyphs: The first two symbols were unknown, but the repeated pair at the end, were known from the cartouche of Alexander (alksentrs) to both represent the letter s. This meant that the cartouche represented (?-?-s-s). At this point, Champollion brought to bear his vast linguistic knowledge. Although Coptic, the direct descendant of the ancient Egyptian language, had ceased to be a living language in the eleventh century AD, it still existed in a fossilized form in the liturgy of the Christian Coptic Church. Champollion had learned Coptic as a teenager and was so fluent that he used it to record entries in his journal. However, until this moment, he had never considered that Coptic might also be the language of hieroglyphs.

Table 12 Champollion’s decipherment of the cartouche of Alksentrs (Alexander).

Champollion wondered whether the first sign in the cartouche, might be a semagram representing the sun, that is, whether a picture of the sun was the symbol for the word sun. Then, in an act of intuitive genius, he assumed the sound value of the semagram to be that of the Coptic word for sun, ra. This gave him the sequence (ra-?-s-s). Only one pharaonic name seemed to fit. Allowing for the irritating omission of vowels, and assuming that the missing letter was m, then surely this had to be the name of Rameses, one of the greatest pharaohs, and one of the most ancient. The spell was broken. Even ancient traditional names were phonetically spelled. Champollion dashed into his brother’s office and proclaimed, “Je tiens l’affaire!” (“I’ve got it!”), but once again his intense passion for hieroglyphs got the better of him. He promptly collapsed and was bedridden for the next five days.

Champollion had demonstrated that the scribes sometimes exploited the rebus principle. In a rebus, still found in some puzzle books, long words are broken into their phonetic components, which are then represented by semagrams. For example, the word belief can be broken down into two syllables, be-lief which can then be rewritten as bee-leaf. Instead of writing the word alphabetically, it can be represented by the image of a bee followed by the image of a leaf. In the example discovered by Champollion, only the first syllable (ra) is represented by a rebus image, a picture of the sun, while the remainder of the word is spelled more conventionally.

The significance of the sun semagram in the Rameses cartouche is enormous, because it clearly restricts the possibilities for the language spoken by the scribes. For example, the scribes could not have spoken Greek, because this would have meant that the cartouche would be pronounced “helios-meses,” because helios is the Greek word for “sun”. The cartouche makes sense only if the scribes spoke a form of Coptic, because the cartouche would then be pronounced “ra-meses”.

Although this was just one more cartouche, its decipherment clearly demonstrated the four principles of hieroglyphics. First, the language of the script is at least related to Coptic, and indeed, examination of other hieroglyphs showed that it was Coptic pure and simple. Second, semagrams are used to represent some words; for example, the word sun is represented by a picture of the sun. Third, some long words are built wholly or partly using the rebus principle. Finally, for most of their writing, the ancient scribes relied on a conventional phonetic alphabet. This final point is the most important one, and Champollion called phonetics the “soul” of hieroglyphs.

Using his deep knowledge of Coptic, Champollion began an unhindered and prolific decipherment of hieroglyphs beyond the cartouches. Within two years he identified phonetic values for the majority of hieroglyphs, and discovered that some of them represented combinations of two or even three consonants. This sometimes gave scribes the option of spelling a word using several simple hieroglyphs or with just a few multiconsonant hieroglyphs.

Champollion sent his initial results in a letter to Monsieur Dacier, the permanent secretary of the French Académie des Inscriptions. Then in 1824, at the age of thirty-four, Champollion published all his achievements in a book entitled Précis du système hiéroglyphique. For the first time in fourteen centuries it was possible to read the history of the pharaohs as written by their scribes. For linguists, here was an opportunity to study the evolution of a language and a script across a period of over three thousand years. Hieroglyphs could be understood and traced from the third millennium BC through to the fourth century AD

For several years, politics and envy prevented Champollion’s magnificent achievement from being universally accepted. Thomas Young was a particularly bitter critic. On some occasions Young denied that hieroglyphs could be largely phonetic; at other times he accepted the argument but complained that he himself had reached this conclusion before Champollion and that the Frenchman had merely filled in the gaps. Much of Youngs hostility resulted from Champollion’s failure to give him any credit, even though it is likely that Young’s initial breakthrough provided the inspiration for the full decipherment.

In July 1828 Champollion embarked on his first expedition to Egypt, which lasted eighteen months. It was a remarkable opportunity for him to witness firsthand the inscriptions he had previously seen only in drawings. Thirty years earlier, Napoleon’s expedition had guessed wildly at the meaning of the hieroglyphs that adorned the temples, but now Champollion could simply read them character by character and reinterpret them correctly. His visit came just in time. Three years later, having written up the notes, drawings and translations from his Egyptian expedition, he suffered a severe stroke. The fainting spells he had suffered throughout his life were perhaps symptomatic of a more serious illness, made worse by his obsessive and intense study. He died on March 4, 1832, at the age of forty-one.