Two centuries ago this week, French linguist Jean-François Champollion announced that he had cracked the code of hieroglyphics, an ancient Egyptian writing system that had puzzled scholars for centuries. RFI tells the story of a landmark event that revolutionized humanity’s understanding of one of the world’s oldest civilizations.
In September 1822, a 32-year-old man jumped out of 28 Rue Mazarine in Paris.
He hurried towards the Seine. On the opposite shore, the Louvre Museum had been established 29 years earlier. He stopped in front of the Pont des Arts, a new metal bridge built on the orders of the late Napoleon Bonaparte, which had been dead since last spring.
He stormed into the Society of French Studies, a learning society founded in a grand domed building just across from the Louvre.
Once inside, he hurried to the office of Jacques-Joseph Champollion, one of the Institute’s correspondents.
The young man pushed a stack of notes onto the scholar’s desk. “I’ve got it!” he exclaimed. Then he fell to the floor and lost consciousness.
legendary discovery
At least, this is how the story goes of one of history’s most famous breakthroughs: how to decipher hieroglyphics, the complex writing system used in ancient Egypt.
According to legend, the person responsible was Jean-François Champollion – Jack Joseph’s brother – He was so devastated by the feat that he was bedridden for five days afterwards.
However, about two weeks later, on September 27, 1822, he publicly announced his findings at the French Academy of Epigraphy and Fine Arts.
What he realized was that hieroglyphs were not just pictures to represent words or phonetic symbols to make sounds. Instead, they combined the two of him.
Then, using his knowledge of other languages used in Egypt over the centuries, his brother Champollion began to unravel its meaning.
egyptomania
The story begins in the 1790s. Champollion was born at the beginning of his decade, at the end of which Napoleon was leading the French invasion of Egypt.
More than 160 scholars and artists were sent along with the soldiers during the operation, and numerous specimens, drawings, and artifacts were brought back to France, sparking a new obsession with ancient Egyptians across Europe.
However, understanding the lost civilization was impossible without understanding the hieroglyphics, which are unreadable to living linguists.
No one had written them since about 400 AD. Arab scholars attempted translations during the Middle Ages with some success, but their work was ignored in the West. After that, Europeans were in trouble.
Later, French soldiers discovered an interesting clue. It was a stone fragment found under a nearby fort. egypt rashid port – or as the French called it, a rosette.
Three inscriptions were carved on it. At the top are hieroglyphs (the “language of the gods”, reserved for formal documents), in the middle are the “language of documents”, another Egyptian script used for everyday purposes, and at the bottom are ancient Greek language, the language of Egypt was located. The last dynasty that ruled ancient Egypt.
Classicists could still read the last parts of these scripts. This means that scholars may be able to work backwards from the meaning of a text to how it was written and ultimately understand how hieroglyphics work.
The French took the stones to Alexandria, but soon found themselves surrounded by British troops. Britain laid claim to the most important archaeological finds and surrendered in 1801.
“Pierre de Rosette” was transported to England and placed in the British Museum the following year. rosetta stone.
talented linguist
Meanwhile, in France, Champollion was a precocious schoolboy with a talent for languages.
Born on December 23, 1790 in the small town of Figeac in southwestern France, he mastered Latin and Greek before moving on to non-European languages. By the time he was a teenager, he was fascinated by Egypt, and at the age of 15 he declared to his parents that he wanted to “deeply and continuously study this ancient nation.”
Champollion moved to Paris and continued his studies, juggling classes in Hebrew, Persian, Arabic, Amharic, and Assyrian. Importantly, he also found a priest who could teach him Coptic, a language spoken by Egyptian Coptic Christians during Roman times and still used in the church today.
“I surrender completely to the Coptic language,” he wrote to his brother in 1809, deciding that Coptic must be the key to understanding hieroglyphics.
“I would like to know Egyptian as well as French, because my great work on the Egyptian papyri is based on that language.”
Race for the Rosetta Stone
At the time, Champollion was not focused on the Rosetta Stone, which remained undeciphered.
Several scholars have advanced.Thanks to the Greek text, they knew that the inscription related to a king named PtolemySo they looked for a cluster of symbols in the central letter that might correspond to the name. This allowed them to pair signs with specific sounds.
However, progress stalled until British linguists, doctors, and physicists came forward. thomas young He turned his attention to the hieroglyphics. Although he was not an expert on Egypt, he approached the text like a code breaker, looking for patterns and noticing similarities between different characters that no one else had seen.
Starting again with “Ptolemy,” he tentatively suggested which hieroglyphs made up the sound of that name. However, he mistakenly believed that only his name was an exception, otherwise hieroglyphs did not represent sounds at all.
In 1819, Young announced his discovery, which was the furthest the Rosetta Stone had reached in the 20 years since its discovery.
Champollion read Young’s work and took up this challenge. His deep knowledge of the Coptic language allowed him to make the leap that Young could not. For example, he intuitively understood that a circular sign should read “Ra,” the Coptic word for sun.
Most importantly, he understood that hieroglyphs could function differently in different cases, sometimes representing whole words, and sometimes representing individual sounds. He said: “It’s a complex system, where you’re writing figurative, symbolic, and phonetic elements all at the same time, in the same text, in the same phrase, and in roughly the same word.”
Champollion cross-checked his readings by trying them on other hieroglyphic samples. When he realized that his system could find reliable meaning in previously undeciphered documents, he became convinced.
Minutes later, his family said, he was running down Rue Mazarine looking for his brother.
a lasting legacy
When Champollion published his theory later that month, it attracted worldwide attention. This included Young and others who were outraged that this excited young linguist did not recognize how much of their foundations he was drawing from.
Champollion dismissed his rivals (perhaps unfairly) and continued to develop his ideas, publishing more detailed guides to hieroglyphs in the years that followed.
He became responsible for building the collection of Egyptian antiquities at the Louvre, and by order of the French government, king charles xHe became the museum’s first Egyptian curator in 1826.
Two years later, he was finally able to go to the country that had fascinated him for more than half his life. “I am completely Egyptian, she is my everything,” he wrote from the banks of the Nile.
The trip also confirmed once and for all in Champollion’s mind that he was right. “Our alphabet is correct,” he wrote to the head of the Academy of Epigraphy during his travels, declaring that it applied equally to all Egyptian monuments.
In fact, it was far from perfect. It took decades with other experts to finally close the gap. But as more documents came to light, scholars tried Champollion’s method on them and found that it worked.
By March 1832, Champollion had died of a stroke at the age of 41 and was buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. ordinary sandstone obelisk.
Another obelisk stands in Figeac, where he was born. Made of French granite, its base is flanked by his two bronze plaques copied from Egyptian sculpture.
When designing this work only a few years after Champollion’s death, Champollion’s admirers knew enough to choose appropriate hieroglyphs. It said “forever”.
Listen to the conversation about Jean-François Champollion in episode 100 of RFI’s podcast Spotlight on France.