When the Rosetta Stone was first discovered, it was thought that the hieroglyphs would be deciphered in two weeks. As it turned out, it took twenty years. One cause of the troubles was that the three inscriptions turned out not to be word-for-word translations of one another. They do match up but in an imprecise manner like three peoples’ summaries of the same movie. Moreover scripts can run left to right, like English, or right to left, like Hebrew and Arabic, or top to bottom, like Chinese and Japanese. The symbols appeared without a break. How could anyone know where one word ended and the next began (if they were words at all)?
Jean-François Champollion, the man who was destined to decipher the hieroglyphs, was born in 1790. By all accounts, he was a child prodigy. When he was five years old, he learned how to read by comparing a list of words he had learned by heart with the written text. He was barely seven years old when he first heard the magical name of Egypt.
When Champollion was 11, Jean-Baptiste Fourier, the famous mathematician and physicist, had a conversation with him. Fourier was so taken by his intelligence that he invited him to his home, and showed him his Egyptian collection. The little boy was enchanted by hieroglyphic inscriptions on stone tablets. “Can anyone read them?” he asked. Fourier shook his head. “I am going to do it,” little Champollion announced with absolute certainty. “In a few years I will be able to. When I am big.”
Champollion explored the most esoteric topics. At the age of twelve, he wrote his first book, History of Famous Dogs. At thirteen he began to learn Arabic, Syrian, Chaldean, and Coptic. He studied textual excerpts from the Zend, Pahlavi, and Parsi. Using every source he could lay hands on, in the summer of 1807 Champollion, then seventeen years old, drew up the historical chart of the kingdom of the Pharaohs.
When he applied to a college, the authorities asked him to write a paper on a subject of his own choosing. He wrote a whole book for them: Egypt under the Pharaohs. On September 1, 1807 he read the introduction to this projected work to an assembly of students and teachers. The professors were overwhelmed to such a degree that on the spot they elected the boy to join them on the faculty. And so overnight Champollion was graduated from student to teacher.
He studied all the Oriental languages trying to understand their idiomatic developments. He wrote to his brother asking for a Chinese grammar, “for amusement”. He learned to speak Arabic so perfectly that he sounded like a native speaker. Through books alone, he acquired an extensive knowledge of Egypt. He spoke and wrote Coptic so well — “I speak Coptic to myself,” he said — that for practice he kept journals in Coptic. (Coptic was the only language providing a link with the Old Egyptian. The Coptic tongue had actually been spoken in Upper Egypt as late as the seventeenth century.)
A matter that kept occupying him was the Rosetta Stone but he kept holding himself back because he thought he was not prepared enough for such a big task. His first attempt to decipher the stele in his late teens enabled him to find the correct values for an entire row of letters. Then he got the horrendous news that that the hieroglyphs had been deciphered. He was relieved when he examined the proofs and realized that it was nonsense.
In 1821 he published a monograph where he outlined the rudiments of a successful decoding method. The dominant tendency for centuries was to look for a purely symbolic meaning in the pictures. Champollion showed how far from the truth this was. Egyptian writing actually had developed far beyond the original symbolism. One might think that the discovery of the Rosetta Stone would have put an end to wild guessing, but just the opposite proved to be the case.
All manner of cabalistic, astrological, and gnostic doctrines were attributed to them, as well as agricultural, mercantile, and administrative allusions to practical life. Biblical quotations were discovered in them, even an antediluvian literature, not to mention excerpts from the Chaldean, Hebrew, and Chinese. “It was as if the Egyptians,” Champollion remarks, “had nothing to express in their own language.” Champollion sat unmoved among these reworks, patiently ordering, comparing, testing, slowly climbing the long hill.
Champollion hit on the idea that the hieroglyphic pictures were “letters”. Once he had grasped basic principles, he saw that decipherment must begin with the names of the kings. But why with the names of Egyptian kings? In the hieroglyphic section of the text was a group of signs enclosed in an oval ring which came to be known as a cartouche. Perhaps these ovals were special? Perhaps they signaled that the hieroglyphs they enclosed were noteworthy in some way (as italics or bold type instructs us to pay particular attention to certain words).
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| Cartouche |
It seemed reasonable to suppose that these cartouches, since they were the only signs in the text showing evidence of special emphasis, might contain the Egyptian word for the king’s name. One should then be able to pick out the letters of the name Ptolemy from the Greek text and so correlate the eight hieroglyphic signs with eight letters. (In Greek, each letter is sounded individually; there are no silent letters. Greek speakers pronounce the P in Ptolemy.)
Much of the work till this point was done by another genius called Thomas Young. But from this point onwards, Champollion raced ahead. By sheer luck, he got hold of the inscription on the Obelisk of Philæ, which was taken to England in 1821. This obelisk bore a message also written in hieroglyphics and Greek. And here again the name Ptolemy was framed in a cartouche, as was also another unfamiliar group of hieroglyphs that through comparison with the Greek were shown to be the Egyptian word for Cleopatra.
The key bit of good fortune was that Ptolemy and Cleopatra contained several letters in common, namely P, T, O, L and E. Champollion had just assigned hieroglyphs to P, T, O, and L, based on the Rosetta Stone’s Ptolemy cartouche. Now he looked to see if those hieroglyphs turned up in the right place in the new cartouche. Substituting the letters from Ptolemy, this new cartouche read: _ L E O P _ T _ _.
With this, he found new letters to assign to the hieroglyphs — the ones corresponding to the sounds c, r, and a — to add to his collection. Then he looked at other inscriptions and other bits of papyrus, searching for more cartouches. With persistence, mis-steps, frustration and inspired guesses, he found the key to the hieroglyphs and with it, the key to all the locked doors of Egyptian antiquity. (The whole story is related in Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone by Edward Dolnick.)
(Why are inspired guesses required? A script can have numerous complications. Consider a person who has no idea about English. Is it read from right to left or from left to right? There are synonyms, homonyms, figures of speech, etc. 'Bank' could mean different things depending on the context. How to interpret 'She gave him the cold shoulder'? There are capital and small letters. How to know that 'cap' and 'CAP' mean the same thing? There are many punctuation marks.)
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