One of the great pleasures in retrac-ing the steps of a fundamental dis-covery, be it in science, or music, or art,is remaking the discovery for oneself, re-experiencing the process through whichthe scientist or artist grasped somethingprofound, which hitherto had beenutterly unknown. The joy of thatmoment, though but a pale reflection ofwhat must have been the emotion of theoriginal thinker, gives one a taste ofwhat creativity really is all about. Andthe taste, what Nicolaus of Cusa calledthe “sweetness of Truth,” has the effectof whetting the appetite further, so thatone yearns to find out what lies aheadon the path to knowledge.

Reliving such discoveries makes last-ing friendships. For, once onehas traversed the same, attimes tortuous, path found bythe original thinker, onecomes to know the personalityof that mind, to respect it andlove it.

Such is the experience ofmeeting Jean François Cham-pollion (1790-1832), the greatFrench philologist and histo-rian, whose discoveries laidthe basis for what is knowntoday as Egyptology. It wasChampollion who fiercelycontested all the academicassumptions about Egypt,and, by unlocking the secretsof its ancient language, estab-lished a scientific basis forstudying Egyptian civiliza-tion. In so doing, he dealt amortal blow to British histori-ography, which had attempt-ed to bury the truth about thePharaonic culture under aheap of prejudices, miscon-ceptions, and outright lies.Champollion was also, notaccidentally, a fervent patriot,who fought for truth, also, for

the glory of France. It is only just andproper that France, today, should cele-brate young Champollion as a kind ofnational hero, two hundred years afterthe events that led to his discovery.

Jean François Champollion, born inFigeac on Dec. 23, 1790, has gone downin history as the man who succeeded indeciphering hieroglyphics, the ancientscript of Egypt, on the Rosetta Stone,and numerous other documents. Yet, itwas not merely a question of breaking acode, as a cryptographer might imagine.It was a matter of demonstrating thatwhat had been considered a mysterious,pictographic cult object, manipulated bya sinister, elite preisthood to exert socialcontrol over the masses, was, in reality, a

highly sophisticated, rationalform of writing, which com-municated the spoken languageof Egypt.

This meant, as well, that theEgyptian society which Britishscholarship had depicted asbackward, slave-based, anddevoted to a death cult, wasinstead a civilization with anadvanced language-culture andscience. Not only: by decipher-ing the hieroglyphic textsreaching back to the earliestdynasties, Champollion wasable to prove the antiquity ofthis language-culture, and itsextraordinary, unbroken conti-nuity over twenty-two cen-turies. This established the factthat the Egyptians, far olderthan the Greeks, had inventedwriting, in the form of a beauti-ful alphabetical system, andgiven this great gift tomankind. As the French philol-ogist wrote, at the conclusion ofhis major work, the inventionof such an alphabetical systemwas an historical breakthrough.“The solution to such a prob-

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CO M ME NTA RY

Unlocking the Civilization of Ancient Egypt

How Champollion Deciphered the Rosetta Stone

Jean François Champollion

FIGURE 1. The Rosetta Stone, found at Rosetta near Alexandriain 1799. Text is inscribed in three different scripts: hieroglyphic(top section), demotic (middle), and Greek (bottom).

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lem offered extreme difficulty,” hewrote, “and the first to find it, changed,without knowing it, the face of theearth; he determined at the same timethe social state of his country, that ofneighboring peoples, and the destiny ofall future generations. The Egyptians,who doubtless had forgotten or hadnever known the name of the inventorof their phonetical signs, renderedhonor, in the time of Plato, to one oftheir gods of the second order, Thoth,whom they also considered father of thesciences and the arts.” (Précis, p. 355)

Cultural Warfare

There can be no doubt, that the Britishwere committed to maintaining the false-hood, that Egyptian culture had been awasted effort. This was manifest in theway the British responded to the discov-ery of the Rosetta Stone. It was in sum-mer 1799, that a Frenchman, working onfortifications in a town thirty miles fromAlexandria, struckupon a stone in theground with his pick.When the object hehad hit was dusted off,it became clear that itwas something of enor-mous value: althoughbroken off in the upperportion, the basalt slabwas inscribed withtexts in three scripts:hieroglyphics at thetop, demotic (popularEgyptian script) in themiddle, and Greek atthe bottom [SEE Figure1]. The unusual monu-ment was immediately sent to the InstitutNational in Cairo, an institution whichthe French under Napoleon had set up,for study of the artifacts that they werecollecting. Napoleon’s expedition intoEgypt, in 1798, had been not only mili-tary, but scientific: he had organized ateam of 167 scientists, members of theballoon corps, engineers, printers, geome-ters, astronomers, zoologists, botanists,artists (including painters, designers,sculptors and poets), mathematicians,economists, journalists, and so forth, tocanvass the country, and, later, to publisha comprehensive report on their findings

in the Description de l’Egypte, a monu-mental work of eighteen volumes, withillustrations.

Although no one could read theinscriptions, all were aware that thetrilingual text opened up the possibilityof deciphering hieroglyphics. TheBritish, fully cognizant of the opportu-nity the stone represented, moved mili-tarily against the French, and after thecapitulation in 1801, confiscated all theartifacts the French had collected—especially the Rosetta Stone, which theysent to the British Museum in London.

Not only did the British grab theRosetta Stonethrough war,but they alsoc o n t r o l l e daccess to it.Through theoffices of theRoyal Society,the institution

through which the British sought tocontrol science, they initiated a projectto decipher hieroglyphics.

In 1802, the Royal Society took in as amember Dr. Thomas Young, a physicistand medical doctor, who had extensiveknowledge of oriental languages. Youngquickly rose in the Royal Society, becom-ing a fellow in 1804. Then, in 1814,Young was given two papyrus texts withhieroglyphic and demotic inscriptions,and it was assumed he would tackletheir decipherment, with the aid also ofthe Rosetta Stone, which he could con-sult in the British Museum. Young tried

to decipher the script, but failed.The general content of the demotic

and hieroglyphic texts on the RosettaStone could be deduced from translationof the Greek text, which was quite com-plete. It was a decree, promulgated in197-196 B.C., of the anniversary of theaccession of Ptolemy V Epiphanes to thethrone in Egypt. After listing the manygood deeds of Ptolemy V, who ruled203-181 B.C., it decreed that statues in hishonor be erected in all the temples, andthat celebrations honoring him be held.The concluding paragraph declares,“And this Decree shall be inscribed

upon stelae of hard stone, in holy, and innative, and in Greek letters,” and shallbe set up in the temples, alongside stat-ues of Ptolemy V.

The “holy” script was the hiero-glyphics and the “native” was thedemotic. Although nothing was knownof the first script, certain progress hadbeen made in attacking the second. Sil-vestre de Sacy, Champollion’s professorof oriental languages in Paris, was thefirst to identify groups of names in thedemotic script, corresponding to theproper names in the Greek, and tohypothesize that the characters were

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The scientific resultsof Napoleon’s expe-dition to Egypt werepublished in volumesof the “Descriptionde l’Égypte,” begin-ning in 1809. Left:Title page of Vol-ume I. Above andright: Illustrationsfrom Latopolis andThebes.

phonetical. Georges Zoega had intuitedin the Eighteenth century, that propernames could be isolated, because theywere contained in cartouches, or oval-shaped enclosures. After de Sacy, theSwedish researcher Akerblad attrib-uted sound values to the characters, tomake out the name of Ptolemy, forexample.

Young worked on the demotic script,using Akerblad’s rudimentary alphabet,but did not make much progress. Hisapproach was that of a computer: hecounted the number of times a certainword, like “god,” appeared in the Greektext, then went to the demotic, to searchfor a word that appeared about the samenumber of times. He thus establishedcorrespondences, but did not decipherthe words.

In working on the hieroglyphic text,Young followed a purely haphazardmethod. The only name in a cartouchein the much reduced hieroglpyhic textof the Rosetta Stone, was “Ptolemy.”Young proceeded thus to guess the val-ues of the characters, comparing themwith the values posited by Akerblad forthe same name in demotic [see Figure2]. As Champollion pointed out later,Young was trying to fit a square peginto a round hole, twisting and turningto make it fit. Thus, he thought somecharacters were letters, some were sylla-

bles, and some were meaningless.Young’s attempt to decipher the nameBerenice, from a cartouche found atKarnac [SEE Figure 3], was even lesslucky, as he guessed correctly only a fewcharacters.

Young gave up after this, regardlessof the fact that other proper names inboth demotic and hieroglyphics wouldhave been available to him. Why hewent no further has not been explained,even by Young’s most fervent support-ers, like the British Museum’s officialhistorian on the Rosetta Stone, E.A.Wallis Budge. Despite his evidentshortcomings, Young was commis-sioned to write an item on Egypt for theEncyclopedia Brittanica of 1818, and didso, claiming he had discovered thehieroglyphic alphabet. Young also led averitable witch-hunt against Champol-lion, following the latter’s breakthroughin 1822, which was based on the slan-derous assertion that Champollion hadplagiarized the work of the Britishphysician.

The Play Drive of the Creative Mind

No two personalities could be more dis-tinct than Dr. Young and Champollion.If the former was motivated by undis-closed aims, shaped by an empiricistapproach, the latter was driven by an

unqualified love for truth, andinformed by the method ofhypothesis. If Young were rigidand dogmatic in his assump-tions, Champollion was a freespirit, capable of questioninghis own most cherished beliefs.

The key to Champollion’sachievement lay in his uncom-promising commitment to seekthe truth, a commitmentshaped by his extraordinaryeducation and upbringing. Theson of a bookseller, JeanFrançois became a bibliophileat an early age. His older broth-er, Jean Jacques, known as “leFigeac,” was also an unusuallyindependent mind, whoassumed the responsibility forthe education of his youngerbrother, known as “le Jeune.”Jean Jacques placed his younger

brother in the care of a religious tutor,who taught him Greek and Latin; later,in 1802, the younger Champollion start-ed studying oriental languages, Hebrew,Arabic, Syriac, Chaldean (Aramaic), andCoptic, the language of the EgyptianChristians. With this grounding in Clas-sical and oriental languages (as well asmodern tongues, of course), JeanFrançois immersed himself in the worksof the ancient writers; from Herodotusto Strabo, Plutarch to Horapollon,Clement of Alexandria, as well as Plato.Champollion read these works, not assome academic exercise, or to prepare topass an examination, but to learn whatthey had to tell him, above all, aboutEgypt, a subject which became a pas-sionate interest very early.

Part of his interest in Egypt wasprompted by his brother, who was topublish a major work on the history ofthe country. And, it was buttressed bythe enormous interest generated inFrench intellectual circles, by theNapoleonic expedition and the discov-ery of the Rosetta Stone, which tookplace when Jean François was nineyears old. It was only two years later,that the young boy announced hewould be the one to decipher hiero-glyphics. In 1806, he explained in a let-ter to his brother what his plans were

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FIGURE 3. Hieroglyphic cartoucheof the name “Berenice.”

Dr. Thomas Young

FIGURE 2. The name “Ptolemy” inhieroglyphic cartouche (top) anddemotic script (bottom).

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for Egypt: “I want to conduct deep,continuing studies into this ancientnation. The enthusiasm which thedescriptions of their enormous monu-ments ignited in me, the admirationwhich their power and knowledgefilled me with, will grow with the newthings that I will acquire. Of all thepeoples that I love the most, I will con-fess that no one equals the Egyptians inmy heart.”

Champollion’s first major work,which he presented to the Academy ofArts and Sciences of Grenoble, just priorto moving to Paris to continue his stud-ies at the College de France, was an“Essay on the Geographical Descriptionof Egypt before the Conquest of Cam-byses.” Egypt was his passion; but it wasnot a thing in itself. Rather, he wasinvestigating the history of Egypt, in aneffort to comprehend more fundamen-tal, universal questions. This is evidentin the titles of courses which he taught,as a twenty-year-old assistant professorof ancient history, at the University ofGrenoble; these included “The Antiqui-ty of the World and the Origins ofMan,” and “Critical Reflections on theHistorians of All Times and AllNations.”

In Paris, Jean François attendedcourses at the College de France and theEcole des langues orientales, where hestudied Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Syriac,Chaldean, and Coptic. He loved lan-guages, and threw himself into theirstudy with incredible joy. As he wrotehis brother in December 1807, his courseof study was intensive: “At nine o’clock[Mondays] I follow M. de Sacy’s Persianclass until 10:00. Leaving the Persianclass, since Hebrew, Syriac, andChaldean are at 12:00, I go to M.Audran’s, who offered to take me Mon-days, Wednesday, and Fridays from10:00 to 12:00. . . . We spend these twohours talking oriental languages, trans-lating Hebrew, Syrian, Chaldean, orArabic. And we always dedicate a half-hour to work on Chaldean and Syriacgrammar. At noon, we go down, and hegives his Hebrew class. He calls me thepatriarch of the class, because I am thebest . . . .”

All this intensive study, Champol-

lion experienced as great fun. In fact,play was a constant element in his lan-guage study. When he was concentrat-ing on Arabic, Jean François sportedArab dress, and adopted the nickname,“al Seghir,” the younger, in Arabic.And when he immersed himself inCoptic, the language which became hisoverriding passion, he knew no bounds.He wrote his brother in 1809: “I amtotally immersed in Coptic, I want toknow Egyptian as well as I knowFrench, because my great work on theEgyptian papyrus [hieroglyphics] willbe based on this language . . . . My Cop-tic is moving along, and I find in it thegreatest joy, because you have to think:to speak the language of my dearAmenhotep, Seth, Ramses, Thuthmos,

is no small thing. . . . As for Coptic, I donothing else. I dream in Coptic. I donothing but that, I dream only in Cop-tic, in Egyptian. . . . I am so Coptic,that for fun, I translate into Copticeverything that comes into my head. Ispeak Coptic all alone to myself (sinceno one else can understand me). This isthe real way for me to put my pureEgyptian into my head. . . . In my view,Coptic is the most perfect, most rationallanguage known.”

Similarly, with Etruscan, a languagewhich had not been deciphered. At 18,he reported to Jean Jacques: “I am total-ly immersed in the language, in thecoins, in the metals, in the monuments,in the sarcophaghi, everything I canfind, the tombs, the paintings, etc., about

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FIGURE 4. The three ancient Egyptian scripts: (a) Hieratic script (top) withhieroglyphic transposition (bottom). (b) Sample of demotic script. (c) Demotic (top)and hieroglyphic (bottom) versions of the name “Ptolemy.” [From Erman, “DieHieroglyphen,” (a) and (c); Jensen, “Die Schrift,” (b).]

(a) (b)

(c)

the Etruscans. Why? because the Etr-uscans come from Egypt.” Then, in acharacteristic jab at “official knowl-edge,” he added, “That’s a conclusion,that would make the academics climbthe walls, those that have a smattering ofGreek and Latin, but I have monumen-tal proof.”

Another aspect of his study-play withlanguages, was comparing scripts. Hetook the alphabets of the languages hewas learning, Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic,and Hebrew, and compared them, letterfor letter; then he would compare eachof them with Greek, Coptic, and soforth. While playing with the similari-ties and differences of forms, he was inessence playing with the hypothesis thatthe different languages of that region ofthe world bore common principles.

The Grand Hypothesis

Champollion’s work on decipheringhieroglyphics was a life-long occupa-tion. From his deep study of the ancientauthors who dealt with Egypt, hedeveloped several hypotheses, whichwere to guide his research. First, as isevident in his letters about Coptic, heassumed that Coptic was “Egyptian,”the language not only of the Christiansbut of all Egyptians, going back to theearliest times. Thus, he assumed a con-tinuity of the language culture throughmillennia.

Related to these ideas, was his earlyconviction, that the three forms ofscript, of which the Greeks wrote—thehieroglyphic, the hieratic and thedemotic—were essentially differentversions or forms for writing the samelanguage [SEE Figure 4]. To test out thishypothesis of the fundamental unity ofthe three, Champollion did extensivework comparing the scripts—in thesame way he had, as a child, comparedthe alphabets of oriental languages. Heused all the material available to him,the demotic and hieroglyphic texts onthe Rosetta Stone, various versions ofthe Book of the Dead, and any papyrushe could get his hands on. With theissuance of each new volume of theDescription de l’Egypte, beginning in1809, he found new material for hiscomparative studies.

By 1821, he had come to the conclu-sion that that “the hieratic is nothing buta simplification of hieroglyphic,” andthat it “should be considered as short-hand for the hieroglyphs.” By extensivecomparisons, he succeeded in identify-ing what he called the “most simpletraits” of the hieratic, and finding corre-sponding symbols in the hieroglyphs.Although he could not read the scripts,he could find the correspondences; infact, he would take a word or group inhieratic, and transpose, according to thecorrespondences he had observed, intothe hieroglyphic. He did the same, fromthe demotic to the hieratic. In 1821, hedrew up a table of 300 signs which wasintended to demonstrate this unityamong the three. What he was seeking,was not primarily the decipherment, butthe internal dynamic of the writing as acoherent system.

What the nature of the writingwas—whether symbolical, ideogram-matic or phonetical, was still an openquestion. At one point, he thought theywere phonetical. In a paper on the hier-atic which he read in August 1821, tothe Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris, he said that he consid-ered the scripts essentially ideographic.In his work of 1822, the Lettre à M.Dacier, he said he had previously consid-ered that both hieratic and demotic,

were not only alphabetical, “but oftenalso ideographic, like the hieroglyphsthemselves, that is, painting sometimesideas, and sometimes the sounds of alanguage.” (Lettre, p. 41)

To test the various possibilities, inDecember 1821, Champollion devel-oped a hypothesis on the basis of theRosetta Stone, which is startling in itssimplicity. He reasoned thus: If thehieroglyphics were ideogrammatic, andeach group stood for one idea or thing,then the number of groups (words) inthe hieroglyphic version should beapproximately the same as in the Greektext. He proceeded to count the Greekwords, and came up with 486. Heassumed that the hieroglyphic textwould actually have far fewer, giventhat such a large piece of that part of thestone had been broken off. Yet, on thecontrary, he found they were far more,1419 to be precise. This proved that theycould not be ideographic. Then, theymust be phonetical. To test this hypoth-esis, he reduced the 1419 signs into whathe considered their elementary traits,and came up with 166. Knowing asmuch as he did about the alphabets ofso many languages in the same regionof the world, he knew that it would behighly improbable for an alphabet tohave 166 characters. Perhaps, it was amixed system.

At the time Champollion was work-ing on these ideas, it was a universallyheld assumption, that the hieroglyphicscontained in cartouches from the peri-ods of Greek and Roman rule in Egypt,had been adapted as phonetical signs. Inother words, it was believed that thehieroglyphs had no relationship to spo-ken language, and were merely cultsymbols used in esoteric rituals. Howev-er, it was believed—and most ferventlyby Dr. Young—the Egyptians, firstunder the Greeks and later, under theRomans, had used these symbols ascharacters, in order to express the namesof foreign rulers. Young asserted, infact, that the Greeks had invented thisphonetical use of the signs.

In 1822, Champollion made hisbreakthrough. Working from excellentreproductions of the Rosetta Stone,which had just been published in the

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FIGURE 6.Hieroglyphiccartouchecontaining thename “Ptolemy”from the Philaeobelisk.

FIGURE 5. Hieroglyphic cartouchecontaining the name “Ptolemy”from the Rosetta Stone.

fifth volume of the Description de l’E-gypte, Champollion isolated the demoticcartouche with the name of Ptolemy,and worked from it, transposing to thehieratic and the hieroglyphic. He dis-covered that the hieroglyphic version hecame up with, actually corresponded tothe hieroglyphic contained in the car-touche of the stone.

Champollion succeeded in deducingthe sound values for the signs in thedemotic Ptolemy, both on the RosettaStone and on another papyrus whichhad been recently acquired by France.He then compared this to a demotic ver-sion of Cleopatra, which had been foundon the so-called Casati papyrus, andascertained that there were several char-acters in the two names which were sim-ilar; this had to be the case, since the twonames in Greek also share severalsounds (P L T O E).

He hypothesized at this point, that, ifthe demotic and hieroglyphic scriptswere lawfully related, and if the demoticnames could be read according to thesephonetical correspondences, then thesame should be true of the hieroglyph-ics. In order to test the hypothesis, herequired good examples of the twonames, in hieroglyphs. On the RosettaStone, because of the damage, the onlyhieroglyphic name was Ptolemy [SEEFigure 5].

Finally, in January of 1822, Cham-pollion was able to test the idea. He atlong last came into possession of a copyof the obelisk at Philae, through thegood graces of M. Letronne. Theobelisk, which had been transported toLondon, was available to Young yearsearlier. The Philae obelisk had thehieroglyphic name for Ptolemy [SEEFigure 6], as well as a cartouche withthe name of a female, identified in aGreek inscription, as Cleopatra. Pro-

ceeding with his comparative method,he identified the signs the two nameshad in common, and then deduced theremaining ones. He noticed that, theletter which should be in the positionof T, in Cleopatra, was not the seg-ment of a sphere he had seen in Ptole-my, but an open hand. Here, heassumed that this must also representT, and posited the notion of homo-phones: that more than one symbol orcharacter could be used to express thesame sound (as in English “phonetic”and “fancy”).

After having discovered the phonet-ical values in these two names, Cham-pollion used the knowledge acquired,to decipher still more. He used thereproductions in the third volume ofthe Description, which showed inscrip-tions of other Greek and Roman lead-ers, and succeeded in decipheringBerenice, Alexander, Philip, Arsinoe,Augustus, Tiberius, Caius, Claudius,Nero, Vespasian, Titus, Domitian,Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antonin,Sabine, and also the surnames forAlexander, NeoCaesar, Germanicus,Dacius, and the title Autocrator.

Jean François had found the key,and used it to open one door afteranother. Yet, still in 1822, he attributedan ideographic nature to the threescripts, except for names inscribed inthe Greek and Roman periods. When,in 1824, he looked back on this convic-tion, he wrote, in his Précis, “I persistedin this false route up to the momentthat the evidence of the facts presentedto me the hieroglyphic Egyptian writ-

ing from a completely unexpected pointof view, forcing me, so to speak, to rec-ognize a phonetical value in a wholecollection of hieroglyphic groups,included in the inscriptions that deco-rate the Egyptian monuments of allages.” (Précis, p. 299)

It was in the same year, 1822, thatChampollion was confronted withempirical proof which utterly contra-dicted the assumption, that the alpha-betical function of hieroglyphics hadfirst appeared with the Greeks.Through a close associate, the archi-tect Nicholas Huyot, Champollionreceived drawings of cartouches fromthe temple of Abu Simbel [SEE Figure7]. What was unusual about the car-touches, is that they did not corre-spond to any of the names he had deci-phered from the Greeks and Romans.Nonetheless, he proceeded with theknowledge of the phonetical values hehad acquired through their decipher-ment, and recognized in the firstname, an S (like the last letter of Ptole-my, in Greek Ptolemaios). The firstcharacter in the name reminded himof a sun, which he immediately associ-ated with the Coptic name for sun, Re.He then asked himself whether theunfamiliar character in the middle,which looked like three prongs, mightbe M, which would yield the nameRamses [SEE Figure 8].

Feverish with the excitement that hewas about to make a fundamental dis-covery, Jean François sought out anoth-er cartouche, to test the hypothesis, thatthe phonetical signs had been used back

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FIGURE 7.Cartouche fromAbu Simbel.Champollionhypthesized thesounds R-M-S.

Figure 8. Hieroglyphic variants of the name“Ramses.”

as early as the time of Ramses for thenames of Egyptian pharaohs. The nextname he isolated [SEE Figure 9], dis-played two familiar characters, those forM and S. They were preceded by thefigure of a bird, which he recognized asan ibis. Remembering the reports of theClassical writers on Egyptian history,including Herodotus and Horapollon,he recalled that the ibis was the symbolof the god known as Thot (or Thoth),who, it was believed, had invented writ-ing, and the arts and sciences. Followingthe same method he had used to deci-pher Ramses, he proposed the readingThot-mu-sis, Thotmes (Tutmoses).

Although this second deciphermentof an Egyptian name confirmed hisfinding, he sought for further proof, thistime, in the case of a word not enclosedinside a cartouche. His hypothesis at thispoint was, that the entire system couldbe phonetical.

The first group he found to workwith, was composed of two signs he hadidentified in Ramses and Thotmes, asrepresenting M and S [SEE Figure 10].Thinking again in Coptic, he wonderedwhether this combination could berelated to “ms, mis, mise,” which is theverb meaning “to give birth.” Hereturned to the text in hieroglyphics onthe Rosetta Stone, and found the samegroup. Then, searching through theGreek text, he found a phase referringto “birthday celebrations.” Thisclinched it.

Overwhelmed by the power of hisdiscovery, Jean François abandoned hisroom, and ran through the streets, toreach his brother, who worked nearby atthe Institut de France. He raced into theroom, shouting “Je tiens l’affaire!,”—“Igot it!”

What remained, was to present thediscovery to the world, and thence, tocomplete his knowledge of the system asa whole. His first announcement of thebreakthrough, came in a paper, Lettre àM. Dacier, which he read to the Acade-mie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres onSept. 27, 1822. In it, he cautiously pre-sented his decipherments, but only ofthe names from the Greek and Romanperiod. He then asserted, “I am certain

that the same hieroglyphic-phoneticalsigns used to represent the sounds ofGreek or Roman proper names, are alsoemployed in hieroglyphic texts inscribedfar prior to the arrival of the Greeks inEgypt, and that they at that earlier timealready had the same representativesound or articulations as in the car-touches inscribed under the Greeks orRomans.”

He summarized the principle of thehieroglyphic phonetical system: “Oneimagines, then,that the Egyp-tians, wanting toexpress, be it avowel, be it a con-sonant, be it a syl-lable of a foreignword, would usea hieroglyphicsign expressing orrepresenting someobject, whose name, in the spoken lan-guage, contained in its entirety or in itsfirst part, the sound of the vowel, conso-nant or syllable that they wanted towrite.” (Lettre, p. 51) Thus, the sign of asparrow-hawk (which also symbolizeslife, the soul) is called “ahe” or “ahi” inEgyptian, and stands for the letter A. InCoptic, the word for mouth is “ro,” sothis sign stands for the letter R, and soforth.

The complete elaboration of Cham-pollion’s discovery came in his 1824masterpiece, the Précis du Système Hiéro-glyphiques des Anciens Égyptiens. As hestated at the outset, he would show thatthe alphabet he had established, appliedto “all epochs,” and that his discovery ofthe phonetical values unlocked theentire system. He would work out “thegeneral theory of the hieroglyphic sys-

tem . . . [which] will give us the fulland entire understanding of all hiero-glyphic texts.”

Champollion illustrated, in full, thedecipherment of grammatical words, thenames of Egyptian kings, the names ofprivate persons (from papyri on mum-mies), titles, names of pharaohs, and soon. He presented a full alphabet, withsigns, their names, and correspondingletters. In each case, he demonstrated themultifaceted nature of the alphabet; aname could be indicated by a symbol (anobelisk for Amman, for instance); or thesame name could be represented figura-tively (with an image representing thegod); or it could be rendered phonetical-ly. He summed it up: “The hieroglyphicwriting is a complex system, a script atthe same time figurative, symbolic, andphonetical, in the same text, in the samephrase, I would almost say, in the sameword.” (Précis, p. 375)

By using his discovery to read allthese names from the earliest times,Jean François was documenting thedynastic chronology, that had beenreported by Manetho, Herodotus, andDiodorus Siculus. He thus showed thatthis system had been in use from theNineteenth century B.C. until the spreadof Christianity in Egypt. This, heemphasized, obliterated everything thathad been thought over the precedingthree hundred years by scholars. How-ever, he added, “men of knowledge, inthe interests of truth, will easily sacrificeall hypotheses enunciated thus far,which are in contradiction with the fun-damental principle that we have justrecognized.”

He also demonstrated the unity ofthe three scripts, and illustrated their usefor religious purposes on monuments

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FIGURE 10. Illustrations of hieroglyphic signs representing Mand S. In Coptic, the verb “ms, mis, mise” means “to givebirth.”

FIGURE 9.Hieroglyphiccartouch with thename “Thotmes.”

(hieroglyphics), for religious and scien-tific works on papyrus (hieratic), and foradministrative matters as well as person-al records (demotic). All three scripts, heproved, were in general use throughoutEgypt, by all classes.

Champollion’s works, the Lettre andthe Précis, were the object of massivecontroversy throughout scholarlyEurope. Young led the “English school”which slandered him, while the Hum-boldt brothers led a large company ofscientists in his defense. In 1866, whenanother bilingual text, known as theDecree of Canopus, was found, his sys-tem was put to the test. Using Cham-pollion’s method, it was successfullydeciphered.

The Secret of Egyptian Art

Champollion went beyond his scientificfindings, to explore the implications ofthis unique system, on the artisticexpression of Egyptian civilization as awhole. Unlike Greek art, he wrote,“these arts did not have as their specialaim the representation of beautifulforms of nature; they tended onlytoward the expression of a certain orderof ideas, and were intended solely toperpetuate, not the memory of theforms, but that of persons and things.”Whether the colossal statue or the tinyamulet, he said, the perfection of formwas strictly secondary. Form was “but apowerful means to paint thought.”Champollion developed the interestingconcept, that unlike the Greeks, whoperfected form, and separated imitativearts from writing, “in Egypt, writing,design, painting and sculpture marchconstantly towards the same portal.”Everything flowed into one “art parexcellence: that of writing.” The greattemples, he wrote, were “representativecharacters of celestial abodes.” Further,“this intimate union of the fine artswith the Egyptian graphic system,effortlessly explains to us the causes ofthe state of naive simplicity in whichpainting and sculpture always persist inEgypt.” (Précis, pp. 431-432)

When Champollion finally visitedhis beloved Egypt, in 1828-1829, he hadthe opportunity to admire this great art

of writing, and to marvel at the magnif-icent temples and pyramids, with theirstatues, bas-reliefs, and inscriptions.The love he had developed for thecountry and its culture, was only mag-nified with each new encounter. One ofthe most moving descriptions from hisEgyptian tour, is of the entrance to thelibrary at the temple to the Ramesseum,in which his awe at the Egyptian dedi-cation to language and writing wasmost enthusiastically transmitted. In hisfourteenth letter from Thebes, June 18,1829, he wrote: “At the foot of the jamband immediately under the dedication,there are two divinities sculpted, withfaces turned towards the opening of theportal, and looking at the second room,which was therefore under their juris-diction. These two gods are, on the left,the god of sciences and arts, the inven-tor of letters, Thoth with the head of anibis, and on the right, the goddess Saf[Sechat], companion to Thoth, who car-ries the remarkable title of lady of lettersand president of the library [literally, theroom of the books]. Furthermore, thegod is followed by one of his paredri(familiars), who, by his inscription andby a huge eye that he carries on hishead, one recognizes as the personifica-tion of the sense of sight, while thefamiliar of the goddess is the sense of

hearing, characterized by a huge earalso drawn above the head, and by theword solem [sedjem] (hearing) sculptedin the inscription; he furthermore holdsin his hands all the implements forwriting, as if to write what he hears.

“I ask myself, if there is a better waythan through such bas-reliefs, toannounce the entrance to a library?”

—Muriel Mirak Weissbach

BIBLIOGRAPHYJean François Champollion, Lettre à M.

Dacier, in Précis du Système Hiéro-glyphique des Anciens Égyptiens, ouRecherches sur les éléments premiers decette écriture sacrée, sur leurs diverses com-binaisons, et sur les rapports de ce systèmeavec les autres méthods graphiques égypti-ennes; Seconde édition, revue par l’auteur,et augmentée de la Lettre à M. Dacier, rel-ative à l’Alphabet des hiéroglyphes phoné-tiques employés par les Égyptiens sur leursmonumens de l’époque grecque et del’époque romaine (Paris: 1827). (Cited as“Précis” and as “Letter”)

________ , Lettres à son frére, 1804-1818, ed.by Pierre Vaillant (L’Asiatheque, 1984).

________ , Lettres et journaux écrites pendantle voyage d’Egypte, collected and annotat-ed by H. Hartleben (Christian BourgoisEditeur, 1986).

________, Lettres écrites d’Egypte et de Nubie,en 1828 et 1829 (Geneva: SlatkineReprints, 1973).

________ , Textes fondamentaux sur l’Egypteancienne, ed. by Christian Jacq (La Mai-son de Vie, 1996).

Jean Lacouture, Champollion, Une vie delumieres (Grasset, 1988).

E. A. Wallis Budge, The Rosetta Stone (NewYork: Dover Publications, 1989 reprintedition).

________ , An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictio-nary, in two volumes (1920) (New York:Dover Publications, 1978 reprint edi-tion).

________ , The Egyptian Book of the Dead(The Papyrus of Ani): Egyptian Text,Transliteration, and Translation (1895)(New York: Dover Publications, 1967reprint edition).

Erik Iversen, The Myth of Egypt and Its Hiero-glyphs in European Tradition (Copen-hagen: 1963; Princeton: 1993).

Hermann Grapow, Die Bildlichen Ausdrückedes Ägyptischen vom Denken und Dichteneiner Altorientalishcen Sprache (Darm-stadt, 1983).

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Title page of Champollion’smasterpiece, “Précis du SystèmeHiéroglyphiques des AnciensÉgyptiens.”