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The Decipherment of Egyptian Hieroglyphic Text |
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Up until the early nineteenth century the world knew very little
of ancient Egypt other than what appeared in the Old Testament.
The monuments such as the Great Pyramids at Giza were known from
Grecian sources but Egypt in general was a mystery, a society that
had been closed to outsiders for hundreds of years.
It took Napoleon's expedition to Egypt of 1798-1802 to make Europe
aware of the richness of ancient Egyptian civilization. Militarily
Napoleon's expedition was a disaster because the English decisively
wiped out the French fleet at Aboukir Bay (The Battle of the Nile).
Napoleon's troops were able to defeat the Mamelukes who controlled Egypt
at the time but as soon as the French
fleet was destroyed the expedition was doomed. Napoleon himself escaped
leaving his troops to fend for themselves. The one success of the
expedition was the scientific investigations carried out by the corps
of scientists Napoleon took with him.
The French scientists brought back to France copies of the hieroglyphic
texts from temple walls and papyrus scrolls. The perplexing thing was
that in all this extensive literature not one character could be read.
No one knew even the rudimentary facts of the ancient Egyptian civilization,
such as the time period over which it existed.
The French expedition discovered what was thought to be the key to
the decipherment of hieroglyphic text, the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta
Stone has a message in three different scripts, one of which is Greek
and another which is hieroglyphic. It seemed so obvious that these
inscriptions would lead to the unlocking of the hieroglyphic literature
that the term "Rosetta Stone" has entered the English language as a
term for a key to solving a great mystery. In fact, however, the
Rosetta Stone played almost no role, other than providing inspiration,
in the deciphering of hieroglyphics. The British acquired possession of
the Rosetta Stone in the terms of the peace treaty but copies of the scripts and
even casts of the stone itself were dispersed in western Europe.
The story of the decipherment of hieroglyphics is told masterfully in a
recent book, The Keys of Egypt:
The Obsession to Decipher Egyptian Hieroglyphics by Leslie Adkins and
Roy Adkins. The story of the decipherment is really the story of
Jean-Francois Champollion of France because, although many others attempted
to unravel hieroglyphics, it was only he who had the proper strategy for
learning to translate the texts. Others such as Thomas Young of England
had some success in ascertaining the phonetic value of a few signs but
their line of approach had no hope of enabling scholars to read the texts.
With Young's approach he got some hieroglyphic signs right and some wrong
and the net gain was rather minimal. Nevertheless there was then and
continues to exist a bitter resentment that Jean-Francois Champollion
never acknowledged in print that Young had initiated the decipherment process.
The Adkins' book makes clear that there was no reason to expect Champollion
to give credit to Young. Champollion was indebted to no one among his
contemporaries. He alone among those who tried
commenced his effort
to decipher hieroglyphics by learning the one existing language that was likely
to be related to the language of the ancient Egyptians. That language
was Coptic, the language spoken by Egyptian Christians and maintained
as a part of their religious ceremonies. Without a knowledge of the nature of
the language the best the other investigators such as Young could do
would be to convert untranslatable hieroglyphic text into an equally
untranslatable phonetic text written in Latin script. Champollion was
not the first to see the likely value of a knowledge of Coptic in
understanding hieroglyphics but probably no one else studied Coptic
with the intensity and depth that Champollion did.
Many petty and jealous individuals vilified Champollion
many years after Champollion's death in 1832 but the situation was aptly
summed up by the Sir Peter Renouf, the President of the Society for Biblical
Archeology, in 1896:
It is hard now to appreciate how difficult the task was at the time.
Here are some of the uncertainties that existed for scholars:
Some of these uncertainties were resolved before Champollion. For example,
the matter of the cartouches was settled when a scholar recognized that
they enclosed personal names and titles similar to what is found in
ancient Chinese writings. But that scholar after making one step forward
goes off on a wild tangent based upon the notion that the Chinese civilization
of the Yellow River Valley was an Egyptian colony. This hypothesis which
now seems ridiculous did not seem so ridiculous at the time it was proposed
but it was wrong. However its proposer could never give it up and wasted
his life on it. Champollion also operated on the basis of some false
hypotheses but, in contrast to the others, was quite willing to abandon
such hypotheses when the evidence mounted against them.
The matter of the direction in which horizontal text was to read turned
out to be more complicated than left-to-right or right-to-left. Sometimes
the direction was left-to-right and sometimes right-to-left. The direction
was indicated by the orientation of the hieroglyphics symbols. The symbols
"faced" in the direction the text was to be read. Thus the mirror image
pairs of symbols were not different symbols at all, but instead rightward or
leftward versions of the same symbol.
The stacking of hieroglyphic symbols was just a space saving and
aesthetic feature and not a way to create different symbols. Sometimes the
repetition of a symbol indicated a new symbol and other times it was a
way to denote plurality.
The hardest issue to resolve was the first uncertainty mentioned above,
the nature of hieroglyphics. Were the symbols ideograms or were they
phonetic? The initial consensus was that the hieroglyphs were ideograms.
There also was the notion that much of the hieroglyphic text was arcane
knowledge intended only for the priests and not to be read by anyone else.
It was Champollion who finally resolved the nature of hieroglyphic text.
But before him others, including Thomas Young, recognized that foreign
names such as the Greek rulers established by Alexander's conquest of
Egypt were written phonetically. From the Greek text of the Rosetta Stone
it was known that the names of Ptolomey and Cleopatra should appear in
cartouches in the hieroglyphics text. Young found the proper cartouches
and deduced the phonetic value of several hieroglyphics from them.
When linguists find scripts they can often quickly determine the
type of writing by a count of the number of different symbols. If the
number of different symbols is twenty to thirty the script is most likely
phonetic. If the count is especially low there is the strong possibility
that the writing gives only the consonants of the words as is the case
in the Semitic languages such as Arabic and Hebrew. If the number of different
symbols is on the order of eighty then the script is probably a syllabary
in which each symbol represents a syllable. The so-called alphabet
created by Sequoia (George Guest) for the Cherokee language was a
syllabary rather than an alphabet. If the number of different symbols
is several thousand then the script is without doubt ideogramic like
that of the Chinese characters.
Champollion rather late in his efforts did some counting for the Rosetta Stone
texts. He found 486 words in the Greek text as opposed to 1419 hieroglyphic
symbols. Since Greek and Egyptian were different languages some difference
in the count could be expected but not a three to one ratio. Clearly it could not
be that each hieroglyphic symbol corresponded
to a word. Champollion identified groups of hieroglyphic signs and the tally
was 180. This means that hieroglyphics could not be alphabetic because of the
discrepancy between the Greek word count and the hieroglyphic group count.
The conclusion was that the hieroglyphic text was a mixture of words made
up of phonetic symbols and ideograms. The significant result is that
a substantial part of the hieroglyphic text is phonetic.
By this time the nature of the third script on the Rosetta Stone was
understood. It was a cursive script, now called demotic, representing the
Egyptian language as it had evolved in Grecian times. There was another
script not found on the Rosetta Stone but found elsewhere throughout Egypt.
It is now called hieratic. It is a cursive version of the hieroglyphics.
Although the Egyptian language evolved over time the language of the
hieroglyphic texts was fixed due to the religious significance of the
texts, much as Latin as the language of the Catholic Church was fixed.
So hieroglyphics and hieratic script are two ways of writing the same
language. Hieroglyphics is formal whereas hieratic script is a
handwritten version of the same symbols.
Champollion honed his skills by translating demotic texts into hieratic
text and then converting the hieratic version into hieroglyphics. About
this time the role of symbols now called "determinatives" was recognized.
The use of one of these determinatives with a hieroglyphic group
determined the meaning of the group. This aspect of hieroglyphics
considerably complicated its decipherment but once the nature of the
problem was recognized the decipherment could proceed.
A critical breakthrough occurred for Champollion on September 14, 1822
when he was able to recognize the phonetic rendering of the name of the
non-Greek pharaoh Ramses in a cartouche. He was so excited that he ran
to tell his brother in another building and promptly fainted and only
recovered after several days of rest.
This is a rough description but the Adkins' book gives the full story of the
decipherment of hieroglyphics
by Jean-Francois Champollion in the context of his life. It is a story
of hardship due to poverty and illness brightened by the love and support
shown him by his older brother Jacques-Joseph. Jacques-Joseph Champollion
was a notable scholar in his own right but he recognized that Jean-Francois
was destined for greater fame than he was. Jacques-Joseph added Figeac,
the name of their home town, to his name; i.e., he became known as
Jacques-Joseph Champollion-Figeac. The French choose to believe
that this was because Jacques-Joseph was so sure that his younger brother
would someday be famous that he changed his name so as not to be confused with his
younger brother.
Both brothers were caught up in the politics of revolutionary France
and its return to monarchy. There was petty jealousies shown by academic
figures to Champollion but he triumphed over all. But despite his fame
he still had to endure financial hardship. The biggest problem was his
health. A mysterious ailment led to his early death at age 41. The nature
of the ailment is uncertain but it could have been diabetes or tuberculosis.
He often was afflicted with gout, a malady usually associated with high
living but that was not the case for Champollion. But despite his early
death most would still consider his life a success, and a success against
extraordinary odds at that.
Two undeniable facts remain after all that has been written:
Champollion learned nothing from Young, nor did anyone else. It is only
through Champollion and the method he employed that Egyptology has grown
into the position it now occupies.
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