Towering achievement
A mentally exhausted Champollion collapsed and had to be Eon neF Vo Jis rooO for Xe Fays
The Philae Obelisk in the grounds of Kingston Lacy in Dorset. Its hieroglyphic inscriptions include the names of Ptolemy and Cleopatra, which helped Champollion win the race of decipherment
Stone, the names of rulers – Ptolemy again and Cleopatra – could be identified in cartouches. Incidentally, the lithograph that went to Young contained an error, hampering his research, while the copy that came into Champollion’s possession in January 1822 was accurate. Certain he was making rapid progress, the Frenchman assigned phonetic values to individual hieroglyphic signs and built an alphabet of his own, which let him find the names of other rulers of Egypt on other monuments.
The final breakthrough came on Saturday 14 September 1822 after Champollion received another inscription, from the pharaonic temple at Abu Simbel. Applying all the knowledge he had laboured so long and so hard to acquire, he was able to read the royal name as that of Ramesses the Great. Encouraged, he went on to read Ptolemy’s royal epithets on the Rosetta Stone. By the end of the morning, he needed no further proof that his system was the right one. He sprinted down the road to his brother’s office at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, flinging a sheaf of papers on to the desk and exclaiming: “Je tiens mon affaire!” (“I’ve done it!”)
Overcome with emotion and exhausted by the mental effort, Champollion collapsed to the floor and had to be taken back home, where for five days he was confined to his room completely incapacitated. When he finally regained his strength, on the Thursday evening, he immediately resumed his feverish studies and wrote up his results. Just one week later, on Friday 27 September, he delivered a lecture to the Académie to announce his findings formally. By convention, his paper had to be addressed to the permanent secretary, so was given the title Lettre à M. Dacier (“Letter to Mr Dacier”).
Gigantic steps
By extraordinary coincidence, in attendance at that historic talk was Thomas Young, who happened to be in Paris. Moreover, he was invited to sit next to Champollion while he read out his discoveries. In a letter written two days later, Young acknowledged his rival’s achievement: “Mr Champollion, junior… has lately been making some steps in Egyptian literature, which really appear to be gigantic. It may be said that he found the key in England which has opened the gate for him… but if he did borrow an English key, the lock was so dreadfully rusty, that no common arm would have had strength enough to turn it.”
This outward magnanimity concealed a deeper hurt at the belief Champollion had failed to acknowledge Young’s contributions to decipherment. Quietly determined to set the record straight he published his own work within a few months, this time under his own name. It was pointedly entitled
An Account of Some Recent Discoveries in Hieroglyphical Literature and Egyptian Antiquities, Including the Author’s Original Alphabet, as Extended by Mr Champollion. The Frenchman was not about to take such a claim lightly. In an angry letter to Young, he retorted: “I shall never consent to recognise any other original alphabet than my own… and the unanimous opinion of scholars on this point will be more and more confirmed by the public examination of any other claim.”
Indeed, Champollion was as adept at self-promotion as Young was self-effacing. Buoyed by public recognition, he continued working and came to a second, equally vital realisation: his system could be applied to texts as well as names, using the Coptic he had utterly immersed himself in as a guide. This marked the real moment at which ancient Egyptian once again became a readable language. The race had been won.
Champollion revealed the full extent of his findings in his magnum opus, Précis du système hiéroglyphique des anciens Egyptiens (Summary of the hieroglyphic system of the ancient Egyptians). Published in 1824, it summed up the character of ancient Egyptian: “Hieroglyphic writing is a complex system, a script at once figurative, symbolic, and phonetic, in the same text, in the same sentence, and, I might almost say, in the same word.” His reputation secure, he even felt able to acknowledge, grudgingly, Young’s work with the comment, “I recognise that he was the first to publish some correct ideas about the ancient writings of Egypt.”
Young, for his part, seemed to forgive Champollion for any slights, later telling a friend that his rival had “shown me far more attention than I ever showed or could show, to any living being”. Privately, Champollion was far less magnanimous, writing to his brother: “The Brit can do whatever he wants – it will remain ours: and all of old England will learn from young France how to spell hieroglyphs using an entirely different method.”
In the end, despite their radically different characters and temperaments, both made essential contributions to decipherment. Young developed the conceptual framework and recognised the hybrid nature of demotic and its connection with hieroglyphics. Had he stuck at the task and not been distracted by his numerous other scientific interests, he may well have cracked the code himself.
Instead, it took Champollion’s linguistic abilities and focus. His Lettre à M. Dacier announced to the world that the secrets of the hieroglyphics had been discovered and ancient Egyptian texts could be read. It remains one of the greatest feats of philology. By lifting the civilisation of the pharaohs out of the shadows of mythology and into the light of history, it marked the birth of Egyptology and allowed the ancient Egyptians to speak, once again, in their own voice.