The Rosetta Stone was famous – and was shifted to Alexandria to be shipped to France at the first opportunity.
9 • How the British got the Rosetta Stone
‘There is no hill we did not fart at,’ said the donkeys. Ethiopian proverb
It is well attested that Napoleon, coming from Corsica, which the British under Nelson invaded in 1794, had, in his youth, wished to join the Royal Navy. The Royal Navy was then, as it would remain, despite Napoleon’s efforts, the greatest naval force in the world. Did he apply? It seems he petitioned an uncle to try and get him some kind of introduction. But after a few weeks at military school he saw that the future was in artillery and his naval ambitions waned.
If Napoleon had joined the Royal Navy the world would have been saved a lot of bother. Maybe he would have served under Nelson instead of fighting him. But he didn’t, and so these two mighty warriors were destined to meet in Egypt – where else? But what if the real and lasting result was not that France lost and England won – round one at least – but that incidentally Britain got hold of the Rosetta Stone by beating the French? That the main thing of value going on then and there was not all the bloodshed and rallying of ships but a simple transfer of booty? Let’s pretend so anyway.
The British dominated the Atlantic but hadn’t entered the Mediterranean in a year, owing to French supremacy there. Once word escaped that Napoleon had invaded Egypt their fleet swept through Gibraltar’s straits looking for action.
It wasn’t easy to find the French. Nelson stopped in Sicily and even did a little sightseeing at Syracuse. (After the impending battle he would meet here for the first time Lady Hamilton, wife of the English Ambassador, later establishing a ménage à trois with them.) Even when they found the French and were hastening to do battle before the sun set, Nelson dined well with his officers. The French, meanwhile, were dining a little too well. They were still aboard Admiral Brueys’ flagship at a briefing dinner when the British hove into view.
Where are we? At the extreme left-hand exit of the Nile just before Alexandria. But in the sea, not the river. The French fleet had pole position – defending any ingress into Egypt and up the Nile. Nelson, who did not realise that his sole purpose here was to capture a stone with a bit of ancient scribble gouged into it, drew closer and closer to the moored French fleet.
Many of the French were on land and sailors had to be parcelled out to man boats they usually did not serve aboard. The British slowed to fix spring anchors, a device to help them moor alongside French vessels and blast the hell out of them. Much has been made of the English decision to get between the French ships and the land, Nelson and his officers reasoning that there must be enough space to manoeuvre, otherwise they would not have moored there. But it seems this tactic was not decisive; that was almost certainly the element of surprise and Nelson’s ability to press home an attack fiercely.
The Reverend Cooper Willyams was the chaplain aboard HMS Swift-sure and he recorded his experience of the battle:
The enemy’s line presented a most formidable appearance: it was anchored in close order, and apparently near the shore; flanked with gun boats, mortar vessels, and four large frigates; with a battery of guns and mortars, on an island near which we must pass. This posture gave the most decided advantage to the French, whose well known perfection and skill in the use of artillery, has so often secured to them the splendid victories on the shore: to that they were now to look for success; for each ship being at anchor, became a fixed battery.
The British plan was to fire at night from two sides on the disoriented French. Nelson ordered each ship to carry four lights at its crosstrees, and a white ensign illuminated by an oil lamp hung in its midst. This would serve for recognition. By such arrangements the British were able to avoid shooting each other while pouring shot into the anchored French fleet.
The plan was good. Seeing through the glass that the French fleet was freely anchored and not on spring anchors that could be used to spin a ship when it was stationary, Nelson and his commanders deduced two things: that the French would be slow off the mark when attacked and, as we have seen, that there would be enough water (though it didn’t look to be the case) between the moored ships and the coast.
It was imperative to strike first, while the French would be expecting them to wait, owing to the lateness of the hour. One of Nelson’s watchwords was that going straight to the battle was worth more than hanging back and making a strategy; perhaps the suggestion was that one’s strategy should already be in place to take advantage of whatever luck goes one’s way. So the British attacked. The French had not foreseen such a bold move and though there were gunners ashore there were no land-based guns pointing out to sea to cover the inside piece of water between the French fleet and the land. The attack was further helped by the fact that the French officers were at the briefing dinner with Admiral Brueys; in all the confusion of being fired upon they had to be rowed back to their respective ships. Some did not make it. The French fought for the most part with much reduced troops, with sailors doubling as gunners, with not enough of either to allow them to set sail and fight at the same time.
Red-hot cannonballs were fired into the sails of the French ships. They burst into flame. Masts came crashing down. Admiral Brueys, an aristocrat who had survived the Revolution and seen half his family killed, was wounded twice and almost cut in half by a cannonball. He died at his command post around 9 p.m., expiating his tactical errors by this great display of fortitude.
Little did he know that he had already lost the stone.
Nelson felt something strike his head and his good eye was suddenly blinded by blood and a hanging flap of flesh. Shrapnel had opened a three-inch wound that exposed part of his skull. Nelson, who went into battle prepared to die, was carried off the deck crying that he was done for (apparently he had predicted his demise like this before, and would again) and to be sure to tell his wife this, mark this – but before he could say what, the sawbones had sewn up the flap of skin and staunched the bleeding. ‘It is, sir, what they call a flesh wound hereabouts.’ Nelson was back on deck and giving orders again in under twenty minutes. Though it appeared to be an injury of little account, it was a long while healing and gave him pain for the rest of his life – another seven years.
The battle raged on through the night and into the morning. It looked as if the British had won. By controlling the entrance to the Nile they controlled Egypt. When the country was finally surrendered to the British, however, Napoleon through his generals who remained in Egypt was able to negotiate that all the treasures accumulated in Cairo should be sent to the Louvre. Thus began the glorious ascendance of French Egyptological studies. Or it would have, if the surrender hadn’t noted that all goods already in transit at Alexandria were now the property of the British. And that’s how the stone, which was sitting in a wooden box at the docks, ended up in Britain. Which turned out to be a good thing because, though it was a Frenchman who ultimately translated the stone, it was an Englishman who helped him get there. And if the stone, by pure chance, had not ended up in London the Englishman in question, the polymath Thomas Young, would never have tried to crack its code. We might still be puzzling over hieroglyphics even now, as we are with the Indus Valley script, Olmec, and the still untranslated Minoan language, Linear A.
10 • Women shed blood at the battle of the Nile
Because the brave one is absent, the battle will not be postponed.
Nubian proverb
In a story about the Red Nile, all the battles it occasions serve further to redden its flow. We have seen crusaders and Arabs slaughtered to preserve the Nile for one ruler or another. But Nelson’s battle was probably the first in which women and children took part.
It puts into perspective the French women, like Pauline Fourès, who stowed away to follow the French fleet. It is hard to believe that 300 or more women could really be hidden, and of course they weren’t – both the French and the British navies turning a blin
d eye to such things, inconceivable though it is to us, used to what are in some ways the more draconian modern navies. (In the US Navy, for example, the old liberality with beer has been replaced by one beer every fifty days when at sea. Of course, people compensate: on big aircraft carriers it is common knowledge that many of the men get high sniffing solvent used for cleaning the planes.)
However, in Nelson’s time there was plenty of alcohol, and, it seems, plenty of women and children too. John Nicol, who served with the British during the battle of the Nile on board HMS Goliath and was one of the very few ordinary seamen who wrote diaries, noted, ‘I saw little of this action . . . Any information we got came from the women and children carrying the powder.’ The magazine, whence the powder came, was the centre of the action during a battle, so it shows how integrated into the ship’s life the families of the common sailors were. Nicol wrote:
the women behaved as well as the men and got a present for their bravery from the Captain . . . I was much indebted to the gunner’s wife, who gave her husband and me a drink of wine every now and then, which lessened our fatigue much. There were some of the women wounded, and one woman from Leith died of her wounds . . . One woman bore a son in the heat of the action; she came from Edinburgh.
The seeming strangeness of giving birth was not so uncommon – the heat and noise of battle induced labour. There were twenty-three women and twenty children aboard ships during the earlier battle of Cape St Vincent, and there may well have been more during the battle of the Nile. We know of one woman, Ann Hopping, the wife of a gunner, who was employed as a seamstress until the ‘clear for action’ signal came; then she carried powder and assisted the surgeon as he routinely removed the shattered limbs of fallen sailors. There were at least five women on the Goliath; four of them lost husbands and Captain Foley took the unusual step of entering their names in the muster book which entitled them to both small pay and victuals. One woman who was aboard the Majestic later wrote to Nelson telling him how she had served on board by attending to the sick. Her husband had been killed and she sought compensation.
Modern notions suggest that women and children get in the way of the fearsome emotions needed for battle. We are led to believe that men will try and protect the women (and children) from injury and so shirk their duty. Evidence from the past suggests otherwise. Ann Hopping attended the arm amputation (with rum the only anaesthetic) of a thirteen-year-old midshipman: ‘During the operation the poor child never uttered a groan, and when it was finished he turned his head towards [me] and said, “Have I not borne it like a man?” These words were scarcely uttered when a cold shiver seized him, and in an instant his young soul had entered the land of immortal life.’
With Admiral Brueys’ death the French began to lose their way. By morning their fleet was sunk and those not sinking were burning in the early-morning sun’s rays. Control of the sea had been an imperative for success. It seemed Napoleon’s big adventure was all over before it had begun. Bonaparte, when he heard the news, is reputed to have said, ‘Unfortunate Brueys – what have you done?’ But he quickly recovered. ‘So, gentlemen, we are called upon to do great things. Seas of which we are not master lie between us and our country, but there are no seas between us and Africa, or Asia!’
The troops rallied and there were other incentives as well as fine speeches: officers who muttered that it was time to quit Egypt were threatened with being shot; Arabs who seditiously spoke against the French would have their tongues cut out. But it would do no good. Napoleon had lost control of the Nile.
Back to the more important matter of the mysterious stone of Rosetta: 46 inches by 30 inches by 12 and . . . bloody heavy. Even an amateur like Napoleon could see it was a key to ancient Egyptian; the problem was all in the details – and the lack of them. Of the fifty-four Greek lines the last twenty-six were damaged – as were the last fourteen lines of hieroglyphics. And of the thirty-four lines of demotic (a quick version of hieroglyphics) the first fourteen lines were badly damaged. It was going to take a lot of very inspired guesswork.
11 • Cracking the stone
No matter how much one loves one’s dog, one does not circumcise it.
Sudanese proverb
The stone, of course, would speak of the Nile – you could almost have predicted that – but how to find out? Well, we will find out, but first let us divert into the Egyptian desert.
I was there, in Dakhla Oasis, to look at the Roman-period temple of Deir el-Hagha. It was here that the explorer Schweinfurth had carved his name into a stone column in 1873. Like looking for Arne Saknussemm’s leads in Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth I always love hunting down clues left by earlier explorers. In the case of the column I discovered just how fast hieroglyphs had been replaced by Coptic. In one part of the temple we have carved hieroglyphs, in another, in a niche pointed out to me by the temple’s guardian after I had slipped him a few Egyptian pounds, was a rough mural featuring imagery of the cross and words written in Greek and demotic characters – Coptic.
The collapse in the use of hieroglyphics occurred in a generation. The last inscription was made in AD 394 in Philae. Demotic graffiti continued for another fifty years, and then nothing but Coptic. Since the old religion was banned by the new cult of Christianity its sacred language must be outlawed too.
But one has to ask – what did people speak? You can’t change a spoken language in a generation. Coptic had to come from somewhere. It was of course the language of ancient Egypt – but now written in Greek, the sanctified script in which the New Testament was recorded. Since there were sounds in ancient Egyptian you couldn’t make in Greek, four symbols from demotic were added, the last heritage of the Pharaohs.
When the Arabs arrived in the seventh century they started the slow change to Arabic. By the eleventh century Coptic was used only by Christians. By the fifteenth century it had become a dead language, used only in church services, though there were dictionaries available translating Coptic into Latin.
But the crucial Coptic connection went unnoticed in Europe. They were too mesmerised by the stone. One of Conté’s printings had reached Thomas Young, the English polymath. When he heard that the Rosetta Stone itself was now in London he took himself off to look at it. Meanwhile in France a young obsessive called Jean-François Champollion had vowed, aged ten, that he and only he would be the man to crack the secret of hieroglyphics. Both were highly intelligent and very good at languages. Before he was fourteen Young had studied Latin, Greek, French, Italian, Hebrew, Chaldean, Syriac, Samaritan, Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Ethiopic. Even if his knowledge was, say, only at GCSE level it was all pretty darn impressive. At Cambridge ‘Phenomenon Young’, as he was called, blossomed into a serious scientist. He became in a way the inheritor of Ibn al-Haytham – studying light and the eye and describing the way light must be a wave, using slit experiments reminiscent of Ibn al-Haytham with his camera obscura. On his annual holiday in Worthing – Young was evidently more adventurous in thought than action – he decided to crack the Rosetta code. It was 1814. In another holiday resort – the island of Elba – the man who had set all this in motion, Napoleon, was slipping away in darkness to the mainland to make his last stand.
And in Paris the obsessive Champollion was really no closer to solving the problem, despite having learnt before he was fourteen Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Zend, Pahlavi, Arabic, Chaldean, Persian and Chinese. Oh, and he had become so obsessed by Coptic that he had recorded diary entries in this language as a teenager. We’ll get back to that later. But despite all this linguistic artillery Champollion was really nowhere. In fact he spent most of his time in displacement activity learning new languages (OK, I think some of that list he learned after he was fourteen – Chinese must have taken a while, surely?) that would prepare him for the great task ahead.
Unfortunately the problem had already been solved eight centuries earlier by the Arab scholar Ibn Wahshiya. This is the finding of Dr Okasha El-Daly, an Egyptologist working
at University College London who is also able to read ancient Arabic manuscripts – something both Young and Champollion were supposed to be able to do but evidently never did. Dr Okasha produces firm evidence – in fact Ibn Wahshiya’s book is online – that by the ninth century, which was when Ibn Wahshiya was living in Cairo, he had cracked the phonetic nature of hieroglyphs, and that the language was very similar to Coptic – so similar he called hieroglyphs ‘old Coptic’ and Coptic written in Greek letters ‘new Coptic’. He had also mastered the various determinatives and endings used in hieroglyphs. However, his purpose was practical. Having cracked the code he used it to investigate ancient Egyptian manuscripts to discover any scientific knowledge they might have had. It is only just coming to light, but the explosion of scholarship under the Arabs was undoctrinaire and interested in everything. It was part of the same movement that brought us Maimonides and Ibn al-Haytham. Yet the prejudice against the language of the heathen – after the crusades – meant that many Arab works of science are untranslated to this day.
But Ibn Wahshiya was luckier. His book was translated – albeit eight centuries later – by the wonderfully named Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (who also wrote a history of the Assassins). In 1806 he published Ibn Wahshiya’s work as Ancient Alphabets and Hieroglyphic Characters Explained. This raises intriguing possibilities. The book was certainly known to Champollion’s colleague Baron Silvestre de Sacy and surely he must have mentioned it to Champollion.
But Champollion was, like many obsessed men, peculiarly stupid in his own way. When he heard that someone had actually cracked the code – in 1808 – he fainted out of sheer unadulterated envy. It turned out to be a vicious rumour – Champollion was still in the running. But for ten years all he seems to have done is study obsessively his Zend, his Ethiopic, his Pahlavi. Making no progress at all. Not even using that Coptic he was supposed to know already.
Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River Page 25
