by DAVID KAHN
This allegorical interpretation of Horapollo contaminated the many other attempts to comprehend the meaning of hieroglyphics that followed his. One such became the first “modern” authority on the subject. Its author was Pierius Valerianus, a famous scholar whose secular name was Giovan Pietro della Fosse and who tutored the future Pope Leo X and later became his private secretary. Hieroglyphic problems fascinated him, and at various times during his life he wrote the 58 books of what was published in 1556 as his Hieroglyphica, a remarkably unified and elegant work. Each book deals with the symbolic significance of one or more hieroglyphs in explanations drawn from Horapollo and other classics dealing with the subject. The elephant symbolizes purity because it bathes in rivers at full moon. Alone, the lion stands for “nobleness of mind,” yoked with a wild boar, for “strength of mind and body,” roaring, for “bestial ferocity,” and with a cock, for “pious timidity” because of its supposed awe of the fowl. The work was reprinted at least eleven times and translated thrice.
Through the history of those years runs the continuous thread of interest in the problem, visible in comments in books widely scattered in time and space. While many authors attempted to draw out of the hieroglyphs the profound wisdom that they supposedly enclosed, none seriously attempted a new decipherment until the 17th century. By then the first extensive collection of authentic hieroglyphic inscriptions, J. F. Herwath von Hohenburg’s Thesaurus Hieroglyphicorum, had been published.
The most ambitious attack on the meaning of the Egyptian writings was mounted by the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, who later in his life was to fail to read the mysterious manuscript attributed to Roger Bacon. Kircher was the most famous and prolific scholar of his time, author of a book on cryptology and universal language, and for several years a professor of mathematics. If Leibnitz was the last man to know everything, Kircher may have been the next to last. His lifework sought to combine the totality of knowledge into a universal cosmology, in which divine truth moved the universe. Christianity manifested this truth perfectly, but Kircher found its highest pre-Christian form in the Egyptian philosophical and magical treatises attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. Kircher believed that Hermes Trismegistus was a real Egyptian priest who had lived in remotest antiquity, but the treatises had actually been written by early Christians and so, despite their pagan and gnostic elements, were theologically consistent with Christianity. Kircher was certain that he knew in general what the hieroglyphic texts contained: the esoteric knowledge of ultimate reality said by Plotinus to have been possessed by the Egyptians. His hope of confirming this by reading the texts and thereby proving the truth of his cosmology motivated his prodigious efforts to decipher them.
In 1636 appeared his Prodromus coptus sive ægypticus, which put forth the original view that Coptic—the language of Egypt that Arabic had displaced but that was still used, written in Greek characters, in the liturgy of the Coptic, or Egyptian Christian, church—“was formerly the Pharaonic language.” In other words, Coptic was the latest form of the same Egyptian language that had been written in hieroglyphs. In this, and in his further statement that a knowledge of Coptic would be needed for a solution of hieroglyphics, Kircher was absolutely correct. His Lingua ægyptiaca restituta of 1644 laid the foundation for Coptic studies. But then his great work on the interpretation of hieroglyphs ignored his own advice. The Œdipus ægyptiacus of 1652-1655 identified each hieroglyph with a philosophical concept in the old allegorical way and so was able to make them reflect Kircher’s cosmology. Kircher read a group that stood for nothing more than the name of the pharaoh Apries as “The benefits of the divine Osiris are to be procured by means of sacred ceremonies and of the chain of the Genii, in order that the benefits of the Nile may be obtained.” Another of his hieroglyphic works, the Sphinx mystagogica, interpreted the simple phrase “Osiris says” as “The life of things, after the defeat of Tryphon, the moisture of Nature, through the vigilance of Anubis.” Kircher made a few lucky guesses, such as that three wavy lines stood for both “water” and the sound /m/ because the Coptic word for water was “mu.” But these few grains of truth were submerged in a sea of nonsense. This quickly became evident to other scholars, particularly in the critical Age of Reason that followed.
The collapse of Kircher’s ambitious attempt quelled any further major trials at solution for a century and a half. Interest nevertheless remained high, fed in part by the inscriptions that continually came to light. The Great Seal of the United States, designed in 1790, depicts an Egyptian pyramid capped by an eye, the supposed hieroglyphic symbol of divine justice; this can be seen on the back of every U.S. dollar bill. Mozart set The Magic Flute in and around the Temple of Isis and Osiris and peopled it with the high priest and an Egyptian prince. The opera was produced in 1791, when the West had gotten no further in the reading of hieroglyphics than it had a thousand years before. Indeed, in 1797, Georg Zoëga, in his enormous 700-page resume of Egyptological matter, declared the problem insoluble. Two years later, an Egyptian laborer named Dhautpoul was building a fort for the French conquerors of his native land near a town in the Nile Delta whose native name was Rashid. His eye was caught by an irregular slab of fine-grained black basalt, either lying on the ground, as some accounts say, or built into an old wall which he was demolishing. It was covered with three bands of writing—hieroglyphs, something thought to be Syriac, and Greek. Pierre-François Bouchard, an alert French officer of engineers in charge of the gang, thought that they were probably three versions of the same text and that the Greek might serve as a key to solving the mystery of hieroglyphics. He knew of the large group of scientists that Napoleon had taken with him on his Egyptian expedition to study the antiquities, and he sent the stone to his commander, reporting that it had been found near a town known to Europeans as Rosetta.
The stone’s importance was instantly recognized. In Cairo, copies were made of it. When the French surrendered to the British in Egypt in the spring of 1801, Article XVI of the Treaty of Capitulation gave the Rosetta Stone to the British. It eventually reached the British Museum, where it reposes today at the south end of the Egyptian Sculpture Gallery, probably the most famous single archeological discovery in history. It measures 3 feet 9 inches high, 2 feet 4 inches wide, and 11 inches thick. Both upper corners and the lower right corner are broken off. The Greek text consists of 54 lines; of the hieroglyphic there remain only 14, corresponding to the last 28 of the Greek, all but two of which are missing part of the ends. The central band proved to be in a writing called demotic, “the language of the people,” a simplified form of script used in business. Demotic had evolved out of hieratic, itself a simplified form of hieroglyphics that had developed for writing on papyrus. At times in Egyptian history all three existed side by side, employing essentially the same principle of expressing sound in script, though the forms differed greatly.
Several translations were made of the Greek text. It was dated on the fourth day of the Greek month Xandikos (April) of the ninth year of the reign of Ptolemy V Epiphanes, which would be 196 B.C. A convocation of Egyptian priests set forth the benefits which this pharaoh had conferred upon them and upon Egypt—gifts of money and corn to the temples, remission of taxes, conquest of the town of Shekan, and so forth. In return, they honored him by making his birthday a festival day forever, erecting golden statues of him in every temple of Egypt, and cutting Egyptian and Greek copies of this decree upon slabs of basalt in the three writings and placing them in the temples next to the statues. This last point confirmed the probability that the three texts were three versions of the same text and permitted scholars to compare them with assurance.
Yet the mere existence of the Rosetta Stone did not make solution automatic. The most eminent Orientalist of the day, Sylvestre de Sacy, professor of Arabic in Paris, very sensibly tried to locate the proper names of the Greek text in the demotic, beginning with this because he felt it to be alphabetic. The hieroglyphic script frightened people off because many still regarded it as a
secret symbolology and because it was so badly damaged. He found the approximate groups for “Ptolemy” and “Alexander,” but the 15 letter-values that he obtained would not yield Coptic-like words elsewhere in the text. He frankly admitted his failure and handed over his material to the Swedish diplomat and scholar, Johan David Akerblad. A talented linguist and student of Coptic, Åkerblad managed to solve in two months many of the problems that had baffled de Sacy. Using the same general approach, he established a demotic alphabet of 29 letters, half of which were correct, and educed words that were more or less identical to the Coptic, thus proving that the language of the ancient Egyptians was indeed related to Coptic. But his insistence that demotic was entirely alphabetic blocked further progress.
He did not touch the hieroglyphs. The few who did treated them as allegorically as had Kircher, with results about as valuable. One case, in fact, was more extreme than anything that had gone before. Another Swedish diplomat, Count N. G. Palin, thought that the Psalms of David were Hebrew translations of Egyptian texts. If, he suggested, the Hebrew were to be translated into Chinese, the Chinese would provide a key to the decipherment of the hieroglyphs!
In 1814, the Rosetta Stone came to the attention of Thomas Young. A British physician, then 41, whose hobby was science, he revived the wave theory of light on the basis of his discovery of the principle of interference, advanced the theory that the eye sees color by fibers that respond to red, green, and violet light, described the visual defect of astigmatism, contributed to the theory of tides, defined a coefficient of elasticity (Young’s modulus), and investigated epicycloidal curves, spiders, the atmosphere of the moon, capillarity, and diseases of the chest. He knew modern languages, including Arabic, Ethiopic, and Turkish, and some ancient ones, such as Hebrew, Persian, and Coptic. With their help, he made some progress with the demotic inscription and then turned to the hieroglyphic.
He first assumed that the hieroglyphs enclosed in ovals with a straight line at one end, called cartouches, represented the names of royalty. His comparisons of the demotic, hieratic, and hieroglyphic scripts convinced him that the first had been derived from the second, and that hieratic had come from hieroglyphic. The signs of the demotic seemed to be letters that stood for sounds; could the signs of the older script be just more elaborate versions of those letters? If this were so, scribes in a conquered country like Egypt might well resort to them to spell out the names of foreigners, which might not be otherwise reproducible in the native script. He might test this hypothesis by seeing if the writing in the cartouches yielded the name that he knew from the Greek version, “Ptolemy.”
The five cartouches contained only two sets of hieroglyphics. The eight signs of the shorter appeared as the first eight signs of the longer, which had 16 signs. Young had seen that in the Greek text the longer form of Ptolemy included titles. He concentrated on the simpler short version, and equated its eight signs with the ten letters of the Greek form “Ptolemaios” by agglomerating the Greek letters into six rather arbitrary syllables (p, t, ole, ma, i, os), by counting a doubled sign (two feathers side by side) as a single letter, and by regarding another sign (a loop) as a kind of silent letter. This gave him the Egyptian equivalents for the six sounds. He inserted these equivalents into a similar cartouche from the ceiling of a temple at Karnak, and, by filling in known sound-values and guessing at new ones, identified the name of the pharaoh Ptolemy I Soter. He did the same for that of the queen, Berenice.
Here he stopped. Though he had managed to read six signs correctly out of the 13 that he had identified and three partly correctly, he declared that he had been unable to find any cases in which the alphabetical signs were used for native words or names and that it was therefore idle to try reading the pure hieroglyphic with them. Actually, his correct identifications had produced such names as “Ptah,” which occurred in his own vocabulary. But he evidently did not recognize them and he quit the field, having made the crucial breakthrough of recognizing the presence of alphabetic elements in a script formerly thought to be purely logographic and symbolic.
The attack was pressed by a young man of sallow complexion and burning genius, a prodigy whose lifelong passion had been to disclose the mystery of the hieroglyphs. Jean-François Champollion was born in Lot, France, on December 23, 1790; five years later he achieved his first decipherment by teaching himself to read. The seeds of his destiny were sown when he was 10 and the mathematician Jean-Baptiste Fourier, then at Grenoble where Jean-François was studying, showed the boy his collection of Egyptian antiquities. The youngster announced that when he was big he would read the writing on them. His life from then consisted of one long preparation for his accomplishment. At 17, he read a paper on “Egypt Under the Pharaohs” to the staff of the Grenoble high school; they were so impressed they elected the youth to the faculty on the spot. Continuing his studies in Paris, he learned Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, and, above all, Coptic. He had determined not to tackle the difficult problem until he had thoroughly prepared himself.
He made intensive comparisons of the three kinds of writing, though at first he thought that the more recent demotic was the older. He clung to the conventional symbolistic view of the hieroglyphs. But he was able to confirm an ingenious observation of Åkerblad, based on the Coptic, that a horned viper represented /f/, which meant “he” at the end of certain words. Champollion extended this to some other end-letters that stood for other personal pronouns. About 1819, however, personal and political troubles so depressed him that he began to doubt even his best results. He reverted to such fantasies as thinking that the lion crouched in the middle of Ptolemy’s cartouche represented his name as a symbol of war, which in Greek was “polemos,” the word from which came Ptolemy’s name (which means “mighty in war”).
To discipline himself, he undertook a meticulous comparison of the signs of all known Egyptian texts. This corrected his chronology of the three scripts and enabled him to trace a sign from hieroglyphic through hieratic to demotic. In December, 1821, his counts showed that the hieroglyphic text of the Rosetta Stone contained 1,419 signs whereas the Greek text consisted of only 486 words. This made untenable the old theory that each sign represented a whole word; he therefore decided to test once and for all the theory that at least some of these hieroglyphs represented sounds. He transcribed the name “Ptolemy,” which on linguistic grounds he now spelled Ptolemis, from the demotic version (known from the Rosetta Stone, and thought to be alphabetic) to hieratic to hieroglyphic. He arrived at a spelling that was virtually identical with the hieroglyphs of the Rosetta Stone. This proved that the hieroglyphs represented sounds, and buried the theory that each hieroglyph was purely the symbolic expression of an idea.
A month later, a friend sent him a new lithograph of a bilingual inscription from a granite obelisk found at Philae in 1815. The Greek text showed it to be a priestly appeal to—interestingly enough—the children of the Ptolemy eulogized in the Rosetta Stone; their names were Ptolemy and Cleopatra. Champollion recognized the cartouche of this Ptolemy from the cartouche for the same name on the Rosetta Stone. And he observed that several of its hieroglyphs reappeared in the Cleopatra cartouche in positions that showed that the signs corresponded to sounds that the two names had in common. Thus, the first sign of Ptolemis, a square, was the fifth of Cleopatra, proving it to be /p/. The third sign of Ptolemis, a noose, was the fourth of Cleopatra, proving it to be /o/. A lion was the fourth sign of Ptolemis and the second of Cleopatra, proving it to be /1/. And the vulture that stood in the sixth position of Cleopatra also stood in the ninth, proving it to be /a/. The only irregularity was that the two words used different signs for their /t/’s; he regarded this as a case of homophony. Like Young, he considered the double feather in Ptolemis to be a single letter, the /i/.
It was January, 1822. Within a few feverish months, the 31-year-old decipherer turned out an almost complete translation of the hieroglyphic names of rulers of Egypt from Alexander to Antoninus Pius. He derived the
sound-values of the other phonetic hieroglyphs by the cryptanalytic method—substituting known values, guessing at the names, and testing the presumed values elsewhere. But this solution, while undoubtedly correct, might have proved of only secondary importance had these alphabetic signs served only for foreign names and played no part in spelling out the native Egyptian tongue. Had he come this far only to face the same difficulty that Young had?
Champollion’s cross-checking of hieroglyphic sound-values in royal names
On September 14, 1822, he received some inscriptions from the colossal rock-hewn temple of Abu Simbel on the Nile. Unquestionably it antedated Graeco-Roman times. One inscription contained a cartouche with four signs: a circle with a dot in it, which represented the sun, a three-pronged sign whose meaning was unknown to him, and two occurrences of a sign like a shepherd’s crook that he knew from Ptolemis stood for /s/. Coptic had taught him that the sun was called “ra” or “re,” and the three-pronged sign occurred in a part of the Rosetta Stone hieroglyphics that appeared to represent the complex of Greek words meaning “be born” or “engender” that added up to “birthday.” The Coptic for this was “mīse,” and the four symbols could thus stand for “Ra-mise-s-s.” It flashed before him that he was reading the hieroglyphic form of one of the most famous of pharaonic names, “Ramses,” and that the name meant something like “child of the sun.” At the same moment his eye was caught by another cartouche, containing an ibis, known as a bird of the god Thoth, the three-pronged sign, and another shepherd’s crook /s/, and he realized in a dazzling instant that this was “Thutmose,” another well-known pharaonic name, which obviously meant “child of Thoth.”
