That would account for the frequent repetition of a limited number of signs, a core, scattered among the many hieroglyphic symbols—they would be words like “his” or pronouns, or negations.
Thus, letter by letter, the puzzle of the hieroglyphs is solved. Writing, fragile as a spider’s web and strong as an iron chain, links centuries and millennia of existence. Domitian his father Vespasian. Domitian his brother Titus—the cruel, vain Roman emperor (obsessed with his thinning hair!) chooses to preserve his Roman name in Egyptian symbols on an obelisk. More than a thousand years later, Innocent X will raise the fallen monument and call it by his family name: the Pamphili obelisk. A famed Jesuit scholar, Athanasius Kircher, will misinterpret the writing on it, leaving behind many “learned” volumes of absurdities. And two hundred years later, Jean François will come to study in Rome and he will stand in Piazza Navonna, the square where gladiators once fought and Christian saints died. Champollion will gaze at the obelisk as they had. He will contemplate it by day and by night. And he will struggle with the hieroglyphs covering its sides, writing which gives form to the chaos of existence and expression to the terror of time.
EIGHT HUNDRED MILES to the south of Cairo—on the border of the Sudan—the strongman Belzoni spends week after week, month after month, supervising his fellahin as they clear Ramesses’ great temple at Abu Simbel, together with the pyramids the most colossal monument in all Egypt. And as the peasants cart away the desert sand, Belzoni sketches whatever images and inscriptions come to light. One of his sketches finds its way back to Europe in a letter; and a copy of this copy finds its way to Jean François’ attic room in Paris.
It contains a cartouche that Champollion has never seen before:
The first symbol was the sun, that was clear; and in Coptic the word for sun was Ra. That would give him, Ra SS, using the alphabet he had developed from the Ptolemaic and Roman cartouches. And of course, by reading as “M” or “Mes” that would be the famed pharaoh Ramesses, he realizes, whose name had been recorded by the Greeks and Romans.
He begins to tremble with excitement. Here was an ancient pharaoh, an Egyptian pharaoh whose name was written in phonetic symbols, in letters, in the same way that the names of foreign kings were written. Champollion searches frantically through the rest of the Abu Simbel papers, looking for another cartouche to confirm what he already knows is true. There, among the sketches of the toiling fellahin and gigantic temple pillars, is another unfamiliar cartouche:
Leaving out the first symbol, it would be read MeSS. But the Ibis he already knew. A god, Thoth, this was another name the Greeks and the Romans had kept alive. The god of writing. And the cartouche therefore read “Thuthmosis.” This was the most famous warrior in ancient Egypt, Ramesses’ hero, the Napoleon of ancient Egypt, whose empire stretched from Megiddo to Cush.
LATER, CHAMPOLLION WILL write of the hieroglyphs: “It is a complex system, a writing that is pictorial, symbolic and phonetic at one and the same time, in a single text, a single phrase and even in a single word. Each of these types of character aids in the notation of ideas by different means: It is a code.”
As he refines his understanding, he identifies many different aspects of the writing. “Determinatives”—for example, non-phonetic indicators as to what order of being a word belonged. So that a hieroglyph to which a small bird was added (a determinative) took on a negative or evil or sickly connation; whereas that same hieroglyph with a small flag would indicate divinity. A wavy line was the determinative for liquid; a phallus emitting liquid, procreation; a forearm with a stick, force—and so on.
Champollion will work with hapax legomena (words connected to a specific time or subject, such as our “Watergate”). He toils over foreign words, Aramaic or Hebrew, embedded in Egyptian. He suffers the agonies of the damned deciphering ancient classics which only existed in the careless practice copies of schoolboys.
In defense of his decipherment, he will travel to Egypt and find hundreds upon hundreds of examples of writing to prove his discovery—which, like every great discovery, must go against tenaciously held ideas. Like Columbus, who was forced to controvert known fact, Champollion rejects the givens of the linguistic world, and presents a far-fetched theory of an ancient language endlessly complicated and rich and subtle: “visual poetry,” he will call it, an interweaving of thought and image, of writing and sound.
But first—before he does any of this—he must run through the streets of Paris to tell his brother. And then he lies in a faint, in a coma. For eight days, he remains in a drugged dream.
After all, how can he bear it? It’s a wonder it doesn’t kill him! How can anyone bear such joy?
EPILOGUE
HONORS ARE BESTOWED upon Champollion from all sides. The pope, the French king, learned societies, universities, all extol his achievement. But Champollion views such praise only as a means to an end. Having the ear of the world, he can plead for more care in the excavation of the ancient sites of Egypt. Funds are made available for an Egyptian wing in the Louvre. A chair of Egyptology is established in the University of Paris.
There is still much work to be done, many mysteries of the ancient language to be unraveled. Yet with Champollion’s decipherment, knowledge of our shared past is extended to include the long-silent millennia before Christ.
CHAMPOLLION RETURNS TO France from his researches in Egypt in the dead of winter. Perhaps with Drovetti’s connivance, his boat is made to remain in quarantine outside of Marseille an extraordinary forty-two days. Not longer after, Champollion, at the height of his powers, dies at forty years of age.
His brother spends the next three decades editing and posthumously publishing his work.
Napoleon dies at fifty-two on St. Helena of arsenic poisoning. He will lie under a blank tombstone until 1840 when political circumstances permit the French, who will never forget him, to bring his body back.
And who are they, this improbable pair?
They are eternal types who have always existed and who always will.
Author’s Note
TERENCE DUQUESNE’S essays are not only learned but filled with remarkable insights. I was particularly inspired by his “A Coptic Initiatory Invocation; An Essay in Interpretation with Critical Text” (PGM IV 1–25). Translation and commentary by Terence DuQuesne. Darengo, ThameOxon, 1991.
For those readers interested in further Coptic readings, I refer them to the superb collection, Coptic Texts of Ritual Power, edited by Marvin Meyer and Richard Smith.
For the often debated issue of early Egyptian cannibalism, I refer the reader to E. A. Wallis Budge’s Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, to Sir William Flinders Petrie, and to the ancient writer Plutarch.
The ancient soldier’s lament given in chapter 9 exists in several versions. I refer the reader to Sir Alan H. Gardiner’s excellent Late Egyptian Miscellanies. Brussels, 1937.
Although the poem by Archilochus (now among the Cologne Museum’s collection of papyri) was discovered as a complete text only in 1916, bits and pieces surfaced earlier during various excavations.
Al Jabarti’s Chronicle of the French Occupation in Egypt can be found in toto in a very readable edition brought out by Markus Wiener Publishers.
A reader interested in pursuing ancient Egyptian customs and habits can have no better guide than The Mummy: A Handbook of Egyptian Funerary Archaeology by E. A. Wallis Budge and Ancient Lives by John Romer.
Among the many texts consulted, I would particularly like to acknowledge my debt to Kenneth Burke, whose excellent introduction to The Oresteia is the source for my remarks about Aeschylus’ trilogy.
For a comprehensive selection of early, middle, and late Egyptian texts, the reader is referred to Ancient Egyptian Literature. Vols. 1, 2, 3. University of California Press.
Those who would like to see events through the artist Denon’s eyes will find his memoirs interesting reading: Voyages dans la Basse et la Haute Egypte pendant les campagnes de Bonaparte en 1798 et 1799. 2 vols.
London, 1807.
For those who enjoy reading primary texts, it is possible to enjoy the newspaper which the French published in Egypt, Le Courrier de l’Egypte. They will also be interested in such works as: Copies of Original Letters from the Army of General Bonaparte in Egypte, Intercepted by the Fleet Under the Command of Admiral Lord Nelson. London, 1798. Correspondance de Napoleon I publiee par ordre de l’Empereur Napoleon III. 32 vols. Paris, 1858–70. Correspondance inedite, officielle et confidentielle de Napoleon Bonaparte. Vols. V–VII. Egypte. 3 vols. Paris, 1819–20. And Lettres de Napoleon à Josephine. Edited by Leon Cerf. Paris, 1929.
And of course, there is the famous Description de l’Egypte, which can be found in many versions from the twenty-four-volume edition published in Paris, 1809–1828, to modern selections such as a recent one-volume paperback published by Taschen Books with very good illustrations.
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 2004 by Daniel Meyerson
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.ballantinebooks.com
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Meyerson, Daniel.
The linguist & the emperor : Napoleon and Champollion’s quest to decipher the Rosetta stone / by Daniel Meyerson.
p. cm.
1. Rosetta stone. 2. Egyptian language—Writing, Hieroglyphic. 3. Champollion, Jean-François, 1790–1832. 4. Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, 1769–1821. I. Title: Linguist and the emperor. II. Title.
PJ1531.R5M49 2004
493'.1'092—dc22 2003065515
eISBN: 978-0-345-47218-2
v3.0
The Linguist and the Emperor Page 18
