Recognizing the importance of the discovery, members of the Institute took prints of the stone – both as a lithograph (by applying printer’s ink to the surface, leaving the engraved inscriptions un-inked) and as a copper plate (filling the inscriptions with ink to give a black-on-white copy) – and sent copies to Paris. From there, they were distributed to scholars around Europe, who began work on the fiendish challenge of deciphering the hieroglyphic section. Among their number were a patrician English polymath, Thomas Young (1773–1829), and a revolutionary French obsessive, Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832). Their respective efforts were to shape the next two decades of Egyptological inquiry, and perpetuate the intense Anglo-French rivalry that had been present at the subject’s birth.
As for the slab itself, now dubbed the Rosetta Stone after its place of discovery, it was sent in 1801 from Cairo to Alexandria, to await shipment back to Paris for display at the Louvre. However, following the surrender of the French army to the British expeditionary force, the antiquities collected by the commission were declared spoils of war.72 The Rosetta Stone would now go to London, not Paris. With delicious irony, its chosen conveyance was a captured French frigate named L’Egyptienne. The ship docked at Portsmouth in February 1802, and the stone was sent at once to the Library of the Society of Antiquaries of London, before being presented by the society’s royal patron, King George III, to the British Museum. The Rosetta Stone thus became one of the first Egyptian antiquities acquired by the Museum (a department of antiquities was only established five years later), and a centrepiece of its collection.
Two decades later, the situation had changed. Britain had won the battle for military supremacy, but France had undoubtedly gained the upper hand where cultural matters were concerned. Notwithstanding the successful shipment of the Young Memnon to London, Salt was finding himself regularly bested by his arch-rival Drovetti. After frequent run-ins between their respective agents in the field, the two consuls-general came to a gentleman’s agreement. A British visitor, Sir Frederick Henniker, observing for himself the result of this compromise, was not impressed: ‘The whole of ancient Thebes is the private property of the English and French consuls; a line of demarcation is drawn through every temple, and these buildings that have hitherto withstood the attacks of Barbarians, will not resist the speculation of civilized cupidity, virtuosi, and antiquarians.’73
By contrast, the French patron of an expedition to Egypt in 1821, Sébastien Louis Saulnier, was especially pleased with Muhammad Ali’s policy on antiquities: ‘Among other means employed, by the government of Egypt, to allure Europeans thither, is the permission granted to all comers to search for and carry away antiquities, whether on the surface or under-ground.’74
This was no mere casual observation, for Saulnier, antiquarian and collector, had sponsored an expedition to Egypt with only one thing in mind: acquiring for France an artefact even more renowned than the by-now famous Rosetta Stone.
Back in 1798–9, when the French army under General Desaix – with Denon in tow – had marched through Upper Egypt in pursuit of the fugitive Mamluk, a highlight of their journey (for Denon at least) had been the temple of Dendera. There, standing proud among the lone and level sands of the surrounding desert, was a spectacular Roman temple dedicated to the Egyptian mother-goddess Hathor.75 Among the many colourfully decorated and beautifully preserved reliefs inside the temple, one had caused a particular stir: a ceiling block inside a small roof chapel, carved with a fine circular representation of a zodiac, complete with constellations and astronomical figures, supported at four corners by slender Egyptian goddesses. Denon had made an accurate drawing on the spot, and, ever since, the zodiac had been coveted by France. Fortunately (from a French perspective): ‘its removal was not attempted at that period, as it must have fallen into the hands of the English, like the inscription of Rosetta, the sarcophagus of Alexander, and other monuments collected by the Institute of Egypt’.76
Now, France regarded ‘the acquisition of the Zodiac as, in some measure, compensating for the absence of these noble monuments’.77 Saulnier’s account tells the story of the patriotic endeavour, undertaken by the expedition leader, Jean-Baptiste Lelorrain:78 ‘His first intention was for bringing away the zigzag borders, but the weight of the great stone was found to be so enormous, that it would be impossible to convey it. It was, moreover, of ornament rather than utility, and hence M. L. [Monsieur Lelorrain] contented himself with removing the planisphere, and the square wherein it was inclosed.’79
Lelorrain’s exploits were discovered by an American diplomat, Luther Bradish, who happened to be visiting Dendera as operations were proceeding. Bradish carried the news to Cairo, where it reached the ears of Henry Salt. Saulnier picks up the story:
No attempts were made at Cairo to dispossess M. Lelorrain of his treasure, but the British consul-general had repaired to Alexandria to renew his solicitations with the Pacha. Fortunately for M.L. he was not long held in suspense, for, on the Pacha enquiring whether he had been duly authorized, and an answer being given in the affirmative, he pronounced at once in his favour . . . The decision of the Pacha was speedily forwarded to him, and he lost no time in embarking the Zodiac on-board a vessel that was bound for Marseilles, and which set sail July 18th. It has thus been rescued from destruction and danger, to which it was exposed, not only on the part of the natives, but of certain Europeans that appear zealous for the preservation of antiquities.80
The zodiac was brought ashore in Marseilles on 27 November 1821 and sent to Paris for immediate display, where it caused even more of a stir than had the arrival of the Rosetta Stone in London twenty years earlier.
Just about the only Frenchman to question the removal of the zodiac from its original context was the author of an anonymous letter to the Revue encyclopédique in October 1821. While the writer was proud that so important a monument should have been acquired by France (and not Britain), he deeply lamented the resulting damage to one of Egypt’s greatest temples:
We applaud the patriotic sentiments which guided this, our two compatriots’ bold project, carried out so skilfully and successfully . . . But in congratulating Messrs Saulnier and Lelorrain on having, so carefully, transported the circular zodiac of Dendera from the banks of the Nile to those of the Seine, and not the Thames, we cannot, however, refrain from expressing a certain regret that this magnificent temple has been deprived of one of its finest monuments . . . Should we, in France, follow the example of Lord Elgin? Certainly not.81
The author of that letter was none other than Jean-François Champollion. Less than a year later – and thanks to the Rosetta Stone in London, not the zodiac in the Louvre – he would become the most famous name in the history of Egyptology.
ONE
Description and decipherment
The Rosetta Stone, key to the decipherment of hieroglyphics.
Mr Champollion, junior . . . has lately been making some steps in Egyptian literature, which really appear to be gigantic.1
THOMAS YOUNG, 1822
After a fortnight of late summer heat, with daytime temperatures nudging twenty-seven degrees, the morning of Saturday 14 September 1822 brought a welcome break for the citizens of Paris. The sky was overcast, there was a light wind, and the thermometer at the Royal Observatory had fallen to a more pleasant thirteen degrees.2 In his brother’s house at 28 rue Mazarine, just a few minutes’ walk from the Pont Neuf on the south bank of the Seine, Jean-François Champollion once again took up his papers, and, with the oppressive heat of recent days lifted, applied himself afresh to his task. For the past fourteen months, ever since arriving in the French capital, he had devoted himself single-mindedly to the greatest intellectual challenge of the age: cracking the code of ancient Egyptian writing. There had been promising avenues and blind alleys in equal measure, and any number of wrong turns. Now, finally, armed with a crucial piece of new evidence, the path opened up once again. This time, there would be no turning back: the prize lay ahead.
Shortly before noon, Champollion sprang from his study, rushed out of the house and 200 metres down the street to the imposing domed building which, since the beginning of the century, had housed the Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, one of the five national academies of France. Bursting into his brother’s office at the académie, he flung a sheaf of papers onto the desk and exclaimed: ‘Je tiens mon affaire!’ (‘I’ve done it!’) Overcome with emotion and exhausted by the mental effort, he promptly collapsed to the floor, unconscious. As Eureka moments go, it was suitably dramatic. After being taken back home, for five days Champollion was confined to his room, completely incapacitated, watched over by his anxious relatives. When he finally regained his strength, on the Thursday evening, he immediately resumed his feverish studies.
Just one week later, on Friday 27 September, he was strong enough to deliver a formal lecture at the académie, announcing his breakthrough. Addressed, as was the custom, to the académie’s permanent secretary, a certain Bon-Joseph Dacier, the lecture was published the following month by Didot Father & Son, booksellers of 24 rue Jacob, under the title ‘Lettre à M. Dacier, Secrétaire Perpétuel de l’Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, relative à l’alphabet des hiéroglyphes phonétiques employés par les Egyptiens pour inscrire sur leurs monuments les titres, les noms et les surnoms des souverains grecs et romains’.3 The Lettre à M. Dacier, as it is universally known, announced to the world the decipherment of hieroglyphics. It was, and remains, one of the greatest feats of philology. By lifting the civilization of the pharaohs out of the shadows of mythology into the light of history, it marked the birth of Egyptology.
Champollion is still revered for his scholarly achievement. Yet the history of Egyptology is rarely uncontested, rarely straightforward. Champollion may have been a lone scholar, but his breakthrough did not occur in isolation. It drew upon a series of insights by other scholars, and was ultimately born out of one of the great academic rivalries of the nineteenth century. The full, circuitous story of decipherment began two decades before that momentous autumn of 1822, in the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic expedition.
As Bonaparte’s soldiers were licking the wounds of defeat, their scholarly compatriots, the savants who had accompanied Napoleon to Egypt, were busy mapping and studying the country and its antiquities. The British might have won the day on the battlefield, but it was the French who had conquered Egypt for science. From that moment on, France held to an unerring belief that the study of ancient Egypt was its hard-earned, irrevocable prerogative. From that moment on, too, successive French governments, and successive generations of French scholars, would look with ill-concealed disdain on the footling attempts of the British to understand the civilization of the pharaohs. The Napoleonic expedition and its aftermath thus set the tone for the next century and a half of discovery in the Nile Valley. Whilst, for the British, Egyptology would begin, and largely continue, as an interesting diversion for well-heeled dilettantes and minor academics, for the French it was, and would ever remain, an important part of their self-image as a nation.
The first great blow for French Egyptological pre-eminence was struck by a member of Napoleon’s entourage, a man who, though largely forgotten in the annals of archaeology, ranks as one of the most colourful figures in the entire history of the subject. Dominique Vivant, Baron Denon, was born into a family of landed gentry near the provincial town of Chalon-sur-Saône. At the age of sixteen he went to Paris to make his fortune, and succeeded in being appointed a gentilhomme ordinaire – an aristocratic hanger-on – at the court of Louis XV. Like many of his ambitious contemporaries, Denon recognized that the seduction of influential women could prove just as potent a recipe for political and financial advancement as any amount of flattery of the monarch himself. Using his position at court – he was curator of the royal collection of antique gems – Denon caught the eye of Louis XV’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour, and became one of her favourites.
Popular for his quick wit and lively conversation, Denon possessed abundant charm, refinement and powers of persuasion. His talents did not go unnoticed, and the king duly appointed him to the French diplomatic service. It was the perfect career for a man of Denon’s talents and interests. In St Petersburg he used his social contacts to ‘ferret out State secrets and boudoir intrigues that were of great service to his ambassador’.4 On a secret mission to Switzerland in 1775, he was a frequent guest of Voltaire’s and penned a remarkable series of sketches of the ageing philosopher. During a subsequent posting in Naples, which was rather lacking in diplomatic intrigue, Denon amused himself instead by indulging his love of drawing and his interest in antiquities. He visited the Roman ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii, and amassed a valuable collection of Etruscan vases which he subsequently sold to the new king, Louis XVI (and which were sent to the royal porcelain factory at Sèvres to be copied). Denon’s wanderings further afield, in Sicily, formed the basis of his first book, Voyage en Sicile, published in 1788. It was a charmed life. France’s interests and Denon’s were in perfect alignment. But it was not to last.
The French revolution of 1789 brought the ancien régime crashing down. The aristocracy fled or were guillotined, their lands confiscated and privileges abolished. Denon only escaped with his life because he was in Venice, on a study tour of its paintings and art treasures (having been elected to the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in 1787, he had resigned from the diplomatic service to pursue a full-time career as an artist); but all his property, hard won over the previous two decades, was confiscated. While awaiting a restoration of his fortunes, Denon put his skills as an engraver and his abundant experience of sexual liaisons to good use, publishing a titillating volume of erotic scenes, inspired by the pornographic frescoes at Pompeii, entitled Œuvre priapique (1793). It hardly marked him out as a future authority on ancient Egypt. Yet Denon’s wide and cultured circle of friends now came to his rescue, and conspired to launch him on his second, unexpected career.
That same year, Denon took the brave decision to return to Paris and try to use his diplomatic skills to recover his fortune. Through his contacts in the art world, he secured the patronage of the revolutionary painter Jacques-Louis David. With such an influential supporter, Denon was able successfully to petition Robespierre, who now rescinded his banishment and restored his confiscated properties. As Denon’s biographer has put it, ‘Not the least of Vivant Denon’s talents was his adaptability to changing political regimes.’5 Once again a free and wealthy man, Denon resumed his favourite pastime and, before long, had charmed his way into the favour of an attractive young widow and socialite, Marie-Josèphe-Rose Tascher de la Pagerie. Rose, as her friends knew her, had had a lucky escape of her own. Her husband, Alexandre Viscomte de Beauharnais, had, like so many of his class, been arrested as an enemy of the people, and guillotined in the Place de la Révolution in 1794, leaving Rose impoverished and with two young children. She had herself been imprisoned in Paris’s Carmes gaol, only to be released five days after her husband’s execution following Robespierre’s fall from grace and the end of his Reign of Terror. Rose and Denon were thrown together by the shared experience of loss and reprieve. For Denon, it was a singularly lucky meeting; for Rose had done the only thing a woman in her position could do: wooing leading politicians in order to provide some measure of security for herself and her children. In 1795, having recovered her late husband’s property, she met a young revolutionary, six years her junior, by the name of Napoleon Bonaparte. She became his mistress and, the following year, his wife. In place of ‘Rose’, Napoleon preferred to call her by the diminutive of her middle name, Joséphine. Denon now found himself back in favour, and back at the centre of power. His personal history had come full circle.
So it was that Denon joined Napoleon on his campaign to Egypt in 1798, as one of the expedition’s official artists. Travelling up the Nile with the French soldiers, Denon amazed them with his resilience and determination. It is said that, ‘even while he ate his scanty meals his sketch pad was beside him’.6 This was not the pampered aristocrat his battle-hardened compatriots might have been expecting, but a dedicated servant of the expedition and its revolutionary aims. Be that as it may, Denon had not lost his entrepreneurial flair. Within a year of his return to France, he followed up his earlier foray into travel-writing by publishing his own, highly personal account of the Egyptian expedition, the two-volume Voyages dans la Basse et la Haute Egypte (1802). It was an instant bestseller, an eyewitness record of Bonaparte’s audacious journey through the land of the pharaohs. Translated into English and German, Voyages reawakened European public interest in ancient Egypt and influenced the course of nineteenth-century scholarship. It remained in print for nearly 150 years, something of a record in the annals of Egyptology. One of the great historians of archaeology has summed up Denon’s achievement thus: ‘Napoleon conquered Egypt with bayonets, and held it for one short year. But Denon conquered the land of the Pharaohs with his crayon, and held it permanently.’7 In recognition of his contribution to scholarship, Denon (along with Napoleon) was elected to honorary membership of the American Academy of Arts in its first year. The French government made him director general of museums, a post he held until the downfall of his patron in 1815. (In the meantime, Denon would travel with Napoleon’s army across Europe, amassing works of art for the Louvre, and establishing it as one of the great collections of the world.)
Denon’s Voyages had, as he knew it would, the benefit of a considerable head start on the official publication of the Napoleonic expedition. But then the latter was an altogether more monumental undertaking. The Description de l’Egypte, published with the endorsement of Napoleon himself, was the first great work of Egyptology. Its publication was announced by a consular decree in February 1802, which also confirmed that the (considerable) expense would be borne by the government. The editor-in-chief would report directly to the minister of the interior. Bonaparte saw in the publication the opportunity to salvage the reputation of his ill-fated mission, and restore French pride. (The preface, written by the mathematician Fourier but personally approved by Napoleon, asserted that Egypt, a country ‘which has transmitted its knowledge to so many nations, is today plunged into barbarism’, effectively justifying the French expedition.) Moreover, the Description would serve to assert France’s claim to the cultural riches of Egypt.
In time, three editors-in-chief would work on the Description. The third, and longest-serving, Jomard, devoted over two decades of his life to the project, seeing it through to completion. (A grateful French government duly appointed him curator of the Bibliothèque Nationale: the reward for good behaviour was, it seems, further punishment.) Although planned as a celebration of Napoleonic endeavour, only about half the entire work was published before Bonaparte’s downfall and exile. The restored monarchy under Louis XVIII might have abandoned the project, but, recognizing the opportunity to bolster France’s reputation, decided to proceed. The finished work did not disappoint. It comprised eight huge folio volumes of text (four on antiquities, two on modern Egypt, and two on natural history) and nine accompanying folio volumes of plates on the same topics (five, two and two respectively). A coloured plate of the Dendera zodiac took pride of place in the second volume.
Indeed, it is the plates – all 974 of them – for which the Description remains most famous, and which have stood the test of time. Although the artists failed to reproduce many of the hieroglyphic inscriptions accurately, not knowing what they were copying, the images of monuments are much more reliable; in some cases, they are the only record of buildings which were subsequently damaged or destroyed. Nearly four hundred engravers were involved in the project; Denon himself contributed 140 drawings. The magnificent frontispiece to the first volume (dated 1809 but published the following year) was a masterpiece of propaganda, which both ‘framed and claimed Egyptian antiquity’.8 It shows a composite, mythical scene of pharaonic ruins: a winding road leads from an obelisk in the foreground, past sphinxes, a pyramid, temples, colonnades and columned halls into the far distance. The frame, under the protection of an Egyptian winged disc, captures the heroic nature of the expedition in a classical idiom. Along the top, Napoleon is shown in the guise of Alexander the Great, mounted on a chariot, spear in hand, and preceded by the French imperial eagle, bearing down on a group of hapless enemies. The sides, surmounted by further eagles, comprise a series of trophies bearing the names of the ‘conquered’ locations – from Alexandria via the pyramids and Thebes all the way to Abukir (the site of Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of the Nile, but included, nonetheless, without a hint of irony). The bottom register shows supplicant groups of Egyptians, complete with their horses and camels, parading before Napoleon’s imperial monogram. And, to complete the symbolism, a pair of cartouches – the oval rings within which pharaohs wrote their names – appear, each containing a star and Napoleon’s personal emblem, the bee.
By the time the final volume of the Description was published, in 1828, the emperor had been deposed, the Bourbon monarchy had been restored and was itself on the way to abolition. But the Description stood as a testament to France’s cultural superiority, proof of France’s ownership of Egypt’s ancient past. Champollion’s breakthrough of September 1822 merely confirmed that conviction.
Even before the last hieroglyphic inscription was carved, on 15 August AD 394, detailed understanding of the script had all but died out in the Nile Valley. Beyond Egypt’s borders, knowledge gave way to speculation, and all sorts of fanciful theories began to spring up about the meaning of the signs. As early as the first century BC, the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus had adumbrated that Egyptian writing was ‘not built up from syllables to express the underlying meaning, but from the appearance of things drawn and by their metaphorical meaning learned by heart’.9 Thus began the erroneous belief that hieroglyphic was a symbolic rather than a phonetic script; while this may have been true of some of the Ptolemaic-era signs, it was a fundamental misconception, a red herring which would deflect scholars from the path of successful decipherment for the next nineteen centuries.
European interest in the writing of the ancient Egyptians was revived at the beginning of the Renaissance, when a manuscript of the fourth-century work, Horapollo’s Hieroglyphika, was discovered on a Greek island and subsequently published in Italy in 1505. It caused a stir, and went through thirty editions (one of them with accompanying illustrations by Albrecht Dürer); but its whole approach, influenced by Neoplatonic mysticism, only served to obfuscate rather than illuminate the inner workings of the hieroglyphic script. Indeed, Horapollo’s readings were ‘more like a collection of conceits and enigmas than an exploration of a real system of serious literature’.10 Nonetheless, the idea that the key to Egyptian writing lay in mythology, not philology, became firmly lodged in European consciousness. The first post-classical work on the subject, the influential 1556 book Hieroglyphica (full title Hieroglyphica, sive, De sacris Aegyptiorum literis commentarii, ‘Hieroglyphics, or, Commentaries on the Sacred Letters of the Egyptians’) by the Venetian scholar Pierio Valeriano, followed the same, flawed approach, as did the wildly speculative publication by Kircher, a century later, of the inscription on a Roman obelisk. The bald truth was that, for over forty generations, no living soul had been able accurately to read an ancient Egyptian text.
Scholars began to think the task impossible. By the early eighteenth century, the English antiquarian, William Stukeley, could confidently assert that: ‘The hieroglyphics of the Egyptians is a sacred character . . . The characters cut on the Egyptian monuments are purely symbolical . . . The perfect knowledge of ’em is irrecoverable.’11 Pococke, in the 1743 account of his journey to Egypt, made the important realization that: ‘As far, therefore, as hieroglyphics are emblematical, they seem to stand for things; but as they are inscriptions, they stand for words or sounds as well as things, and might be read in the vulgar language by the children of the priests.’12 Two decades later, a French cleric, Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, correctly surmised that the cartouches might contain royal or divine names. But these were pinpricks of insight in an enveloping fog of misapprehension. Even the great French orientalist, Antoine Silvestre de Sacy, regrettably concluded that full decipherment was ‘too complicated, scientifically insoluble’.13
Only at the very end of the eighteenth century did a brave Danish scholar, Georg Zoëga, dare to suggest, against received wisdom, that some hieroglyphs might be phonetic after all. In the foreword to his book De origine et usu obeliscorum (‘On the origin and purpose of obelisks’), published in 1797, Zoëga suggested that: ‘When Egypt is better known to scholars, and when the numerous ancient remains still to be seen there have been accurately explored and published, it will perhaps be possible to learn to read the hieroglyphs and more intimately to understand the meaning of the Egyptian monuments.’14 It was a prescient statement. Just a year later, Napoleon launched his expedition to Egypt, exploring and publishing the country’s ancient remains and, in the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, providing scholars with the key that would finally unlock the mysteries of Egyptian writing.
