In Cairo, one of Napoleon’s savants, the engineer Jean-Joseph Marcel, recognized the script in the middle section of the stone as demotic and correctly identified the royal name ‘Ptolemy’, by comparison with the Greek text where it occurred eleven times. He also guessed that the first two signs in the group must therefore be the letters ‘P’ and ‘T’; but was unable to take this hunch any further.15 So, when copies of the stone’s inscription began to circulate in Europe, it was a happy circumstance that they came to the attention of two of the most brilliant minds of the age – two men who could not have been more different in talent or temperament. One was a dazzling polymath, the other a single-minded obsessive; one a man of easy, self-effacing erudition, the other a self-conscious and jealous intellectual; for added piquancy, one was English, the other French. The rivalrous race to decipherment had begun.
Thomas Young was a man of his time. Born into a prosperous Quaker family that placed a high value on learning, he showed an early aptitude for languages alongside a fascination for science. By all accounts, he was able to read by the time he was two years old, and by the age of fourteen had gained some proficiency in French and Italian, Latin and Greek, Hebrew and Syriac, Arabic and Persian, Turkish and Ethiopic, as well as the obscure ancient languages Chaldaean and Samarian. He was encouraged in his studies by a great-uncle who moved in London’s fashionable intellectual circles. However, Young was not wealthy, and needed a profession to support himself. Medicine seemed to offer a socially respectable and financially rewarding career; so he enrolled, first at the University of Edinburgh, then at Göttingen (renowned in the eighteenth century for its outstanding library). A paper on the workings of the human eye gained him election to a fellowship of the Royal Society at the precocious age of twenty-one. (He would later serve as the society’s foreign secretary.) Finally, to gain the MD needed to practise as a doctor, he went up to Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1797 (a move which also required him to renounce his Quaker faith and join the Church of England), where his fellow students nicknamed him ‘Phenomenon Young’. It was a barbed compliment. Absorbed in his studies, Young attended few lectures, remaining instead in his room, carrying out his own experiments in the exciting new field of physics.
The year he entered Cambridge was a bittersweet one for Young. His great-uncle died, depriving Young of an influential and supportive mentor, but giving him financial independence thanks to a large legacy of property and money. Young was now able to pursue his own passions. Moving to London in 1799, he began practising as a doctor, but science remained his passion. An autodidact – while still at Cambridge, he had written to one of his brothers that, ‘Masters and mistresses are very necessary to compensate for want of inclination and exertion: but whoever would arrive at excellence must be self-taught’16 – he nonetheless achieved remarkable insights and breakthroughs. Alongside his observations on the human eye – explaining how the lens accommodates, describing astigmatism, and proposing a theory of colour vision – he also demonstrated the wave theory of light, an insight which Einstein regarded, after Newton’s Opticks, as ‘the next great theoretical advance’ in the subject.17 Among many other accomplishments, Young formulated the modulus of elasticity (still used by engineers), advised the Admiralty on shipbuilding, served as secretary of the Board of Longitude, and was an expert on life insurance. In 1802–3, when still only in his late twenties, Young gave a series of lectures at the Royal Institution in London, covering virtually every aspect of science; for sheer breadth of knowledge, it has never been surpassed. Also that year, during a brief lull in the Napoleonic Wars, Young was able to visit France and to hear Napoleon – fresh from his Egyptian adventures – speak at the Institut National in Paris. Little did either man know that Young would soon come closer than anyone else to snatching the crown of Egyptology from the French.
With his prodigious knowledge of languages, ancient and modern, and his supreme gifts as a linguist, it is not, perhaps, surprising that Young should have become interested in the philological conundrum of the age, the decipherment of hieroglyphics. In his own words, he could not resist ‘an attempt to unveil the mystery, in which Egyptian literature has been involved for nearly twenty centuries’.18 The challenge seems first to have piqued his curiosity in 1814 when he reviewed a recent German publication on the history of languages, Johann Christoph Adelung’s Mithridates, oder allgemeine Sprachkunde. At the same time, Young began studying a copy of the Rosetta Stone inscription. Blessed with an almost photographic memory, he started to discern patterns and resemblances that had escaped other, less punctilious observers. In particular, he noticed similarities between some of the signs in the demotic and hieroglyphic scripts (until then believed to be unrelated). His intuition was confirmed the following year when he consulted a borrowed copy of an early volume of the Description which included facsimiles of ancient Egyptian papyri. Young thus became the first scholar to suggest, correctly, that monumental hieroglyphs, cursive hieroglyphs and demotic were closely connected. Not only did this insight require an extraordinary combination of gifts, it also demanded a leap of imagination and the abandonment of centuries of false theories about ancient Egyptian writing. Young did not demur from rejecting Horapollo’s readings as ‘puerile’, nor from pouring scorn on Kircher’s attempts at translation: ‘according to his interpretation, which succeeded equally well, whether he happened to begin at the beginning, or at the end of each of the lines, they all contain some mysterious doctrines of religion or of metaphysics’.19 As for Kircher’s famous drawings of Egyptian obelisks, Young damned with faint praise, calling them ‘tolerably faithful, though inelegant, representations of the principal monuments of Egyptian art, which had before his days been brought to Europe’.20 Young also broke with received wisdom by correctly proposing that demotic combined both symbolic and phonetic signs. By contrast, other scholars working on the Rosetta Stone at the time, notably Champollion’s teacher Silvestre de Sacy and the Swedish diplomat Johan Åkerblad, wrongly concluded that demotic was entirely alphabetic. However, not even Young made the logical step of realizing that hieroglyphic, too, was a hybrid script. That breakthrough would have to wait for the laser-like brilliance of Champollion.
In common with many gentleman scholars of the early nineteenth century, Young kept up a lively correspondence with his contemporaries, in Britain and beyond, sharing observations and theories, and keeping abreast of new discoveries. However, Young never corresponded directly with Champollion. The reason was a remarkable letter, written by Silvestre de Sacy to Young on 20 July 1815. In it the French orientalist warned: ‘If I might venture to advise you, I would recommend you not to be too communicative of your discoveries to M. Champollion. It may happen that he may hereafter make pretension to the priority.’21
The teacher evidently knew his former pupil well, and his prediction would come true. As a result of Silvestre de Sacy’s letter – probably prompted by a political row with Champollion; the latter was a Bonapartist, while the teacher was a royalist, and Louis XVIII had been restored to the throne less than a month earlier – Young never shared his work on hieroglyphics with the only other scholar who could have truly appreciated it.
Alongside his scholarship on Egypt, Young’s research continued to be prodigious in its scope. His contributions to the 1816 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica ranged from annuities to waves. His article on languages was the first to use the term ‘Indo-European’, for Young recognized that languages as diverse as English, Latin and Greek all belonged to the same family. (He had achieved this insight while still in his teens, by comparing the key features of hundreds of languages.) But, naturally reserved and conditioned by his Quaker upbringing to value modesty, Young rarely wrote under his own name. Most of his articles, groundbreaking as they were, were published anonymously. For Young, the intellectual adventure was reward enough. All through 1816 and 1817, he continued to work on decipherment, eagerly studying any new publications of Egyptian manuscripts he could lay his hands on. Indeed, in 1817 he founded the Egyptian Society of London, for the express purpose of publishing pharaonic texts. Ever the gentleman scholar, he had no intention of following in Belzoni’s footsteps and going to Egypt to secure manuscripts himself. Instead, he appealed for funds ‘for employing some poor Italian or Maltese to scramble over Egypt in search of more’.22
In 1818, Young summed up his knowledge of hieroglyphic and demotic scripts in a further article for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published the following year in a supplement to the fourth edition. It was entitled, simply, ‘Egypt’. In it, he correctly established the phonetic values of some demotic signs, and a number of correspondences between the demotic and hieroglyphic scripts. Once again, the article was anonymous; Young did not publish it under his own name until 1823, a year after Champollion’s Lettre à M. Dacier. However, Young’s authorship of ‘Egypt’ was well known and recognized at the time of publication by those in his intellectual circle (which of course excluded Champollion). Henry Salt used the article to read the cartouches of Ptolemy on the temple of Dakka in Nubia, and mentioned the fact in a letter written to William Hamilton from Cairo on 1 May 1819.23 In 1820, Belzoni wrote of Young’s ‘discovery of the alphabet of the Egyptians’24 and included the article ‘Egypt’ as an appendix to his own work: ‘An Explanation of some of the principal Hieroglyphics, extracted from the Article Egypt in the supplement of the Encylopædia Britannica; with additional Notes’. However, the anonymity of the published article would subsequently allow Champollion to claim all the credit for decipherment, just as Silvestre de Sacy had predicted.
Champollion was seventeen years Young’s junior. Born in the town of Figeac, in the Lot, to a bookseller and his wife, Champollion grew up surrounded by writings and displayed a precocious genius for languages. Until the age of eleven, Jean-François was educated at home by his elder brother, Jacques-Joseph, himself a gifted scholar and linguist.25 In 1798, Jacques-Joseph asked to participate in the Napleonic expedition to Egypt, reflecting his established interest in the subject, but his request was turned down. Despite this disappointment, he continued to take an interest in the emerging discipline of Egyptology, and evidently transmitted his enthusiasm to his younger brother. When Jean-François turned eleven, he enrolled in the lycée in the city of Grenoble, 500 km from the family home, and renowned as a centre of learning. According to legend, it was during a visit to Grenoble in April 1802 by Fourier, eminent mathematician and participant in the Napoleonic expedition, that the young Champollion was invited to see the great scholar’s private collection of antiquities, sparking a lifelong fascination for ancient Egypt. Sadly, the known historical facts do not support the story; but it is likely that both Champollion brothers attended the soirées held by Fourier at his official residence in Grenoble between 1804 and 1806. (Fourier had been appointed prefect of the département of Isère by Napoleon on their return from Egypt in 1801.) Certainly, Jean-François first saw a copy of the Rosetta Stone in 1804, and started to learn Coptic the following year. In 1806, he presented a paper to the Grenoble Academy in which he (correctly) argued that Coptic was a direct descendant of ancient Egyptian; it was this insight, and his later fluency in Coptic, that would prove decisive in the decipherment of hieroglyphics. That same summer, the mayor of Grenoble is reported to have asked Champollion if he intended to study the fashionable natural sciences. ‘No, Monsieur,’ Jean-François is said to have replied. ‘I wish to devote my life to knowledge of ancient Egypt.’26
For a young man with such an ambition, there was only one place to go: Paris, the centre and beacon of French scholarship. So, in 1807, he enrolled at the Ecole Spéciale des Langues Orientales Vivantes where his teachers included Silvestre de Sacy. During two years in Paris, Champollion not only vigorously pursued his studies, but also wrote a major part of his first book, Introduction à l’Egypte sous les Pharaons (1811) and completed a second, L’Egypte sous les Pharaons, ou Recherches sur la géographie, la religion, la langue, les écritures et l’histoire de l’Egypte avant l’invasion de Cambyse. Description géographique (1814). On completing his studies in Paris, Champollion returned home to take up a teaching post in history and politics at Grenoble, being promoted to a chair at the town’s Collège Royal in 1818. This brought a measure of professional and financial security, and finally allowed Champollion to devote more of his time to the serious study of ancient Egypt. At exactly the same time, across the Channel in England, Thomas Young was writing his seminal article on ‘Egypt’. Almost entirely unaware of each other’s work, the two greatest minds of the age were engaged in a race to crack the code of hieroglyphic writing.
In a curious twist of fate, the spur to Champollion’s decisive breakthrough was an incident which nearly ended his career entirely. Having grown up in revolutionary France, imbibed the radical promise of liberty, equality and brotherhood, and followed Napoleon’s meteoric rise, it was perhaps no surprise that Champollion should have shared the anti-monarchist sentiment of the age. It must have come as a bitter disappointment, indeed a betrayal, therefore, when, following Napoleon’s defeat and exile in 1815, France restored the Bourbons to the throne. For a man as fixed in his views and as certain of his own rightness as Champollion, such a reversal was never going to be taken lying down. In March 1821, Bonapartists in Grenoble staged a rebellion, raising the revolutionary tricolour in place of the white flag of the Bourbon monarchy. Champollion was accused of being the ringleader; the new arch-royalist prefect of Isère, Baron de Haussez, attempted to indict Champollion on a charge of high treason. Had this succeeded, and Champollion been found guilty, he could have faced the death penalty. Fortunately for Champollion, his academic brilliance had not gone unnoticed in Paris, and supporters in the French capital intervened to have him tried in a civil rather than criminal court. He was acquitted of all charges, but would remain forever tainted, in the eyes of political opponents and jealous rivals, as a dangerous revolutionary. De Haussez may have failed to have Champollion tried for treason, but he saw to it that he lost his positions and income at the Collège Royal in Grenoble. Without a job, without a salary, and persona non grata in his home region, Champollion returned to Paris to stay with his ever-dependable elder brother. So it was that, on 20 July 1821, Champollion arrived at 28 rue Mazarine. With nothing else to occupy his time, and with the benefit of his brother’s extensive library, he devoted himself wholeheartedly to the challenge that, within fourteen months, would result in his seminal achievement.
Three months before his arrival in Paris, Champollion had published his first significant work on ancient Egyptian writing, De l’écriture hiératique des anciens Egyptiens; focussing on the cursive form of hieroglyphics (known as ‘hieratic’), the study was apparently produced in total ignorance of Young’s Encyclopaedia Britannica article. Consequently, Champollion maintained that both hieratic and demotic were entirely symbolic, an error he soon realized and regretted. (So much so, that he tried to suppress his own text and to withdraw all copies from circulation.) Over the course of the next year, Champollion read Young’s article, and changed his mind: against all accepted wisdom, he now concluded that there was indeed a phonetic element to ancient Egyptian scripts.
In the meantime, Young had not been idle. On a grand tour of Italy in the summer of 1821, he studied obelisks in Rome, and discovered a second bilingual inscription in the Drovetti collection of antiquities, temporarily stored in a warehouse in Livorno. Copies of the inscription on the obelisk removed from Philae by William Bankes now began to circulate, but Young’s copy contained an error which threw him off the scent. By contrast, Champollion’s copy, which he received in January 1822, was accurate, and enabled him to make further progress. The cartouche of Cleopatra, alongside that of Ptolemy, was to prove decisive in assigning phonetic values to individual hieroglyphic signs. By applying these equivalences to other cartouches on surviving Ptolemaic and Roman monuments, Champollion was able to read the names of further rulers from Egypt’s classical past: Alexander and Berenice, Trajan and Caesar. Certain that he was making rapid progress, Champollion drew up a table showing the demotic and hieroglyphic equivalents to the letters of the Greek alphabet. (He would publish this ‘Tableau des signes phonétiques’ later the same year, as part of his Lettre à M. Dacier, with a cheeky cartouche of his own name in demotic at the foot of the page.)
Others, too, were trying their hand at decipherment. Salt wrote from Cairo on 26 April 1822: ‘At Philae, where I did not hope to do much, after the long stay of Mr Bankes there, I found and excavated the front of a small temple with an inscription upon it in Greek, which proves that it was dedicated by Ptolomeus Epiphanus to Esculapius. I have made some progress in the hieroglyphics, though not much.’27 Salt could at least take pride in the growing fame of his greatest achievement, the acquisition by the British Museum of the Young Memnon. The year 1822 saw the first scientific publication about the statue,28 which acknowledged it, not merely as a trophy of antiquarian treasure-hunting, but as an art-historical object in its own right. France, by contrast, marked the year 1822 with the issue of a bronze portrait medal of Denon, now retired from his position at the Louvre. A decade earlier, French scholarship had achieved international renown by describing ancient Egypt. Now, surely, it could do the same with decipherment.
The final breakthrough came on the morning of 14 September 1822 when Champollion received a new hieroglyphic inscription: it showed cartouches from the temple of Abu Simbel, and had been copied by a French architect Jean-Nicolas Hugot who had recently travelled to Egypt with Bankes. Champollion applied his familiarity with the Rosetta Stone, with the value of certain hieroglyphic signs, with the Coptic language, and with pharaonic history – all the elements of knowledge that he had laboured so long and so assiduously to aquire – to read the royal name contained in the cartouches as that of Ramesses. Encouraged by this success to accept that hieroglyphics might, after all, be a hybrid system, comprising both symbolic and phonetic signs – at least in the writing of names – Champollion applied the same approach to the second half of the long cartouche of Ptolemy on the Rosetta Stone, and was able to decipher the royal epithets ‘beloved of Ptah, who lives forever’. By the end of the morning, he needed no further proof that his system was the right one; papers in hand, he sprinted down the rue Mazarine to his brother’s office in the Académie des Inscriptions to announce his discovery.
By an extrordinary coincidence, Thomas Young happened to be in Paris two weeks later, and attended the meeting of the académie on 27 September at which Champollion presented his Lettre à M. Dacier. Moreover, Young was invited to sit next to Champollion while he read out his discoveries. Another member of the académie, the physicist François Arago, introduced Young and Champollion to each other at the end of the session. It was their first meeting. In a letter written two days later, Young acknowledged the Frenchman’s extraordinary 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 has found the key in England which has opened the gate for him, and it is often observed that c’est le premier pas qui coûte; 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.’29
But this outward magnanimity concealed a deeper hurt that Champollion had failed to acknowledge Young’s contribution to decipherment. (As Young would put it shortly afterwards, with characteristic understatement: ‘I did certainly expect to find the chronology of my own researches a little more distinctly stated.’30) Quietly determined to set the record straight, he eschewed his customary anonymity, and within a few months, published his own work, under his own name. It was entitled, rather pointedly, An Account of Some Recent Discoveries in Hieroglyphical Literature and Egyptian Antiquities, Including the Author’s Original Alphabet, As Extended by Mr Champollion. Young dedicated it to his friend, the Prussian scholar Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), who had also attended Champollion’s presentation at the académie that late September day.
Young’s Account is surprisingly personal in tone, and allows us a rare insight into the workings of his mind and conscience. In the preface, he admitted to a desire for public acknowledgement of his efforts: ‘I cannot resist the natural inclination, to make a public claim to whatever credit may be my due, for the labour that I have bestowed, on an attempt to unveil the mystery, in which Egyptian literature has been involved for nearly twenty centuries.’31 But in case the reading public should think him a narrow-minded, peevish scholar, he affected a more modest air a few pages later: ‘I think myself fully justified in endeavouring . . . to obtain, while I have yet a few years more to live and to learn, whatever respect may be thought due to the discoveries, which have constituted the amusement of a few of my leisure hours.’ 32 (This was disingenuous. In fact, Young was a workaholic, having admitted to a friend: ‘I have learned more or less perfectly a tolerable variety of things in this world: but there are two things that I have never yet learned, and I suppose I never shall – to get up and to go to bed.’33) Even in describing the heights of his scholarly achievements, Young nonetheless wished to present himself as a dilettante gentleman scholar. It was a view of British Egyptology that was to be perpetuated, for good and ill, throughout the nineteenth century.
Young was especially put out that Champollion, not content with claiming unique insight into hieroglyphics, had also meddled in the middle section of the Rosetta Stone, which Young had rather thought his specialist subject. Worse, Champollion had decided to cast aside Young’s nomenclature for the cursive script and replace it with his own. As Young reminded readers: ‘I have called these characters enchoric, or rather enchorial: Mr. Champollion has chosen to distinguish them by the term demotic . . . in my opinion, the priority of my publication ought to have induced him to adopt my term, and to suppress his own.’34 A natural self-publicist, Champollion won the argument. Today, if Young is remembered at all in the annals of philology, it is as the decipherer of demotic, not of enchorial.
Warming to his theme in the Account, Young made a few last, brave attempts at magnanimity:
I fully and sincerely acquit Mr Champollion of any intentions actually dishonourable: and if I have hinted, that I have received an impression of something like a want of liberality in his conduct, I have only thrown out this intimation, as an apology for being obliged to plead my own cause . . . however Mr Champollion may have arrived at his conclusions, I admit them, with the greatest pleasure and gratitude, not by any means as superseding my system, but as fully confirming and extending it.35
But, eventually, as he wrote more about his own discoveries, his natural reserve deserted him and he launched into fifteen pages of barbed comment. One piece of advice, directed at Champollion, summed up Young’s feelings:
in fact, the further that he advances by the exertion of his own talents and ingenuity, the more easily he will be able to admit, without any exorbitant sacrifice of his fame, the claim that I have advanced to a priority with respect to the first elements of all his researches . . . and I cannot help thinking that he will ultimately feel it most for his own substantial honour and reputation, to be more anxious to admit the just claims of others than they can be to advance them.36
The Frenchman was not about to take such sentiments lying down. In an angry letter to Young, dated 23 March 1823, Champollion retorted: ‘I shall never consent to recognize 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.’37
Young’s friends were outraged by this slight, but failed to make headway against Champollion’s version of events. Whilst the Frenchman was adept at self-promotion, his English rival Young ‘could not bear, in the most common conversation, the slightest degree of exaggeration, or even of colouring’.38 Even Young’s friend, François Arago, supported Champollion’s claims; nationalism, it seems, took precedence over friendship. Thereafter, Young largely lost interest in hieroglyphics, turning his prodigious mind to other matters.
Not so Champollion. In January 1823, a chance encounter in a Paris sale room introduced him to the Duke of Blacas d’Aulps, an influential courtier of Louis XVIII’s. The duke was to become Champollion’s benefactor, supporting his studies and protecting him from his jealous rivals and political opponents. The acquaintance soon bore fruit. In February, the duke presented Champollion with a gold box from the king, encrusted with the royal cipher in diamonds, and bearing the inscription ‘King Louis XVIII to Mr Champollion on the occasion of his discovery of the alphabet of hieroglyphs’.39 Even for a Bonapartist like Champollion, this royal recognition of his breakthrough must have felt like a vindication. Buoyed up and encouraged by such praise, he continued to work on decipherment. It led him to a second, vital realization. In his Lettre à M. Dacier, Champollion had asserted that hieroglyphics were only used phonetically in the writing of proper names. Over the following seven months, he completely changed his mind. In April 1823, Champollion announced to the Académie des Inscriptions that hieroglyphic writing was, after all, a fully hybrid system, and had been so throughout Egyptian history. He showed that his new system could be applied successfully to read pharaonic names, such as that of Ramesses, and could equally be applied to texts as well, using Coptic as a guide to the meaning of ancient Egyptian words. (For example, the Coptic word pnoute gave the meaning of the Egyptian pa-netjer, ‘god’.)
This, rather than Champollion’s initial breakthrough, marked the real moment at which ancient Egyptian once again became a readable language. The full extent of his system was revealed in his magnum opus, published in early 1824 and dedicated (thanks to the Duke of Blacas’s efforts) to Louis XVIII, who received Champollion in a private audience. In the Précis du système hiéroglyphique des anciens Egyptiens, Champollion 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.’40
His place in history now secure beyond challenge, Champollion even felt able to acknowledge his great rival, albeit grudgingly:
I recognize that he was the first to publish some correct ideas about the ancient writings of Egypt; that he was also the first to establish some correct distinctions concerning the general nature of these writings, by determining, through a substantial comparison of texts, the value of several groups of characters. I even recognize that he published before me his ideas on the possibility of the existence of several sound-signs, which would have been used to write foreign proper names in Egypt in hieroglyphs; finally that M. Young was also the first to try, but without complete success, to give a phonetic value to the hieroglyphs making up the two names Ptolemy and Berenice.41
In the end, despite their radically different characters and temperaments, Young and Champollion both made essential, if not quite equal, contributions to decipherment. Young developed the conceptual framework, recognizing the hybrid nature of the demotic script and its connection with hieroglyphics. Had he stuck at the task, and not been distracted by his numerous other scientific interests, he might well have cracked the problem. Instead, it took Champollion’s linguistic abilities and his single-minded focus to solve the riddle.
In 1825, with Champollion now basking in the glory of decipherment, Young moved to a new, grand house in Regent’s Park where ‘he led the life of a philosopher, surrounded by every domestic comfort, and enjoying the pleasures of an extensive and cultivated society, who knew how to appreciate him’.42 He might easily have left his Egyptological studies entirely behind, had it not been for a letter he received in June 1827 from a Coptic scholar in Turin, Amadeo Peyron. Peyron wrote:
You write that from time to time you will publish new material which will increase our knowledge of Egyptian matters. I am very glad to hear this and I urge you to keep your word . . . there is universal regret that your versatility is so widely engaged in the sciences . . . that you are unable to press on with your discoveries and bring them to that pitch of perfection . . . for you are constantly being drawn from one science to another.43
Young had been beaten to the decipherment of hieroglyphics; he wasn’t about to let the same thing happen again with his beloved demotic. So, from that moment on until the day of his death, he worked assiduously on the problem. He even sought out Champollion’s assistance, perhaps confident that the Frenchman was now too busy with other responsibilities (he had been appointed a curator at the Louvre) to pose a serious challenge in this particular scholarly endeavour. Indeed, Young seems to have forgiven Champollion for any earlier slights. In the summer of 1828, when Young travelled to Paris to accept the honour of election as a foreign associate of the Institut National, he told a friend that Champollion had ‘shown me far more attention that I ever showed or could show, to any living being: he devoted seven whole hours at once to looking over with me his papers and the magnificent collection which is committed to his care’.44 Champollion was far less magnanimous. The following spring, he wrote 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.’45
Six weeks later, on 10 May 1829, Thomas Young died, just short of his fifty-sixth birthday. On his deathbed, pencil in hand (he was too weak to wield a pen), he was still working on the proofs of his landmark publication, his answer to Champollion’s Précis, the modestly titled Rudiments of an Egyptian Dictionary in the Ancient Enchorial Character; Containing All the Words of Which the Sense Has Been Ascertained. It was published posthumously and remains a milestone in the history of Egyptian philology. But, like Young’s achievements, his passing scarcely attracted any attention from his contemporaries. A brief news item in the Lancet noted the death of Thomas Young the respected physician; an address by the president of the Royal Society marked the demise of a devoted servant of science. There was little else. Eventually, five years after his death, Young was honoured with a memorial plaque of white marble in St Andrew’s chapel, Westminster Abbey, paid for by his friend Hudson Gurney. Beneath a profile portrait medallion by the noted sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey, the epitaph (composed by Gurney) reads:
Sacred to the memory of Thomas Young M.D. Fellow and Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society Member of the National Institute of France. A man alike eminent in almost every department of human learning. Who, equally distinguished in the most abstruse investigations of letters and science, first established the undulatory theory of light and first penetrated the obscurity which had veiled for ages the hieroglyphicks of Egypt. Endeared to his friends by his domestic virtues, honoured by the World for his unrivalled acquirements, he died in the hopes of the Resurrection of the just. Born at Milverton in Somersetshire June 13th 1773, died in Park Square London May 10th 1829, in the 56th year of his age.46
A more poignant acknowledgement had to wait nearly a century and a half, for the 1972 exhibition in Paris marking the 150th anniversary of decipherment. In a unique act of scholarly cooperation, the British Museum lent France the Rosetta Stone. In a reciprocal gesture, Paris displayed the stone next to pictures of Champollion and Young – both of equal size.47
TWO
In the footsteps of Napoleon
