Frontispiece of the Napoleonic Description de l’Egypte, which ‘framed and claimed’ the Nile Valley for European scholarship.
A single column from Karnak is more of a monument on its own than all four facades of the courtyard of the Louvre.1
JEAN-FRANÇOIS CHAMPOLLION, 1829
In the summer of 1824, Jean-François Champollion was riding high. His breakthrough Lettre à M. Dacier, followed two years later by his landmark Précis du système hiéroglyphique, had firmly (if not fairly) established his reputation as the undisputed decipherer of ancient Egyptian. By means of his scholarly exertions, he had also done a great service to his country and, most gratifyingly of all, bested the British. As his nephew was to put it in a later biography, Champollion’s discovery belonged ‘not only to him, ultimately to France’.2 In return for such a patriotic achievement, Champollion’s aristocratic patron, the Duke of Blacas, saw to it that appropriate rewards were forthcoming. He successfully petitioned the king to finance a study tour of Italy, to enable Champollion to examine, at first hand, the antiquities brought back from Egypt since the days of the Roman emperors.
Setting off from Paris that same summer, Champollion travelled first to Turin, capital of the Kingdom of Sardinia and seat of the House of Savoy. Thanks to his connections in Paris, the Frenchman came armed with letters of introduction from the Duke and Duchess of Orléans to the King and Queen of Sardinia. Turin’s Museo Egizio (Egyptian Museum) was a magnet for scholars, as it housed one of the longest-established collections of Egyptian antiquities anywhere in Europe. Seven decades earlier, in 1753, King Carlo Emanuele III (r.1730–73) had sent a botanist, Vitaliano Donati, on an expedition to Egypt to bring back objects for the royal collection. Donati had returned with 300 antiquities, largely from Karnak and Coptos, and these still formed the nucleus of the Museum’s holdings. Then, only a few months before Champollion’s arrival, the current King of Sardinia, Carlo Felice (r.1821–31), had greatly augmented the collection by purchasing part of the vast hoard of antiquities amassed by the French consul Drovetti. The sale comprised over five thousand objects, including a hundred statues, stelae, mummies and 170 papyri. When Champollion arrived in Turin, many of the treasures were still in their boxes, waiting to be unpacked.
As well as studying the objects, he was also keen to test his skills at decipherment on a whole host of new inscriptions. One papyrus, in particular, promised exciting new revelations for someone who could read the hieratic script in which it was written: the so-called Royal Canon of Turin dated from ancient Egypt’s New Kingdom and contained not one, but two extensive texts. One side of the papyrus listed tax returns from various districts along the Nile Valley; but – of far greater interest to scholars like Champollion – the other side was inscribed with eleven columns listing all the rulers of Egypt from the time of the gods down to the threshold of the New Kingdom. When the papyrus had been acquired by Drovetti, it was virtually complete. Champollion eagerly looked forward to reading it and discovering hitherto unknown details of ancient Egyptian chronology. When he came to unpack it, however, he was utterly dismayed and bitterly disappointed. During its long transit from Egypt to Turin, the papyrus had crumbled into pieces. Champollion was faced, not with a roll, but with a mass of jumbled fragments.3 He lamented: ‘I confess that the greatest disappointment of my literary life is to have discovered the manuscript in such a desperate condition. I shall never get over it – it is a wound that will bleed for a long time.’4
The condition of the Turin Canon, and Champollion’s attempts to piece it back together, weighed altogether more heavily on his mind than the death, during his stay in Turin, of the French king Louis XVIII. Despite Champollion’s revolutionary past, he had found royal favour, which both protected him from his enemies and enabled him to undertake his study tour. Indeed, feted by Turin’s nobility and invited by the King of Sardinia to catalogue the Drovetti collection, Champollion’s republican sympathies seem to have faded somewhat. He was enjoying his fame as the decipherer of hieroglyphics, and only too happy to accept invitations into the aristocratic salons of Piedmont. A still more exalted audience awaited him on the next leg of his tour, in Rome.
Ever since the days of Julius Caesar, the eternal city had been home to a glittering collection of Egyptian monuments, most notably obelisks. At least fifteen of these stone needles had been transported to the city during the Roman empire, of which thirteen still remained. A century and a half before Champollion’s arrival, Athanasius Kircher had copied (badly) and interpreted (fancifully) the hieroglyphic inscriptions on the most prominent obelisks. Now, as the first scholar truly able to read the inscriptions since Roman times, Champollion embarked on a systematic study. Very quickly he realized the deficiencies in Kircher’s work, and determined to produce accurate copies that would stand the test of time. (This would become something of a theme for the remainder of Champollion’s career.) However, before he could complete his study, Champollion – not usually one to be deflected from his scholarship – had to break off from his work. In June 1825, he was faced with an altogether more delicate assignment; for he had been summoned by the pope, Leo XII (r.1823–9), to a private audience at the Vatican.
Best known for his reactionary views, Leo XII was not particularly interested in Egyptology. He was, however, concerned with the infallibility of Church doctrine, and was therefore acutely aware of a debate that had raged over the date of the Dendera zodiac ever since its discovery by Napoleon’s expedition and subsequent removal to Paris by Lelorrain in 1821. By studying the positions of the stars portrayed in the inscription, no less a scholar than Jomard, the editor-in-chief of the Description de l’Egypte, had proposed a date of 15,000 BC. This was anathema to the Catholic Church which still held that the world had been created in 4004 BC. Louis XVIII, with his traditional views, had been scandalized, the arch-conservative Leo XII, appalled. A rival astronomer had suggested a much later date, 747 BC, and this scholarly dispute had come to epitomize the clash between religion and science. In the end Champollion had shown that the answer lay not in the position of the zodiac’s stars, but in the hieroglyphs of its accompanying text. In the summer of 1822, as he was finalizing his system of decipherment, he had read the cartouche in the lower right-hand corner of the zodiac as the title ‘autocrator’, firmly dating the monument to the Roman period. (The zodiac, along with the foundation of the temple of Dendera, is now dated to the reign of Cleopatra VII, shortly before the Roman conquest of Egypt). Jomard was incandescent, and would remain Champollion’s implacable opponent, frustrating his ambitions whenever he had the chance. But the Church was delighted, and relieved: the traditional date of creation could stand, unchallenged. When Champollion presented himself before a grateful pontiff in Rome, Leo XII is said to have repeated, three times and in perfect French, that the scholar had rendered ‘a beautiful, great and good service to the Church’.5 He even offered to make him a cardinal. Champollion politely declined. Insistent that so valuable a service demanded official recognition, the pope instead suggested to the French government that Champollion be admitted to the Légion d’honneur. What the scientific and political revolutionary made of all this is not recorded. It was certainly one of the strangest moments in Champollion’s illustrious career.
Escaping Rome two days later, and moving on to Florence, Champollion found himself in more familiar territory. Not to be outdone by the King of Sardinia, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Leopoldo II (r.1824–59), had also recently acquired a large collection of Egyptian antiquities. This one had been amassed by an Italian diplomat, Giuseppe di Nizzoli, who had served for seven years as chancellor of the Austrian consulate in Cairo. He had sold the first part of his collection in 1821 to the Austrian government. Three years later, he put a second part on the market, taking advantage of the interest (and high prices) generated by the Drovetti sale. Leopoldo II seized his chance and secured the collection for Tuscany. And who better to catalogue the objects than the greatest and most famous scholar of ancient Egypt in all of Europe, Jean-François Champollion? It was a relationship that would prove crucial for the next phase of Champollion’s studies.
On this first visit, however, Champollion stayed in Florence for only two weeks. He was anxious to head back to Turin to immerse himself for a second time in the spectacular Drovetti collection. En route, he received word that a further collection, amassed by Drovetti’s great rival Henry Salt, had been sent to Europe for sale and currently lay in store at the Livorno docks. Champollion’s interest was piqued, so in July 1825 he made a detour via Livorno to see Salt’s antiquities for himself. What he found more than lived up to expectations. The British consul had clearly enjoyed a flair for acquiring rare and important artefacts. With the Drovetti and di Nizzoli collections having been snapped up by ambitious rulers in Turin, Vienna and Florence, Champollion determined, there and then, that the Salt collection should come to Paris. Champollion’s motives were not entirely unselfish. If Paris were to acquire a significant collection of Egyptian antiquities, then the Louvre would have to appoint a curator to look after them; and Champollion saw himself firmly in the frame for such a prestigious appointment. All he needed to do was to persuade the French government, and, in particular, France’s new king, Charles X (r.1824–30).
In November 1825, just before the route across the Alps became impassable with the winter snows, Champollion made the journey from Turin to stay with his family in Grenoble, before returning to Paris to begin his lobbying. Unfortunately, the Salt collection was not the only one on the market; nor, Champollion discovered, was he the only plausible candidate for the Louvre curatorship. One by one, hoards of antiquities amassed by European collectors were being auctioned off to rival European courts, taking advantage of the newfound fashion for all things ancient Egyptian that the Description and decipherment had prompted. The latest collection to come onto the market was an extensive group of objects formed by an Italian horse-dealer-turned-excavator, Giuseppe Passalacqua. Among those advocating its purchase by the French state was Champollion’s arch-nemesis, Jomard, who rather fancied himself as inaugural curator of Egyptian antiquities at the Louvre. Once again, the Duke of Blacas came to Champollion’s rescue. Thanks to the duke’s powers of persuasion, Charles X issued a royal grant in February 1826 which enabled Champollion to return to Livorno to make a full study of the Salt collection and estimate its value. Champollion’s assessment was sufficiently favourable that, just two months later, after further intervention by Blacas, the French king approved the purchase of the Salt collection, and, a few weeks later, confirmed Champollion’s appointment to the plum new job at France’s national museum.
Champollion stayed in Livorno for a full six months, to supervise the shipment of the collection to Le Havre. Even this enforced delay turned out to be another stroke of luck. For Grand Duke Leopoldo II of Tuscany had sent a young scholar, a professor of oriental languages at the University of Pisa named Ippolito Rosellini (1800–43), to meet Champollion, hoping the great man might take the twenty-five-year-old under his wing. Rosellini asked Champollion directly if he would take him as his pupil. As Rosellini later recalled: ‘I immediately determined to follow him wherever he should go.’6 Not only did the two get on famously, beginning a lasting friendship and collaboration, but together they hatched an audacious plan: for a joint Franco-Tuscan expedition to Egypt, following in the footsteps of Napoleon but with all the advantages that decipherment had brought to the study of pharaonic civilization. It seemed fitting that a medal had recently been struck in France to celebrate the second edition of the Description de l’Egypte. The obverse showed a conqueror in Gaulish-Roman attire unveiling a voluptuous female personification of Egypt.7 If Egypt were to be uncovered anew, it was only right that it should fall to a Frenchman and an Italian to accomplish the task. Rosellini joined Champollion in Paris at the end of the year to discuss their plan in more detail.
For Champollion, who had devoted his entire adult life to the study of ancient Egypt, the prospect of actually visiting the land of the pharaohs, rather than reading about it in books, now lodged itself firmly in his imagination. But, on a more prosaic level, there was the overwhelming task of his day job. The Salt collection of 5,000 objects was followed, in 1827, by the second Drovetti collection. As a consequence of these two purchases, the Louvre now had the best holdings of ancient Egyptian antiquities outside Egypt itself. It fell to Champollion, as curator, to sort, study and arrange the objects in the new Egyptian galleries. Breaking with tradition, he determined to present the collection not as mere objets d’art but in historical order, to chart the development of pharaonic culture. It was an immense undertaking, not helped by his many enemies in the French capital and the vested interests at the Louvre. The old Parisian courtiers did not take kindly to this upstart scholar from the provinces with his radical ideas, and they worked to frustrate him at every turn. Already in November 1826, Champollion had written to Rosellini:
My life has become a fight . . . My arrival at the Museum has disturbed the whole place, and all my colleagues are conspiring against me, because instead of treating my position as a sinecure, I busy myself with my department, which inevitably makes it appear that they are doing nothing with theirs . . . Fortunately the minister is on my side, but I regret having constantly to involve him and weary him with all these political manoeuvres. How I long to be camped on the deserted plain of Thebes! Only there will it be possible for me to find at the same time both pleasure and rest.8
To add insult to injury, in 1827 Champollion was blocked from election to the Académie des Inscriptions; his radical views on politics and history seemed increasingly out of favour with the deeply conservative bent of Charles X’s government. Beset with frustrations and disappointments on every side, Champollion found Egypt calling him ever more loudly.
While the Description had brought the monuments of the Nile Valley to the forefront of European consciousness, in truth it had recorded an Egypt that was fast disappearing. Muhammad Ali’s modernization of Egypt gathered momentum throughout the 1820s and, as more land was brought under cultivation and factories began to spring up along the riverbanks, it was Egypt’s ancient monuments that bore the brunt. In the quarter century following the Napoleonic expedition, the Young Memnon and the sarcophagus of Seti I had been shipped to London, the Philae obelisk to Kingston Lacy, and the Dendera zodiac to Paris. Great quantities of smaller objects had been ruthlessly collected, then sold at a tidy profit, by European consuls and adventurers. Many of the antiquities that remained in Egypt fared even worse. At Aswan, the pillared chapel on the island of Elephantine was dismantled in 1822 to build barracks and warehouses; other monuments were demolished to feed lime kilns, while ancient mud brick made excellent fertilizer to support an increase in agricultural production. Between 1810 and 1828, thirteen whole temples were lost. Muhammad Ali even encouraged his engineers to use the Giza Pyramids as a convenient source of stone for the construction of new dams across the Nile. Little by little, Egypt’s archaeological sites were being cannibalized to feed its industrial revolution. And what economic development spared, treasure-hunting and slapdash excavation often claimed. The burial site of an ancient Egyptian hero, General Djehuty, was discovered by Drovetti in 1824, but the sumptuous contents were dispersed, unrecorded, and even the location of the tomb was lost.
As reports of this orgy of destruction began to reach Europe, scholars became increasingly concerned. A desire to record and preserve Egypt’s ancient patrimony before it was lost forever became a key motivation for nineteenth-century Egyptologists, starting with Champollion. In his case, a further spur to action may have been the sense of growing British activity in Egypt, as witnessed by the burgeoning number of travellers’ accounts. France may have lost the Battle of the Nile, but it wasn’t about to lose the battle of ideas or of science – not if Champollion had anything to do with it.
Rosellini’s patron, Grand Duke Leopoldo II, supported the idea of a Franco-Tuscan joint expedition from the outset. It would bring glory to his dynasty – then vying with the House of Savoy for pre-eminence in Italy – and promised to enrich his Florentine collection with further treasures. Charles X of France was rather less enthusiastic. However, the prospect of closer political ties with Tuscany and the opportunity to split the cost (a French-led expedition at half the price), coupled, no doubt, with further persuasion by the tenacious Duke of Blacas, finally won over the king. Royal permission for the expedition to proceed was granted on 26 April 1828 at an audience secured by La Rochefoucauld, minister of the royal household.
In accordance with the proposal, first drawn up by Champollion and Rosellini in the middle of the previous year, the expedition would build on the foundations laid by Napoleon and his savants, and would extend the work of the Description (the final volume of which had still not been published). Now was the time, Champollion argued, to use the breakthrough of decipherment to advance the study of ancient Egypt – in situ. It was agreed that Champollion, as the elder and more eminent scholar, would be expedition leader, with Rosellini as assistant director. Reflecting the fifty-fifty division of costs, each side would include seven members. On the French side, alongside Champollion, were Charles Lenormant (inspector general); Antoine Bibent (architect); Alexandre Duchesne, Pierre-François Lehoux and Edouard Bertin (painters); and Nestor L’Hôte (artist-cum-customs officer). Joining Rosellini on the Tuscan side were his uncle Gaetano Rosellini (architect), his brother-in-law Cherubini (artist), Giuseppe Angelelli (painter), Giuseppe Raddi and Gaetano Galastri (naturalists), and Alessandro Ricci (doctor). The last was a practical addition to the party, who would more than justify his inclusion. All seemed set fair. There was just one final detail to iron out: permission from the Egyptian ruler, Muhammad Ali.
Unfortunately, political events in the Eastern Mediterranean, and with them, relations between Egypt and the European powers, were suddenly plunged into crisis. Things had started to simmer in 1821 when the Greek provinces rebelled against Ottoman rule and agitated for independence. In the months that followed, the Ottoman army had been unable to quell the uprising, and intercommunal violence between Greeks and Turks had spread to Constantinople. With Britain, France and Russia all united in support of the Greek cause, the Ottoman sultan cast around elsewhere for military assistance. With heavy irony, the wayward province of Egypt seemed to offer an answer. For, in 1822, as part of Muhammad Ali’s modernization plans, and to cement and enhance his own power, he had created a new Egyptian army. His ‘new order’ (nizam jadid) was consciously modelled on the Napoleonic regime, and brought all barracks, military schools and training camps under a single code of instruction and discipline.9 Up to 200,000 men were drafted from communities large and small throughout Egypt, often for years at a time, and garrisons for them and their families were built near all the country’s major towns. Muhammad Ali’s policies ushered in nothing less than the thorough militarization of Egyptian society; it was to be perhaps the most durable of his reforms. And it meant that, when the appeal came from Constantinople for military assistance, Muhammad Ali was ready to respond – at a price. In exchange for the offer of Crete as an addition to Egyptian territory, he eventually sent 16,000 soldiers and sixty-three naval vessels under the command of his son, Ibrahim. If the intervention had succeeded, the Ottoman sultan would have retained his authority, and the ruler of Egypt greatly enhanced his. Unfortunately for both men, the combined forces of Britain, France and Russia proved too resolute and powerful an enemy. The ensuing confrontation culminated in October 1827 at the Battle of Navarino, when the entire Egyptian fleet, alongside many Ottoman ships, was sunk. Humbled and hopelessly exposed, Muhammad Ali had to sue for terms with the European powers. Never again would he risk the Egyptian army defending his nominal suzerain in far-off Constantinople. From now on, Egypt’s foreign policy would be resolutely in pursuance of its own interests.
Against such a backdrop, a European expedition to Egypt headed by a Frenchman was unlikely to be welcomed by the Egyptian government. To make matters worse, Champollion had detractors closer to home: ever since the death of Henry Salt in October 1827, the French consul Drovetti had enjoyed a near monopoly on collecting antiquities in the Nile Valley; when news of the proposed Franco-Tuscan expedition reached him, he was aghast at the prospect of a state-backed, scientific mission encroaching on his lucrative activities, and lost no time in trying to prevent it. No matter that, back in 1824, he had promised Champollion assistance with any future Egyptian expedition. To safeguard his own position and income, Drovetti now wrote to Champollion in terms carefully calculated to frighten and dissuade: ‘I suffer, more than any other, from the circumstances which prevent me from encouraging this project to go ahead in the current year . . . There reigns in Egypt, as in all the other parts of the Ottoman empire, a spirit of animosity towards Europeans which, in certain cases, could produce ferment and seditious acts against the personal safety of those domiciled or who find themselves travelling there.’ He continued, at his most disingenuous: ‘Please be assured that I could not be more sorry for not being able to facilitate your wishes.’10
The expedition might have been stopped in its tracks there and then, had not the French king, Charles X, already given permission for it to proceed, exactly one week before Drovetti’s letter. Upon receiving royal approval, Champollion wasted no time in departing Paris for Toulon, eager to embark as soon as possible. On his way south, Champollion must have crossed with Drovetti’s letter, winging its way to his Paris address. There, it was opened by Champollion’s brother, who, smelling a rat, deliberately delayed forwarding it to Toulon. By the time it arrived at the port, prompting a request by the French government to the local prefect to detain the expedition, Champollion had set sail. (He only learned of the letter upon arrival in Alexandria, and commented: ‘It is the hand of Amun that diverted it.’11) His parting words to his brother were: ‘Goodbye, my dear friend; do not worry, the gods of Egypt watch over us.’12
Champollion and his companions sailed out of Toulon harbour on 31 July 1828 – thirty years after Napoleon – and first set eyes on the Egyptian coast eighteen days later. Champollion had waited all his life for this moment, and felt as if he had come home. In the first of a regular series of letters to his brother which, together with his journal, provide a vivid and invaluable account of the whole expedition, he wrote: ‘It’s as if I had been born in this country, and the Europeans have already concluded that I look like a Copt . . . Moreover, I have adopted the manners and customs of the country.’13
Indeed, his swarthy complexion and excellent Arabic meant that he could easily pass for a native. (He later adopted local dress and grew a long beard, completing the transformation.) With the monuments of ancient Egypt now at his fingertips, he set straight to work. On his first full day in the country, he visited the most famous sight in Alexandria, Cleopatra’s Needles, and concluded from their inscriptions that they had nothing at all to do with Cleopatra but, instead, dated back to pharaonic times. In a similar vein, he established that another famous Alexandrian monument, Pompey’s Pillar, had been erected by the emperor Diocletian, 300 years after Pompey’s visit. Thus, in the space of a few hours, thanks to his ability to read the ancient Egyptian texts, Champollion cut a swathe through the accumulated myths, legends and misunderstandings of centuries. For the first time since the Roman empire, the monuments of ancient Egypt could once again speak for themselves.
Memories of a more recent empire stirred patriotic thoughts in Champollion’s mind, as he toured places visited by Napoleon and his savants three decades earlier. ‘Everything in this city’, he wrote to his brother on 23 August 1828, ‘breathes the memory of our former power and shows how easily French influence exerts itself on the Egyptian population.’14 But Champollion’s ambitions extended far beyond Alexandria. If he were to follow in the footsteps of his childhood hero and explore the Nile Valley in its entirety, he would need permission from the Egyptian ruler. Fortunately, in the weeks since Champollion had left France, the political situation in Egypt had calmed. Britain had signed a treaty with Muhammad Ali, permitting the evacuation of Egyptian troops from Greece. As a result, the pasha was now less ill-disposed towards Europeans and might, after all, be persuaded to grant the expedition a royal firman (official permit).
Just six days after landing in Alexandria, Champollion was granted the all-important audience with Muhammad Ali, and must have been surprised and delighted at the outcome: not only was the expedition given permission to travel as far south as the Egyptian border with Sudan, it was also allocated two Egyptian guards for its protection. A furious Drovetti tried to intervene, but Champollion had established his own direct line to the French consulate; Muhammad Ali’s firman arrived on 10 September. It even gave the Franco-Tuscan expedition permission to visit sites formerly reserved for Drovetti and his fellow antiquities collector Anastasi. It was a total victory for Champollion. Ecstatic and relieved, he wrote to his brother:
I have had to use all my diplomatic skills (all this letter is absolutely confidential). You have seen in Drovetti’s letter that the reasons for preventing my voyage to Egypt were exaggerated. It was, at root, simply a calculation of personal interest. The antiquities dealers were all squirming at the news of my arrival in Egypt with the intention of excavating.15
When Muhammad Ali put a large sailing boat, the Isis, at the expedition’s disposal, Drovetti made the gallant gesture of supplying it with bottles of fine French wine. But he would not forget the indignity of having his monopoly so rudely and completely snatched away, and would take his revenge by failing to forward Champollion’s post from France during the course of the expedition. Champollion would later write of Drovetti:
He should be ashamed for his conduct towards me regarding the excavations and the firman which I had to extract from the authorities . . . I have not the least confidence in him, and I am not impressed by his politicking and his conduct in Egypt, where he is only concerned for his own interests . . . All the French despise him, and I wouldn’t dare say that they are wrong.16
Through a combination of his intellectual reputation and political connections, Champollion had bested his rival. On the eve of departure from Alexandria, 13 September 1828, the founder of Egyptology was full of anticipation: ‘In forty-eight hours I will have seen the sacred river of which, until now, I have only drunk; and this land of Egypt, about which I have dreamt for so long.’17
Champollion came to Egypt as a devotee, fulfilling the ambition of a lifetime. He drank Nile water as a matter of pride (despite concerns about the plague), and felt more at home in the backstreets of Cairo than in the boulevards of Paris. He certainly found the Egyptian capital remarkably clean compared with the filth of its French counterpart. However, his love affair with the land of the pharaohs did not blind him to the harsh realities of life under its modern masters. Only a few days after arriving in Cairo, he wrote in his journal: ‘The pace of civilization would march very quickly here, if a well-intentioned government presided over the affairs of unhappy Egypt. But a totalitarian spirit devours or dries up everything.’18
If the state of contemporary Egypt was depressing, the ancient monuments presented an equally dispiriting picture. Champollion was particularly disappointed by Saqqara, with its confusing mass of spoil heaps and ruins. ‘The vast expanse interrupted by pyramids was riddled with hillocks of sand covered in debris,’ he wrote. ‘All these hillocks are the result of excavations in search of mummies and antiquities, and the number of shafts or tombs at Saqqara must be enormous, if you consider that the sand thrown up in discovering one shaft must itself hide the openings to several other shafts.’19
In the early nineteenth century, ancient Egypt was still buried beneath the sands. That was especially true at Giza, which Champollion had first glimpsed in the distance on 19 September 1828 and which he began to explore in earnest three weeks later. As he wrote on 8 October: ‘I wanted to clear the sand covering the inscription of Thutmose IV which is engraved on the [Sphinx’s] chest; but the Arabs who descended upon us from the heights crowned by the Pyramids told me that it would require forty men and eight days to accomplish. So I had to give it up.’20
Strangely, there is a gap in Champollion’s otherwise comprehensive journal corresponding to the next three days, which he spent at Giza. Whether he was dumbstruck by the sheer magnificence of the pyramids, overcome by mental and physical exhaustion, or simply too preoccupied by the ancient ruins to commit his observations to paper, it is an unexplained hiatus in an otherwise detailed record of his Egyptian expedition.
Following in the footsteps of Napoleon, Champollion felt a heavy responsibility: not just to study the monuments recorded in the Description, but to improve upon that great work by making accurate drawings of the inscriptions – aided by his ability to read them – and to correct other inaccuracies so as to present the most authoritative study of pharaonic civilization ever undertaken. He was certainly uniquely qualified to undertake such a task. Indeed, his reputation as the decipherer of hieroglyphics preceded him, as he had discovered when preparing to set sail from the port of Cairo on his journey upstream: ‘I met here Lord Prudhoe, Mr Burton and Major Felix, Englishmen, committed hieroglyphicists, who showered me with attention as if I were the head of a sect.’21 Nothing, however, could have prepared Champollion for the sheer number of monuments and quantity of inscriptions to be studied and copied when he reached the great southern city of Thebes. The temples were on a grand scale – ‘Suffice to say . . . that we in Europe are mere Lilliputians and that no people, ancient or modern, has conceived the art of architecture on a scale so sublime, massive and awe-inspiring as did the ancient Egyptians’22 – and he quickly realized that to do the site justice would require months, not days. But far from being overwhelmed by the task, he felt newly energized. He wrote to his brother: ‘My health is excellent; the climate suits me, and I am much better than in Paris.’23 Indeed, Egypt had transformed not only Champollion’s health but his whole outlook. He felt moved to declare: ‘I belong entirely to Egypt – she is everything to me and I must seek consolation from her, because I will receive none from Europe.’24
With each new site he visited, this reaction grew stronger. At Dendera, once home to the famous zodiac now displayed in Paris, Champollion and his companions ‘spent two hours in ecstasy, running through the great halls with our poor torch, trying to read the exterior inscriptions by the light of the moon’.25 No inconvenience or danger would be allowed to stand in the way of scientific examination. At Abu Simbel, where two great temples were hewn from the living rock face – a recent visitor had declared the site ‘the ne-plus-ultra of Egyptian labour, and . . . the noblest monument of antiquity that is to be found on the banks of the Nile’26 – the challenges were especially daunting. When Burckhardt had rediscovered the site fifteen years before, in 1813, the whole of the main entrance and most of the four flanking colossi had been completely covered by sand, the accumulation of twenty-five centuries. Bankes had visited in 1815, but was unable to enter. It took Belzoni, with his engineering expertise, to clear the sand and open the temple in 1817; Bankes had returned two years later to find drifts once again threatening access. Now, another decade on, the desert had reclaimed its prize, and the portal was completely blocked. It took a huge effort just to clear a hole big enough for a man to squeeze through. But Champollion was undaunted:
