Past Perfect: Reading the Rosetta Stone
Jean-François Champollion deciphers Egyptian hieroglyphics
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Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832), the son of a book peddler in southern France, had the misfortune to be born during the French Revolution. Tutored in Latin and Greek by a local priest, he early on showed a genius for languages, prompting his family to send him to school in Grenoble. By the age of 14, after viewing a copy of the Rosetta Stone (which had been discovered in 1799 in the village of el-Rashid [Rosetta] in the western Nile Delta), he had already found his life’s work. Champollion continued his education in Paris, mastering Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Chaldaean, Chinese, Sanskrit and Coptic—languages he hoped would help him decipher the Rosetta Stone’s mysterious writing. In 1809, the precocious Champollion was named assistant professor at the University of Grenoble—with doctoral papers signed by Napoleon himself—and he immediately set to work on the Rosetta Stone, a second-century B.C. stela inscribed in Greek, demotic (a derivative of Egyptian hieratic script) and Egyptian hieroglyphics. Thirteen years later Champollion cracked the code. The following letter to Baron Joseph Dacier, secretary of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris, was written just a few days after he made the final breakthrough. Champollion spent his last years as curator of the Egyptian section of the Louvre, where he compiled a dictionary and grammar of ancient Egyptian. In 1832, still a young man of 42, he succumbed to a stroke. His grave in Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris is fittingly topped by an obelisk.
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Sir,
It is to your generous patronage that I owe the indulgent attention which the Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres has been pleased to accord to my work on the Egyptian scripts, in allowing me to submit to it my two reports on the hieratic, or priestly, script and the demotic, or popular one: after this flattering trial, I may at last venture to hope that I have successfully shown that these two types of writing are neither of them composed of alphabetic letters, as had been so widely supposed, but consist of ideograms, like the hieroglyphs themselves, that is, expressing the concepts rather than the sounds of a language; and to believe that after ten years of dedicated study I have reached that point where I can put together an almost complete survey of the general structure of these two forms of writing, the origin, nature, form, and number of their signs, the rules for their combination by means of those symbols which fulfill purely logical and grammatical functions, thus laying the first foundations for what might be termed the grammar and dictionary of these two scripts, which are found on the majority of monuments, and the interpretation of which will throw so much light on the general history of Egypt. With regard to the demotic script in particular, there is enough of the precious Rosetta inscription to identify the whole … and it is from this same inscription that I have deduced the series of demotic symbols which, taking on syllabic-alphabetic values, were used in ideographic texts to express the proper names of persons from outside Egypt. It is by this means also that the name of the Ptolemies was discovered, both in this same inscription and in a papyrus manuscript recently brought from Egypt.
Accordingly, it only remains, in completing my study of the three types of Egyptian writing, for me to produce my account of the pure hieroglyphs. I dare to hope that my latest efforts will also have a favourable reception from your famous society, whose good will has been so valuable in encouragement to me …
The interpretation of the demotic text on the Rosetta inscription, by means of the accompanying Greek text, had made me realize that the Egyptians used a certain number of demotic characters, which assumed the property of expressing sounds, to introduce into their ideographic writings proper names and words foreign to the Egyptian 038language. We see at once the indispensable need for such a practice in an ideographic system of writing. The Chinese, who also use an ideographic script, have an exactly similar provision, created for the same reason.
The Rosetta monument shows us the application of this auxiliary method of writing, which I have termed phonetic, that is, expressing the sounds, in the proper names of the kings Alexander and Ptolemy, the queens Arsinoe and Berenice, [and] in the proper names of six other persons …
The hieroglyphic text of the Rosetta inscription, which would have lent itself so felicitously to this study, owing to its cracks, yielded only the name Ptolemy.
The obelisk found on the island of Philae and recently brought to London also contains the hieroglyphic name of a Ptolemy, written in the same symbols as on the Rosetta inscription and similarly enclosed in a cartouche, and this is followed by a second cartouche, which must contain the proper name of a woman, a Ptolemaic queen, since this cartouche ends with the feminine hieroglyphic signs which also follow the hieroglyphic proper names of every Egyptian goddess without exception. The obelisk was, as it were, tied to a pedestal bearing a Greek inscription which is a supplication from the priests of Isis at Philae to the king, Ptolemy, his sister Cleopatra and his wife Cleopatra. If this obelisk and its hieroglyphic inscription resulted from the plea of the priests, who actually mention the consecration of a similar monument, the cartouche with the female name could only be that of a Cleopatra. This name, and that of Ptolemy, which have certain like letters in Greek, had to serve for a comparative study of the hieroglyphic symbols which composed the two; and if identical signs in these two names stood for the same sounds in both cartouches, they would have to be entirely phonetic in character.
A preliminary comparison had also made me realize that these same two names, written phonetically in the demotic script, contained a number of identical characters. The resemblance between the three Egyptian scripts in their general principles caused me to look for the same phenomenon and the same correspondences when the same names were given in hieroglyphs: this was soon confirmed by simple comparison of the hieroglyphic cartouche containing the name Ptolemy and that on the Philae obelisk which I believed, according to the Greek text, must contain the name Cleopatra.
The first sign in the name Cleopatra, which resembles a kind of quadrant, and which would represent the Greek sign [the English letter “K”], should have been absent from the name Ptolemy. It was.
The second sign, a lion couchant, which would give the
The third sign in the name Cleopatra is a feather or leaf, standing for the short vowel E; we also see two similar leaves at the end of the name Ptolemy, which, from their position, can only have the value of the diphthong
The fourth character in the cartouche for the hieroglyphic Cleopatra, the representation of a kind of flower with a bent stem, would stand for the Greek sign O in the Greek name of this queen. It is in fact the third character in the name Ptolemy (Pto).
The fifth sign in the name Cleopatra, which appears as a parallelogram and must represent the Greek sign
The sixth sign, standing for the vowel Greek sign
The seventh character is an open hand, representing the
The eighth sign of
Finally, the ninth and last sign in the queen’s name, which must be the vowel A, is in fact the hawk which we have already seen representing this vowel in the third syllable of the same name. This proper name ends in the two hieroglyphic symbols for the feminine gender: that of Ptolemy ends 039in another sign, which consists of a bent shaft, equivalent to the Greek … as we shall see.
The combined signs from the two cartouches, analyzed phonetically, thus already yielded us twelve signs, corresponding to eleven consonants, vowels, or diphthongs in the Greek alphabet,
The phonetic value of these twelve signs, already very probable, becomes indisputable if, applying these values to other cartouches or small enclosed panels containing proper names and taken from Egyptian hieroglyphic monuments, we are enabled to read them effortlessly and systematically, producing the proper names of rulers foreign to the Egyptian language …
You, sir, will doubtless share all my astonishment when the same alphabet of phonetic hieroglyphs, applied to a host of other cartouches carved on the same piece of work, will give you titles, names, and even surnames of Roman emperors, spoken in Greek and written with these same phonetic hieroglyphs …
It is easy to see that the vowels of the hieroglyphic alphabet are used indiscriminately one for another. On this point we can do no more than establish the following general rules:
1. The hawk, the ibis, and three other kinds of birds are consistently used for A:
2. The leaf or feather can stand for both the short vowels A and E, sometimes even O.
3. The twin leaves or feathers can equally well represent the vowels I and H, or the dipthongs IA and AI.
All I have just said on the origin, formation, and anomalies of the phonetic hieroglyph alphabet applies almost entirely to the demotic phonetic alphabet …
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Phonetic writing, then, was in use among every class of the Egyptian nation, and they employed it for a long time as a necessary adjunct to the three ideographic methods … The facts speak well enough for themselves to enable us to say with fair certainty that the employment of an auxiliary script in Egypt to represent the sounds and articulations of certain words preceded Greek and Roman domination, although it seems most natural to attribute the introduction of the semi-alphabetic Egyptian script to the influence of these two European nations, which had long been using a true alphabet … I am positive that the same signs in phonetic hieroglyphs used to represent the sounds of Greek and Roman proper names were also used in ideographic texts carved long before the Greeks reached Egypt, and that they already had, in certain contexts, the same value representing sounds or articulations as in the cartouches carved under the Greeks and Romans. The development of this valuable and decisive point is connected with my work on the pure hieroglyphs. I could not set out the proof in this letter without plunging into extraordinarily prolonged complications.
Thus sir, I believe that phonetic writing existed in Egypt at a far distant time; that it was first a necessary part of the ideographic script; and that it was then used also, after Cambyses [the Persian conqueror of Egypt who ruled Egypt from 530–522 B.C.], as we have it, to transcribe (crudely, it is true) in ideographic texts the proper names of peoples, countries, cities, rulers, and individual foreigners who had to be commemorated in historic texts of monumental inscription …
My attempts may perhaps add something to the record of definite achievements by … the Egyptians, whose just fame still echoes round the world; and it is certainly no little achievement today that we can take with assurance the first step in the study of their written memorials, and thence gather some precise notion of their leading institutions, to which antiquity itself gave a name for wisdom which nothing has yet overthrown. As for the remarkable monuments erected by the Egyptians, we can at last read, in the cartouches which adorn them, their fixed chronology from Cambyses and the times of their foundation or their successive accretions under the various dynasties which ruled Egypt; the majority of these monuments bear simultaneously the names of pharaohs and of Greeks and Romans, the former, characterized by their small numbers of signs, perpetually resisting every attempt to apply to them successfully the alphabet I have just discovered. Such, sir, I hope, will be the value of this work, which I am flattered to produce under your honoured auspices …
J. F. Champollion the younger
Paris, 22 September, 1822.
Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832), the son of a book peddler in southern France, had the misfortune to be born during the French Revolution. Tutored in Latin and Greek by a local priest, he early on showed a genius for languages, prompting his family to send him to school in Grenoble. By the age of 14, after viewing a copy of the Rosetta Stone (which had been discovered in 1799 in the village of el-Rashid [Rosetta] in the western Nile Delta), he had already found his life’s work. Champollion continued his education in Paris, mastering Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Chaldaean, Chinese, Sanskrit […]
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