In 1821, the Pioneer Exhibition opened in Piccadilly, in the heart of London. The Egyptomania caused by Napoleon’s dramatic march into Egypt two decades earlier had spread from Paris to Britain. For the first time in Europe, a beautifully decorated and painted Egyptian tomb, discovered and opened three years ago in what later became known as the Valley of the Kings, was on display. It was discovered by the Italian Giovanni Belzoni. It is his name that should be mentioned more often in connection with Ancient Egypt, as he was the man who brought about Egyptomania in Europe. He himself came from a Paduan family and was an engineer by profession who wanted to make money by introducing the hydraulic wheel to Egypt. He was obviously quite skilled in communication, because he somehow managed to win the confidence of the dreaded Egyptian pasha, Muhammad Ali.
In October 1817, the tomb of the supposed pharaoh Psammis was discovered near Thebes, and only later, from reading the hieroglyphs, it was discovered that it was in fact the tomb of Seti I, an ancestor of Ramesses the Great. The pharaoh’s sarcophagus had been empty for three thousand years. A few months later, Belzoni opened the second pyramid at Giza – the pyramid of Kefren – and penetrated its interior. This was the start of a systematic exploration of the pyramids, which was soon joined by the question of what all the writing on the walls of the pharaohs’ tombs said. But nobody knew, because nobody could read hieroglyphs.
On the first day of the exhibition in London, 2000 visitors paid half a crown to see an Egyptian tomb. Of course, what was on show in London was not the real tomb, but a model of it, measuring 15 metres long, and containing reproductions of two of the Pharaoh’s most impressive burial chambers. The decorations on the walls represented gods, goddesses, sacred animals and the life of the pharaoh, the hieroglyphs were made of wax, and some of the objects were original, such as the two mummies and the sarcophagus.
The sarcophagus, decorated with hieroglyphs, was made of white alabaster and three metres long. Once upon a time, it held the mummy of a pharaoh. Whose tomb was it when Belzoni opened it in 1817 and how old was it? No one knew at the time. Knowledge of hieroglyphic writing had already disappeared by the 4th century, one thousand five hundred years before Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. The tomb was therefore simply named after the supposed pharaoh Psammis.
The credit for modern hieroglyph reading goes to a brilliant and arrogant Frenchman who was fascinated by Napoleon and completely obsessed with Egypt. In mid-September 1822, he announced that he had read “the hieroglyphic pronunciation of many Egyptian rulers, including Alexander, Cleopatra, Ptolemy and Ramses”. Six years later, he set off for Egypt alone, and died shortly afterwards, aged only 41.
Hieroglyphic writing was abandoned in classical antiquity, and the last existing hieroglyphic writing was carved by a priest in 394 in Hadrian’s Gate on the island of Philae. The disappearance of hieroglyphic inscriptions was caused by the collapse of ancient Egypt, which was conquered first by the Persians and then by the Macedonian Greeks, led by Alexander the Great. After Alexander the Great, Egypt was ruled by the Ptolemaic Greek-speaking dynasty, which ended with Cleopatra and the Roman occupation of Egypt.
Later, many ancient Egyptian temples were converted into Coptic churches. The Coptic language itself is based on the language of Ancient Egypt, but it is not hieroglyphic, but phonetic, like Latin and Greek, with the addition of six characters borrowed from Ancient Egypt of a later age.
A particularly important event is Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 and the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. Fortunately, there were many scientists in the French army, including Champollion’s later mentor Fourier and Vivant Denon, who was later appointed director of the Louvre. In July 1799, when a French engineering company was rebuilding an old fortress at the village of Rashid (Rosetta) in the Nile Delta, an officer realised quite quickly the significance of the discovery of three parallel inscriptions on a large stone tablet and sent the tablet to Cairo.
After the French defeat, the English seized it, made some plaster casts of it and sent them to institutes in Europe. From the moment the Rosetta was found, it was clear that the inscriptions were written in three different languages, the Greek alphabet on the bottom and Egyptian hieroglyphs on the top, which unfortunately was the most damaged. In the middle was a writing in a script that was little known at the time. It was obviously not Greek and also bore little resemblance to the hieroglyphs in the above script.
Today we know that it was a “demotic” script, evolved from the early Egyptian hieroglyphic “hieratic” script of the temples and court, and used in everyday life for writing letters, making accounts and the like. The word demotic comes from the Greek word demotikos, meaning general use.
The Greek was first translated, and it turned out to be a legal decree of a priestly council issued in Memphis, the capital of ancient Egypt. Greek was the language of the court during the Ptolemaic dynasty. The last sentence of the Greek text read: “This decree will be inscribed on a stone tablet in hieroglyphic (hieratic), Demotic and Greek script and placed in the temple next to the image of the ever-living Pharaoh.”
It was immediately clear that all three texts were talking about the same thing. In fact, the text was written in two languages, Greek and Ancient Egyptian, written in two versions; a hieroglyphic script used by the priests and the court, and a Demotic script, which was more simple and intended for simpler tasks.
However, the Greek text served as a basis for reading the rest of the text, and it is through the ancient Greek that scholars have tried to identify the Greek names in Demotic script. The hieroglyphic script was too corrupted to be dealt with. So they managed to identify five Greek names; Alexandros, Alexandreia, Ptolemy, Arsinoe and Epiphanes. They were all convinced that the hieroglyphic text above must be a symbolic script (such as Chinese writing) and the demotic text a phonetic and alphabetic text like Greek. This was the understanding of the ancient Egyptian script in 1814.
From Grenoble to Paris
Champollion was born in Figeac, a small town at the foot of the green hills in south-western France, in 1790. His father had moved there twenty years earlier and had been a successful bookseller for many years. His mother was paralysed and the doctors had given up all hope of her ever recovering, so his father called in a local magician, who laid the patient on a bed of strong-smelling herbs, gave her hot wine to drink and then told her that she would recover and give birth to a son who would become very famous.
Three days later, the patient did indeed get up, and on 23 December 1790, Jean-Jacques Champollion was born. If it is said that the children of the devil have a hoofed foot, then it was to be expected that this one, who was assisted in birth by a magician, would also have a defect. And indeed, the doctor who examined the newborn found that the child had yellowish skin like all Orientals and an olive complexion, and resembled an Arab.
The young man went to school until he was 13, but then the school was closed because of the revolution. Several years of unrest followed, culminating in the revolutionary terror of 1793-1794, when a guillotine was even set up near his parents’ house in the town square. Unlike his cautious older brother Jacques-Joseph, the young Champollion was a hot-blooded child, subject to rapid changes of mood. Outbursts, rejection, enthusiasm and a volcanic temperament later helped him to become enthusiastic about Egyptian culture, but they also undermined his health.
He was a republican at heart, although he later realised that his work was supported only by royalists and autocrats in France and Italy. Thus, throughout his life, he wandered between the republican and royalist worlds. As soon as he learned to read, it became his passion, and it is said that, at the age of just ten, he was already reciting long passages from Virgil and Homer in Latin and ancient Greek.
In 1796, the schools reopened and the authorities allowed priests to teach again. Of course, Egypt was not on the school curriculum. However, Jean-Jacques’s father, who was a book dealer, received a copy of the Courier d’ Egypte from Egypt in September 1799, describing the discovery and the probable significance of the Rosetta Stone. But Champollion was only eight years old at the time and the newspaper made no impression on him.
In 1801, his brother Jacques-Joseph, who had since settled in Grenoble, decided to take over the upbringing and educational expenses of his unstable younger brother. His teachers felt that the young man was “full of desire for knowledge, but this quickly turns into apathy and carelessness which is difficult to overcome”. So, in March 1801, the ten-year-old Jean-Jacques went to his brother’s house in Grenoble in a carriage, and his sister, who calmly endured his lapses, wrote sadly: “Our house is not the same now.”
Thus Grenoble, the capital of the Dauphiné province, became the young man’s home for almost two decades. Its liberal and republican atmosphere also had a strong influence on its cultural and social life, although there was no university until Napoleon founded it in 1805. However, Grenoble was not spared the revolutionary excesses of the French Revolution.
In Grenoble, Jean-Jacques lived in a boarding house, participated in meetings of various student organisations and seemed to be getting less and less healthy, sometimes fainting. The rules of the boarding house did not allow him to read late into the night, so after the lights went out in the boarding house, he would go to the window with a book in his hand, lean over so that he could catch the faint reflection of the oil lamp in the street on the book, and read, read, read. Otherwise, life in the boarding school was spartan. He complained to his brother that he didn’t know why he had a constant pain in his chest. It was only when the inspectorate came to the boarding school that he was allowed to study even during his free hours.
As a 15-year-old boy, when asked what he wanted to do when he grew up, he replied, “I want to devote my life to the study of Ancient Egypt.” Why this adolescent enthusiasm for the Orient? He was probably among the group of schoolchildren invited by the Prefect of Grenoble and mathematician Joseph Fourier to see his collection of Egyptian antiquities; Fourier had been on Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt with several other scientists.
After this visit, Jean-Jacques asked his brothers for more and more books about Egypt. He was interested in Egypt’s geography, religion, government, customs, social and economic relations. In 1804, he saw a reproduction of the Rosetta plaque. One of the decisive moments in his life was his encounter with Raphaël de Monachis, a Greek Catholic priest from Egypt who was then lecturing in Arabic at a special language school in Paris. From him he was given a manual for learning Arabic, which he immediately took up, and from it he learned that there were also two indigenous languages in Egypt, Coptic and Ethiopic, which also had their own script. Arabic, Coptic and Ethiopic were the most widely spoken languages in the Nile Valley and could be the key to clarifying the language of ancient Egypt. Jean-Jacques was convinced of this.
As early as 1807, he began to map Ancient Egypt and tried to identify the original Ancient Egyptian names of towns and cities from historical sources written in Greek, Latin, Arabic, Coptic, Hebrew and other oriental languages, assuming that the current names were only phonetic imitations of the names used in Ancient Egypt.
When his brother saw what he was interested in, he sent him to Paris to study oriental languages. Paris, which welcomed the 17-year-old Jean-Jacques in 1807, was, to his disappointment, a dirty and smelly city, full of disease, with poor or non-existent sewage systems. During the two years Jean-Jacques spent in Paris, he complained constantly of severe headaches, pains all over his body and breathing difficulties.
Paris was a very different city from pure Grenoble, but on the other hand it was also full of cultural treasures that Napoleon’s armies had plundered from the occupied lands. Jean-Jacques visited four institutions most of all; the College de France, the special school for oriental languages, the Imperial Library and the Egyptian Commission building. At noon there are lessons in Hebrew, Syriac and Chaldee. During these lessons we talk and translate from Hebrew, Syriac and Chaldee and Arabic. In addition, I am learning Coptic in the Imperial Library.”
In Paris, de Monachis constantly impressed upon him the importance of the Coptic language for understanding the Egyptian language. He also introduced him to the small Egyptian community living in Paris, and there he became acquainted with the Coptic priest Yuhanna Chiftich, who had accompanied the French army in Egypt. The young man soon spoke Coptic perfectly.
During his stay in Paris, he had several controversies with other Egyptologists, notably the Swedish diplomat Akerblad and the Frenchman de Sacy (who was also his teacher), who, in his opinion, had misinterpreted the texts of the Rosetta plaque. They did make out some names and words in the demotic part of the text and claimed, but did not prove, the existence of an alphabet in demotic script. Champollion tried to translate the Greek text into Coptic and compare it with the Demotic text, using his new knowledge of Coptic, but was unsuccessful. In 1804 he was forced to abandon his interpretation of the Rosetta tablets and he did not take it up again until ten years later.
It was during this time that he wrote his first book, Egypt under the Pharaohs, which was published in part in 1811 and in full three years later. In 1804, his elder brother was appointed professor of Greek literature at the University of Grenoble and in charge of the city’s library, and his younger brother Jean-Francois became his assistant at the age of 19. Jean-Jacques was happy to return to the Grenoble he loved so much. He spent much of his free time in the city library. This was no ordinary library, looking after the 20,000 souls of the city’s population. Forty thousand books once belonged to the Bishop of Grenoble, and among them could be found 300 precious manuscripts and incunabula (books printed before 1500).
Expulsion and return
The Champollion brothers reacted to Napoleon’s fall and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in their own way. While both welcomed the return of peace, the elder brother immediately rushed to Paris and began to suck up to the new regime of Louis XVIII. He presented him with a special hardback copy of his brother’s book Egypt under the Pharaohs. Jean-Jacques remained in Grenoble, suspicious of the return to power of the royalists and the clergy. Two months later, he sent two more copies of his book to the Royal Society in London, together with a request that they send him an exact copy of the Rosetta plaque, the original of which was in the British Museum.
The request landed on the desk of the Secretary of the Royal Society and, coincidentally, it was a man who was convinced that Britain must be the first to unravel the mysterious hieroglyphic writing. The race between Dr Thomas Young and Jean-Jacques Champollion was on.
Champollion’s rival, Dr Young, was one of the best physiologists in Britain and a doctor working in London’s largest hospital, the scientist who discovered the phenomenon of astigmatism, and a gifted linguist who compared the vocabulary of some 400 different languages and in 1813 coined the term “Indo-European” to refer to a family of languages that also includes Greek, Latin and Sanskrit. He also worked in astronomy, bridge-building and shipbuilding. In short, he was a man of many talents. He was sometimes criticised by others for relying too much on intuition and not enough on painstaking evidence-gathering.
He came from a poor Quaker family living in a remote village and was largely self-educated. Young had never been to Egypt and did not want to go there, but Campollion dreamed of going there. In most things relating to Egypt, the two scholars were intellectually, emotionally and politically on opposite sides. When Young accepted Champollion’s request to send him a copy of the Rosetta plate, he had only been working on Egyptology for six months. By placing Egyptian hieroglyphs side by side, he was able to spot similarities in patterns that other scholars would not have noticed.
It was this ability to analyse visually that would almost lead him to the crucial discovery that Demotic script is related to hieroglyphic script and not a completely different script. In other words, hieroglyphs that depicted human figures, animals and other objects were slowly being transformed into Demotic script. But the hieroglyphic script was symbolic because it depicted symbols, whereas the demotic script was believed to be alphabetic. It was difficult to reconcile these two views if it was assumed that the Demotic script was derived from the hieroglyphic script.
Then politics began to enter the Champollion brothers’ lives. On the night of 7 March 1815, Napoleon, who had escaped from exile on the island of Elba and landed on French soil, appeared with a few soldiers in front of Grenoble, knocked on the city gates with his tobacco box and said, “Open up.” The Champollion brothers were among those who greeted him enthusiastically. Napoleon stayed in Grenoble for three days and needed a secretary and an assistant for some matters, and the Mayor of the city recommended the elder of the Champollion brothers. Napoleon was very friendly and, unlike in previous years when he had always been aloof towards his assistants, now tried to convince the people around him that he would be nothing more than a constitutional monarch. Champollion the elder worked with the Emperor until he travelled to Lyon on 9 March.
But Napoleon lost his game at Waterloo, and those who had welcomed him on his return were now suffering the consequences. By the end of 1815, a quarter of all officials in France, some 80,000, had been dismissed for disloyalty. Five thousand of them were brought before the courts, Champollion the elder lost his professorship at the University of Grenoble and was sacked as chief librarian.
His younger brother, who was a little less enthusiastic about Napoleon, continued to write satires about the royalists, much to the annoyance of the police. In early July, the elder brother took part in the defence of Grenoble, the last city in France to resist the royalists. During the bombardment of the city, Champollion quickly ran to the library and began to rescue valuable texts. A fire broke out in the town and when it surrendered, 600 people were counted dead and around 500 wounded. The younger Champollion was also no longer allowed to teach, but he was allowed to stay in the city and was seriously considering making a living as a notary.
In February 1816, the Prefect of Police of Grenoble informed Paris that the Champollion brothers were also “dangerous men, to whom nothing is sacred”. On the basis of this assessment, they were deported to the town of Figeac, where the Champollion family originated. In fact, they were lucky, because shortly afterwards, a certain Paul Didier, former director of a law school, gathered a group of malcontents, rebelled against the authorities and attempted to take Grenoble. The rebellion was quickly put down and 15 of the mutineers were sentenced to death, while Didier was publicly executed by guillotine in Grenoble.
For five years, until Jean-Jacques left Grenoble in 1821, he experienced severe hardship. Exile, unstable incomes, political repression and an uncertain fate not only affected his health, but also his research. However, he did not give up, and continued to work on a Coptic dictionary and grammar. With three sisters and the father of the Champollion brothers living in Figeac, he had no lack of contact with his family. Fortunately, the Champollion brothers were not troubled by the authorities, to whom they had to report regularly, and only their passports were taken.
But Champillon senior soon secured permission to go to Paris, where he became assistant to the secretary of the Academy of Letters. His younger brother could also have returned to Grenoble as early as July 1817, but why? For the time being, he had no job there. But he soon changed his mind, as he received a copy of the Monthly Review from London, in which an unknown author praised his book Egypt under the Pharaohs. It was very likely that Thomas Young had written the review. This prompted him to take up his notes on the Rosetta panel again, return to Grenoble in October 1917 and take up teaching for a living.
Meanwhile, Thomas Young has made considerable progress in his study of the Rosetta slab. Based on the Greek text, he was convinced that he had read the name Ptolemy on the three cartouches (a series of hieroglyphic signs circled in a square). The short cartouche would contain only the name Ptolemy, while the longer cartouche would contain the Pharaoh’s titles of honour, just as the Greek text did.
Champollion openly mocked his efforts: ‘An Englishman knows as much about the Egyptian language as he knows about Malay or Manchurian. … Dr. Young’s discovery, which has been announced with so much pomp, is nothing but a boast. … The discovery of the alleged key evokes nothing but sympathy.” Nevertheless, he insisted on being sent everything Dr Young had written on Egypt.
During this period, Jean-Jacques married Rosine Blanc, the daughter of a Grenoble glover. The bride’s family tried to dissuade Rosine from marrying, and the groom’s elder brother in Paris also opposed her, but the lovers persisted and married.
Jean-Jacques, who was increasingly suffering from insomnia and stomach pains, had been in disfavour with the new Prefect of Grenoble, Baron Haussez, since Napoleon’s fall, and had quarrelled with him. In the spring days of 1821, riots broke out in Grenoble, and the townspeople hoisted the tricolour on the fortress instead of the white flag of the Bourbons. Champollion the Younger was also said to have taken part in the riots, shouting scurrilous slogans, although he denied all this, claiming that he had nothing to do with the riots. The Prefect dismissed him from his job and wanted to court-martial him. It was only after an intervention from Paris that he was tried in a civilian court and acquitted of all charges in July 1821. But he could no longer survive in Grenoble.
He was without a job or income and the prefect continued to make his life miserable. He got into a carriage, left his wife Rosine in Grenoble and set off in bitterness. “I am haunted by a cruel fate, I don’t know if I will survive.” A friend who accompanied him to the carriage replied, “Courage, your genius will overcome fate in the end.”
Read by hieroglife
After arriving in Paris, Champollion stayed with his brother and his family. He was again financially dependent on him, as he had been in the past. But now he had enough time to devote himself solely to ancient Egypt. Surrounded by books from his brother’s library, he immersed himself in papyri from private and public collections from all over Europe, coveting the papyri brought to him by travellers from Egypt. His discoveries were made known in lectures he gave at the Paris Academy between 1821 and 1823. He was able to lecture there thanks to his brother’s connections. He also published two illustrated texts on Egypt in 1822 and 1824.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to identify the paths that led him to his revolutionary discoveries concerning hieroglyphs. One reason for this is the lack of his correspondence, and another is that he kept silent about his most important reflections and only communicated his final conclusions to the public. This secrecy and obscurity are not surprising in his case. Highly creative people tend to work in solitude and are often unaware of their own thought processes. Champollion’s silence was also an excuse to play down the discoveries of his English rival, Dr Young.
However, Champollion’s thinking about Egyptian writing can be traced back to three phases. First, until September 1822, he was convinced that Egyptian writing, whether hieroglyphic or demotic, represented things or ideas, not voices. The only exception to this assertion, that hieroglyphs could therefore represent voices, was when they were used to phonetically write foreign proper names, such as Ptolemy, and other Greek and Roman names.
In his second phase, which lasted until April 1823, he radically changed his thinking. He realised that the considerable amount of phonetic component in the hieroglyphic script, which existed not only in Greco-Roman Egypt but throughout Egyptian history, was used not only to write foreign proper names but in all writing. This is said to be evidenced by the names of historically famous pharaohs such as Ramses and Thothmes.
In the third and final phase, up to the first months of 1824, Champollion worked intensively on a hieroglyphic writing system, which included a basic alphabet of about twenty phonetic values, a few other phonetic signs and several hundred non-phonetic symbolic signs. The combination of all these systems was then used to form words. Finally, he admitted: “I hope I am not speaking too quickly, that I have succeeded in showing that neither of these two forms of writing is purely alphabetic, as has been the case up to now, but is often also ideographic, like the hieroglyphs themselves, that is to say, sometimes describing ideas and sometimes describing voices.”
Was this change in thinking due to the influence of his rival Dr Young? Opinions on this are still divided today. Champollion always claimed to have worked completely independently of Dr Young, but the Englishman’s discoveries were so important that he could not ignore them. Of course, having critically examined Young’s writings and reluctantly accepted some of his results as his own, he was also prepared to take the first decisive step.
It happened in January 1822, when he saw a copy of the inscription on an obelisk on the island of Philae, near Aswan. William Bankes, a traveller and friend of Dr Young, removed it with the help of Benzoni and transported it to London. Here the inscription on the obelisk was copied and sent to all the important scholars working on Egypt in Europe.
This obelisk is significant because its inscription is written in two languages. On the base it is in Greek, and on the obelisk it is in hieroglyphs. This was not something like the Rosetta plaque, where the two inscriptions did not correspond in content. Nevertheless, Bankes had already realised that the hieroglyphic inscription on the two cartouches contained the same names of Ptolomei and Cleopatra as the Greek inscription. One of these cartouches, representing Ptolemy, was almost identical to the cartouche on the Rosetta plate, which also represented Ptolemy. It was therefore very likely that the second cartouche represented Cleopatra.
As soon as Champollion saw that some of the signs in Cleopatra’s name also appeared in Ptolemy’s, he knew he had found the key to reading the hieroglyphs. He assumed that the name Ptolemy was pronounced alphabetically, so the same must be true of Cleopatra.
But Dr Young came to practically the same result and published it, and Champollion went berserk. He had to admit unwittingly that Dr Young had played a pioneering role in the study of Egyptian writing between 1814 and 1819. But he really could not allow anyone to make fun of his long years of work – starting in 1807, when he was still a student in Paris and really suffering, unlike Dr Young, who was living comfortably. He was probably convinced that it was he who had taken the first steps in reading Egyptian script, independently of Young, or even that he had corrected the Englishman in his errors. He was always a man who liked extreme views, unlike the modest Young.
He soon had an encounter that had a profound impact on his life. In January 1823, in an exhibition room in Paris, he copied inscriptions from an Egyptian collection that was ready to be auctioned, publicly lamenting that the only buyer of the collection would be the King of Sardinia, who had a collection of Egyptian antiquities in Turin. In the process, he became involved in a conversation with a stranger. This later turned out to be Count Blacas d’ Aulps, one of the most important courtiers of the King of France, who had spent many years as a diplomat in Italy. So d’ Aulps became his second mentor. With his financial help, he took a step closer to Egypt, which he intended to visit. He went on a study trip to Italy to see the Egyptian antiquities that had been accumulating there since ancient times.
La bella Italia
Champollion’s career has always been marked by excesses. A study tour of Italy was no different, and without d’ Aulps’ help he would never have seen Italy. “For me, the road to Memphis and Thebes leads through Turin”, he was fond of saying. The voices asking why the state should finance the journey of the notorious republican Champollion from Grenoble to Italy were growing louder and louder, and Louis XVIII ordered that the republican’s suitability should be checked. Of course, from Grenoble, where all Champollion’s enemies were gathered, the reply was that he was not a suitable man for such a journey. But the Count d’ Aulps had enough influence with the King and so the trip was approved, even though d’ Aulps had to put up some money out of his own pocket.
Early in June 1824, Champollion learned that the Mont-Cenis Pass, which led from France to Italy and whose road was built in Napoleon’s time, was snow-free and could be crossed by carriage. He said goodbye to his wife and child and crossed the pass to Turin. Although the reactionary royal family of Sardinia had little or nothing to do with the French guest, he was welcomed by the nobility despite his liberal views. Everywhere he went, in Turin, Florence, Rome and Naples, he was a real sight.
But he was more interested in scholars than in the nobility. The Egyptian Museum in Turin is still the second largest museum in the world for Egyptian antiquities and the only national museum outside Egypt dedicated exclusively to Egyptian art and culture. Champollion spent long hours in its rooms. Shortly after his visit, he wrote a letter to his brother:
“It’s a wonderful thing. I didn’t expect to be so rich. The courtyard is filled with statues of pink and green basalt. There is a seated Amon-Ra with King Horus, a large statue of Thutmothis preserved as if it had just come from a carver’s workshop, a monolith of Ramses the Great seated on his throne, a statue of Amenophis II standing, a statue of the god Ptah, creator of the world, and many others, all standing before my eyes.”
Campollion was the first person since the late Roman Empire to use inscriptions to identify exactly who all the statues in Turin represented. Then he turned to papyri, and in November he was informed that there was a pile of papyrus scraps in the attic room of the museum that they didn’t know what to do with. Despite being told that it was not worth going there, Champollion did not want to miss the opportunity.
The papyri, which had endured the boat and boat journey from Thebes, had deteriorated in the cold and damp climate of northern Italy, and had been stored in Livorno for several months before the owner paid the freight, were indeed in a poor state of preservation. Champollion nevertheless had in his hands what was later called the Book of the Dead. He was most interested in what is now called the Turin King List, an important manuscript from the time of Ramses II, which chronologically lists as many as 77 pharaohs. But none of these names can be found on the Abydos Tablet, and Champollion was convinced that they belonged to even earlier dynasties.
Such an early dating of Egyptian civilisation was, of course, a potential challenge to the biblical account of the creation of the world. The French king even issued a law against blasphemy in 1825, which increased Catholic intolerance and influenced Champollion’s work on Egyptian chronology. After his discovery, Egyptologist Gustav Seyffahrt continued to work on the list of pharaohs and somehow compiled almost the entire Turin List of the Dead. Modern scholars believe that it must have comprised some 300 rulers, with precise indications of the time of their reign, and probably went back far before the time of the pharaohs, to the reign of unnamed spirits and gods.
Champollion was already in Rome in mid-March. He arrived there at night and, despite the gout that plagued him, set off on a night tour of the city. Other days he wandered around Rome in the heat and rain, taking notes among the ruins. He also visited the Vatican, looked at papyri and Coptic manuscripts in the library, and was received by Pope Leo XII, who offered to make him a cardinal. Champollion smoothly declined the honour. He was also in Naples and presented to the King there. On his way back he stopped in Florence and, shortly before the Mont-Cenis pass was closed in November because of snow, he was back in Grenoble with his family.
But before he returned to Grenoble, he learned that a large Egyptian collection, assembled by Henry Salt, the English consul in Egypt, had arrived in Livorno and was for sale. He looked at it, assessed its value and was convinced that the French government should buy it and use it to set up a new Egyptian section in the Louvre. He hoped that he and his brother would be appointed custodians of the collection. The King nodded and sent Champollion to Livorno to begin negotiations on the purchase.
While in Livorno, he met a couple who would have a profound influence on his life. The first was Ipollito Rosellini, a young professor of oriental languages from Pisa, who became his pupil. They were also friends, travelling together in Italy and dreaming of a joint Franco-Italian expedition to Egypt. Another new acquaintance was the poet Angelica Palli, daughter of a local businessman. They met only a few times, but Champollion fell in love with her and wrote her passionate letters, even after she stopped replying and rejected him. Thirty of the surviving letters were published in a collection in 1978.
It is difficult to say what their relationship was really like, as her letters have not survived, and many are convinced that she was nothing more than a schemer, like those in Italian comic operas.
Finally, Egypt!
In April 1826, the King of France approved the purchase of Salt’s Egyptian collection and appointed Champollion as the first curator of the collection at the Louvre. Thus, after an absence of two and a half years from Paris, Champollion returned to the city that was the centre of his power and influence. Parisian society received him with mixed feelings. Many official circles regarded him as the hardened leader of the terror of 1793, even though his official birth certificate showed him to be only three years old at the time.
In addition, Champollion was convinced that ancient Egypt was the cradle of world culture and that Egyptian architecture and culture were more important than Greek. Such revolutionary claims were not to the liking of the Hellenists and the Latins. But Champollion was now able to support his views with texts, since no one but him could read hieroglyphs so fluently. His view of Egypt was not only aesthetic but also historical, based on his knowledge of individual Egyptian rulers taken from the Turin List of the Dead.
His opponents denied that his reading of the hieroglyphs was correct, so he wrote to his friend Rosellini: “In spite of Paris and its pomp and ceremony, I have returned to the past, and the present is of no use to me. Imagine a man who loves peace and quiet, but who is thrown, ex officio, into a cauldron of machinations and intrigues against me and my work. My life has become a struggle.”
In April 1826, he received permission to form an expedition to Egypt. It was to be Franco-Tuscan, with Champollion as its leader and Rosellini as his assistant. Each part of the expedition was to consist of seven people, including architects, painters and doctors. Now everything depended on the permission of the Egyptian pasha, Mohammed Ali.
The French consul in Egypt at the time was Bernardino Drovetti, who owned the entire antiquities trade. He did not like the idea of an expedition interfering in this work and made sure that it was obstructed at every turn. The expedition ship landed in Alexandria on 18 August 1828. Champollion’s account of the expedition is based on letters he sent to his brother and is a rich description of both modern life in the country and analyses and drawings of ancient Egyptian culture.
The visit to Mohamed Ali’s shepherd was successful and the expedition was given permission to travel to the second Nile cataract. The Pasha also provided them with a large boat for the Nile journey and two escorts. But a second smaller boat had to be hired, as the expedition now numbered 30 people with cooks, translators and other servants.
By mid-September, the expedition was on its way, sailing down the Nile past Cairo. Champollion disguised himself as an Arab and grew a beard so that people could hardly recognise him as a European. When they reached the former city of Memphis, he could admire the ruined colossus of Ramses the Great, which he was able to recognise from the hieroglyphs. But unlike Memphis, he was disappointed by the necropolis at Saqqara, which was used as a cemetery until the end of the Roman Empire. It had been abandoned for more than a thousand years and left to grave robbers.
They soon stopped at the Pyramids and the Great Sphinx of Giza. Here Champollion wanted to start removing the sand that had accumulated around the Sphinx, hoping to discover the inscription Tutmosis IV on its base. But it would have taken 40 men, eight days to remove the sand, and he did not have that much time. The Arab guide led them into the long corridors of the Great Pyramid. The air was stifling, warm and foul. They felt a mixture of awe and admiration. After a short stop in Dendra, they continued their journey to Thebes. Champollion’s feverish dream of seeing Karnak and the Valley of the Kings was about to come true.
Almost thirty years before Champollion’s expedition set out, the French army reached Thebes in a harrowing attempt to pursue the Mameluke cavalrymen who were fleeing south after their defeat by Napoleon. As the weary soldiers rounded the hills, they saw the legendary ruins of the city ahead. For three days, from 20 to 23 November, Champollion in the Valley of the Kings wandered from ruin to ruin, from the royal tombs with their sarcophagi and murals to the palace of Karnak.
But the plan was to continue to the first cataract of the Nile at Aswan, which in Roman times was the border of Egypt, and then on into Nubia to Abu Simbel and the second cataract south of Wadi Halfa. They thus arrived in Aswan on 4 December and immediately visited the two temples on the island of Elephantine in the middle of the Nile. However, the boats could not cross the first cataract, so they loaded part of their supplies on camels and a smaller boat to reach Philae Island on the Nile. As he expected, all the buildings and inscriptions were from the reign of the Ptolemaic dynasty and later the Roman Empire. But he was not particularly interested in that.
Today, the Nile Valley between Aswan and Wadi Halfa is covered by Lake Nasser. The 500 km of water created by the construction of the dam in 1971 has submerged many ancient monuments as well as the second cataract of the Nile. But in Champollion’s day, the Nile flowed peacefully past many important sites in ancient Egypt. Today, everything looks different. Before the dam was completed, only the island of Philae and the temple of Abu Simbel were moved, saving them from sinking.
The highlight of the visit was undoubtedly the tour of Abu Simbel. The forgotten temple, built by Ramses the Great and Queen Nefertari, was discovered in 1813 by the Swiss traveller Burckhardt. The temple had been abandoned and left to the desert sands since the 7th century BC, and it was not until Belzoni removed enough sand in 1817 that it was possible to enter. But Champollion was already feeling homesick, for it had been several months since they had set off down the Nile, and in that time he had received only one letter from Europe with news of what was happening in France.
On their way back north, they stopped again in Thebes in March 1829 and visited the Valley of the Kings. Here, the expedition explored sixteen tombs. In the intense heat, Champollion rode a donkey or walked from one tomb to another, taking notes. There was no one in the Valley of the Kings except snakes, lizards, wolves and hyenas attracted by the smell of the kitchen. Champollion did not feel well, as the work was very tiring and he lost consciousness several times, but he always said: “I need absolute silence to hear the voices of the ancestors.”
He wrote long letters to his brother, telling him that a typical tomb of a pharaoh belonging to the Ramses dynasty has a prefatory image at the beginning showing a dull yellow disc in the middle of which the sun god is drawn with a ram’s head – in other words, the setting sun entering the underworld and worshipped by the kneeling pharaoh. To the right of the disc is the goddess Nephthys, and to the left is the goddess Isis. The yellow disc also contains a scarab beetle, which is a symbol of regeneration or the next birth.
In September, Champollion was already in Cairo, negotiating the purchase of more than 100 objects to be exhibited later at the Louvre. At the end of his Egyptian journey, before leaving Alexandria for his home in France, he wrote to his assistant at the Louvre: “I have accumulated enough work for the rest of my life.” But he was not allowed to enjoy the fruits of his unique life for long.
On 23 December 1829, he set foot on French soil again. The last years of his life were not spent peacefully. He had lost his supporter, the Comte d’ Aulps, his health was deteriorating, the director of the Louvre, Count Forbin, was giving him a hard time, and his opponents were attacking his life’s work – reading hieroglyphs. Nevertheless, he was appointed the first professor of Egyptology.
In July 1831, Roselinni came to visit him from Florence, as they had not seen each other since they left Egypt. Together they began work on a comprehensive report on the Egyptian expedition. The joint report never saw the light of day, but after Champollion’s death two separate reports were published; an Italian-Tuscan one and a French one by Champollion’s elder brother.
Ill health forced Champollion to move to his native Figeac, where he could work in peace and rely on his sisters to look after him. For three months he worked like a man possessed and his health improved, so that in December he began lecturing again in Paris. He lectured until he collapsed unconscious on the floor of the lecture theatre. He suffered a stroke. He recovered quickly and was out of bed within a few days, but he was no longer master of his movements and had difficulty writing.
In January 1832, it suffered a second attack. On the third of March, he fell into a coma, groaned and said, “Now to the afterlife, to Egypt, to Thee.” He was buried in the famous Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
