200 years since the Rosetta Stone puzzle was solved, who was the French genius who deciphered it?

2022-09-27 18:32:43Histori SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
Jean-François Champollion

 

 

On September 27, 1822, the French Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832) solved the mystery of the Rosetta Stone, deciphering the trilingual inscription, which helped him discover the code for deciphering the writing of the ancient Egyptian language. Since then, Egyptian hieroglyphs have been no longer a mystery.

JACQUES, A WONDERFUL CHILD. It is said that Jacques, the last of the seven sons of the bookseller from Figéac (north-eastern France), had come into the world with the yellow irises and dark complexion typical of desert dwellers, an omen of his future; strong connection with Egypt. But even if he was born with jaundice, it is certain that that child proved to be very gifted with a remarkable memory. Therefore, at the age of eight, his older brother, the historian Jacques-Joseph, took him under his "educator" wing in Grenoble.

It was the year 1798. In the same year, Napoleon Bonaparte left for Egypt with soldiers and scholars. The first to steal those lands from the Ottomans and strike British rule in the Mediterranean Sea, the second to catalog the wonders of the land of the pharaohs. The fleeting military occupation ended in 1801, with the French defeat, but from an archaeological point of view the expedition produced lasting cultural results and two elements that provided a turning point in Champollion's life: the Rosetta Stone, found in the port of the homonymous city, July 15, 1799 , by a soldier of Napoleon and the first edition of the Description de l'Égypte published in 1803 by scholars after the expedition.

POLYGLOT. The volume, together with the finds from Africa, sparked interest in Egyptian antiquities throughout Europe and more specifically from Champollion. The same one who a year ago had experienced his love at first sight with hieroglyphs, in front of the mysterious inscriptions found in the finds from the private collection of a member of the Napoleonic expedition: “I will read them! in a few years, when I grow up, I will read them!", he declared seriously. And youthful loves, you know, are never forgotten.

At that time, the 12-year-old was beginning to use his innate abilities as a linguist. In high school he had begun with Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, then tried his hand at Arabic, Syriac, Slavic, Cyrillic, Chaldean, Ethiopic, and Coptic (which he himself, at age 17, recognized as direct descendant of ancient Egyptian). Finally he moved to Paris for a year, to perfect himself at the Special School of Oriental Languages, and there he supplemented his baggage of impossible languages ??with Avestan, Sanskrit, Persian and a little Chinese. And the result was that on his return, not yet nineteen years old, he was appointed assistant professor of history at the University of Grenoble.

200 years since the Rosetta Stone puzzle was solved, who was the French genius
Jean-François Champollion, in an 1892 illustration

THE EGYPTIAN PAPYRI. But he did not leave the hieroglyphs: "I dedicate myself completely to the Coptic language. I want to know Egyptian as well as French, as I am sure that my great work on the Egyptian papyri will be based on this language," he wrote to his brother at the time. Of course, he was right. But how did he succeed, where others had failed for decades? The answer is simple: by applying his knowledge to the stone found in Rosetta, which he had seen in a copy as early as 1808.

THE ROSETTA STONE. The stone inscription, incomplete and in small letters like the clauses of an Enel contract, was carved in 196 BC, in three different scripts: classical Greek (the language of the ruling dynasty, the Ptolemies), demotic (everyday and popular script of the Egyptian language) and hieroglyphics (the "sacred carved signs" used by the priests of the Land of the Pharaohs). That it was a decree issued by the Egyptian priests gathered in Memphis, the ancient capital of Egypt, to celebrate the newly crowned thirteen-year-old pharaoh Ptolemy V Epiphanes, was already known. But for researchers it wasn't so much what the stone said, as the fact that it repeated it three times, in three different languages. And one of these, Greek.

For years Champollion tried to solve the mystery about which half of Europe was now puzzled: to discover the meaning of all those small drawings from the 5th century AD, no one understood anymore. Meanwhile, as confused as the signs he tried to decipher, the thread of his life unraveled between the meeting with Napoleon, who fascinated with his research (1814), the marriage to Rosine Blanc (1818) and the blows of older colleagues envious, culminating in his expulsion from the university for his political ideas in 1821.

200 years since the Rosetta Stone puzzle was solved, who was the French genius
The Rosetta Stone (196 BC) is kept in the British Museum in London

It is said that "When one door closes, another one opens". And so it was. Released as a professor, he returned to Paris, where he began the final work on the hieroglyphs. At this particular moment of his existence, after the anxiety and public harassment he suffered, decipherment became for him the only means to show his skills and fully understand the importance of Egyptian civilization", wrote the Egyptologist Giacomo Cavillier, in the essay his “Champolion in Egypt. Diary of a scientific expedition" (1828-1829).

On September 14, 1822, the researcher sat in his chair and exclaimed in disbelief: “I found it! Here is the key...!”. Then it faded away. What was this key? He started from the name of the sovereign, pharaoh Ptolemy, easy to identify because it is found in the "stones" and "ovals" that appear in Egyptian inscriptions, and then extended the method to the names of pharaohs present in the bilingual text. (Greek and hieroglyph) of the obelisk found at Philae, on the Nile. Thus, by comparison with the Greek, he was able to identify the value of many signs. Less than two weeks after that jump in his chair, on September 27, 1822, he read to his colleagues the famous "Lettre à M. Dacier," in which he informed the secretary of the "Académie des Inscriptions et BellesLettres" in Paris for its discovery. "It is a complex system, of a figurative writing,

THE HIEROGLYPH REBUS. But what exactly did that mean? That a hieroglyph is a bit like a puzzle: each drawing can mean what it represents (pictographic value), a consonant or groups of consonants (phonetic value), or another word depending on the context in which it is inserted (ideographic value). An example? The sign of the duck, present in some inscriptions, actually means "duck", but also symbolizes the word "son", if associated with the Sun as an epithet of a pharaoh, and the phonetic sound "sa", which can be used to write words that have nothing to do with drooling feathers.

From that moment on, Champollion devoted the last 10 years of his life to finding, visiting and studying Egyptian collections throughout Europe, to test his method and to enrich and refine his vocabulary. "The possibility of deciphering hieroglyphic writing opened the researcher unlimited opportunities for research and contacts with the most important intellectual circles of the time, with the management of museums and with wealthy patrons," notes Cavillier.

THE LANGUAGE OF THE PHARAOHS. So, while his wife was giving birth to their only daughter, Zoraide, in 1824 Champollion brought out his first real treatise on the decipherment and grammar of hieroglyphs: An Account of the Hieroglyphic System of the Ancient Egyptians. For two years, he selected and bought artefacts between Turin, Florence and Livorno, putting together the first core of the new Egyptian section of the Louvre, where he was later appointed curator and accumulated enough knowledge to realize his dream: a scientific expedition in Egypt, sponsored by the King of France and the Grand Duke of Tuscany, directed together with Ippolito Rosellini, a young professor of Oriental Languages ??at the University of Pisa.

200 years since the Rosetta Stone puzzle was solved, who was the French genius
Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832) on a commemorative stamp

MISSION TO EGYPT. On July 16, 1828, at six o'clock in the afternoon, Champollion left Paris. He would return there a year and a half later, having visited Egypt on the back of a mule, explored the Valley of the Kings, and followed the course of the Nile to the 'second impassable cataract (in present-day Sudan). From here, on January 1, 1829, he writes to Dacier: “I am now truly proud to say that there is nothing to change in our Letter on the Hieroglyphic Alphabet. Our alphabet is valid. It is applied with the same success to the Egyptian monuments of the time of the Romans and Lagides, as to the inscriptions of all the temples, palaces and tombs of the pharaonic era.

THE END OF A GENIUS. But so much dedication to the cause took a toll on his health: the man who left Egypt on December 6, 1829 with more than 20 chests full of antiquities and precious documents was very ill. He managed to enjoy the highest academic honor ever received in just one year in the chair of Egyptian Archeology created for him by King Louis Philippe at the Collège de France in Paris. As a true culture hero, he faced two sudden blackouts in the university classroom. And at two o'clock in the morning on March 4, 1832, at the age of only 41, he passed away.

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