Champollion and 1822: how hieroglyphs were read again

Jean-François Champollion was born in Figeac, in south-western France, on 23 December 1790. Raised in Grenoble under the guidance of his elder brother Jacques-Joseph, he showed from boyhood an almost obsessive passion for Eastern languages: Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Aramaic and above all Coptic. That last language, a direct descendant of ancient Egyptian preserved in the liturgy of Egypt's Christians, proved to be his decisive weapon.

The debate before Champollion

For centuries European scholars had believed that hieroglyphs were purely conceptual symbols, images expressing ideas with no link to sounds. In the seventeenth century the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher had proposed mystical and entirely fanciful translations. By the eighteenth century, however, some scholars, such as the Dane Georg Zoëga, had suggested that the names enclosed in cartouches were royal names and that at least some signs had a phonetic value.

The British physician and physicist Thomas Young took an important step between 1814 and 1819. Studying the Rosetta Stone, he assigned sound values to some signs in the cartouche of Ptolemy. Young, however, believed that phonetic writing served only to transcribe foreign names, such as those of the Greek rulers, and that the rest of the system remained symbolic. It was this limit that Champollion managed to overcome.

Ptolemy, Cleopatra and Ramesses

Decisive help came from an obelisk found at Philae and taken to England by the collector William John Bankes, which bore a Greek inscription with the names of Ptolemy and Cleopatra. Comparing the two cartouches, Champollion verified that the signs shared by both names, such as those for p, t, o and l, stood in the expected positions. He thus obtained a first alphabet of reliable phonetic values, to be tested on other names.

The breakthrough came in September 1822, when he received copies of inscriptions from the temple of Abu Simbel. In one cartouche he recognised the sign of the sun, ra in Coptic, followed by signs he knew how to read as m and s: he derived the name Ramesses. It was proof that the names of Egyptian pharaohs too, far older than the Ptolemies, were written with phonetic signs. According to a story handed down in the family, he ran to his brother and fainted with emotion.

The Lettre à M. Dacier and beyond

On 27 September 1822 Champollion presented his results to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris in a letter addressed to its secretary, Bon-Joseph Dacier. Two years later, in the Précis du système hiéroglyphique, he described the complete system: hieroglyphs were at once figurative, symbolic and phonetic, often within the same word. It marked the end of a purely esoteric view of the signs.

Intense years followed. He studied the papyri of the Egyptian Museum in Turin, became curator of the Egyptian department of the Louvre and in 1828 and 1829 led a Franco-Tuscan expedition to Egypt together with the Italian Ippolito Rosellini. In 1831 he obtained the first chair of Egyptology at the Collège de France, but he died in Paris on 4 March 1832, aged only forty-one. His Grammaire égyptienne was published posthumously by his brother.

Not everyone accepted his conclusions at once. The studies of the German Karl Richard Lepsius and, in 1866, the discovery of the bilingual Canopus Decree confirmed them definitively. Since then Egyptology has become a philological discipline, and hieroglyphs have ceased to be riddles and returned to being what they were: texts to be read.