“I have seen roll through my hand the names of ages whose history is totally beyond recall, the names of gods who have lacked altars for fifteen centuries, and I have picked up . . . one little scrap of papyrus—the last, unique memorial of a king who in his lifetime perhaps found himself cramped in the immense Palace of Karnak!” (Champollion, quoted in Robinson, Ch. IX)
The French officer told the Englishmen to move quickly—the general’s servants would soon be packing his goods on the ship, and he would leave Alexandria with his treasure. It was September 1801, and Napoleon Bonaparte’s army in Egypt had just surrendered to the English in accordance with the Capitulation of Alexandria. As part of the terms of surrender, the scholars representing Britain were allowed to appropriate any Ancient Egyptian artefacts the French had collected during the three years they had occupied Egypt.
And the French had gathered many artefacts. This wasn’t spontaneous looting; cataloguing and seizing Ancient Egyptian artwork had actually been among Napoleon’s specific goals. Following on the heels of the army he’d invaded with in 1798 was a smaller army of 167 savants he had selected. These savants, who counted engineers, botanists, architects, and archaeologists among their number, had fanned out across the conquered territory in the name of science. They collected samples of plants, made maps, investigated agricultural practices, and conducted surveys of ancient buildings and monuments. Any historic artefacts that seemed particularly interesting, valuable, or beautiful that could be moved were shipped to France, to become part of the collection of the Louvre Museum.
On this September day in 1801, the Englishmen were being led to one particularly important artefact that General Jacques- François Menou had agreed to turn over, but hadn’t yet delivered. It was an unprepossessing hunk of black granite, 44 inches long, 11 inches thick, and weighing approximately 760 kilograms (or 1,670 pounds). It had been discovered by a French demolition team near the port of Rosetta in 1799, and the officer in charge had immediately recognized its importance. They sent this hunk of black stone back to General Menou, who had the savants inspect it.
They were excited to discover that it had a trilingual inscription on it: the first in Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, which nobody could read, the second in a script they assumed at first was Syriac, and the third was in good old Ancient Greek, which many educated people learned at that time. It was possible this stone could help scholars rediscover how to read the hieroglyphs for the first time in 1,500 years. They called this the Pierre de Rosetta – the Rosetta Stone.
The savants made multiple copies of the stone’s inscription. They sent them back to France, where they were distributed to scholars throughout Europe. The French were preparing to ship the stone to Paris when the English attacked. And now, in a baggage train of carts and laden donkeys, General Menou’s servants had carefully packed the stone under a pile of carpets, hoping to sneak it onto the ship. But the turncoat French officer had tipped off the scholars Edward Daniel Clarke and William Richard Hamilton in time. They had brought soldiers with them—soldiers who soon seized the Rosetta Stone and hauled it off on a gun carriage.
The single most important artefact in all of Egyptology—the artefact which in fact was the foundation of the field of Egyptology—was now in possession of France’s great enemy, where it remains to this day. The claiming of the Rosetta Stone by the English would kick off a century of cut-throat competition between the two great powers, one that would see them fighting to claim as much of Ancient Egypt’s legacy—and its loot—as they could.
I’m Rose Judson. Welcome to Books of All Time, a podcast that’s tackling classic literature in chronological order. This is Episode Four, The Tale of Sinuhe: Out of the Sands, a Voice.
Our last episode walked through the Ancient Egyptian narrative poem The Tale of Sinuhe. In this episode, we’ll be looking at a few of the figures who helped make the Tale’s rediscovery possible as part of this archaeological rivalry between England and France. In his 2022 book A World Beneath the Sands: The Golden Age of Egyptology, Toby Wilkinson describes the West’s development of Egyptology during the 19th and early 20th centuries as another invasion—one that was just as disruptive to Egypt as the Persian invasion in 525 BCE, Alexander the Great’s in 332 BCE, or Julius Caesar’s in 48 BCE. Wilkinson writes that “[f]rom its very inception, Egyptology was the handmaid of imperialism, in a manner that Caesar would have recognized and applauded.” (Wilkinson 12)
A World Beneath the Sands acts as the main jumping-off point for this episode, but we’re just going to look at two of the many scholars, statesmen, and scoundrels who populate the cast of early Egyptology. One of them is fairly well-known: Jean-François Champollion, the first modern person to decipher Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics thanks to the trilingual inscription on the Rosetta Stone—that was Champollion I quoted at the top of the episode.
The second is less well-known, though in his own day he was quite the celebrity— the poet William Wordsworth almost certainly saw him in action in the early part of his career. Charles Dickens wrote about him, and the novelist Sir Walter Scott called him “the handsomest man (for a giant) that I ever saw.” (Mayes 11) He was an Italian named Giovanni Battista Belzoni, and he would be responsible for making Egyptomania a popular craze, not just the obsession of scholars. We’ll start with him.
Belzoni was born in 1778 in the city of Padua, in what was then the Republic of Venice—Italy would be a collection of small states until it unified in 1861. Belzoni was one of fourteen children born to a poor barber and his wife. His youth would be overshadowed by strife on the continent—first, the ripple-effects of the French Revolution in 1789, as refugees from the conflict fled. Next, there were the French Revolutionary Wars, which ultimately saw Napoleon Bonaparte—yes, him again—lead an invading force through the Kingdom of Sardinia and the Republic of Venice. One of his generals would eventually capture Rome itself in 1798.
Belzoni was 18 at this time, and he was at risk of being conscripted for military service—in fact, Belzoni was probably more at risk than most young men, because he had grown into a young giant. He was about 6 feet 7 inches tall and uncommonly strong. He was also beautiful, apparently—descriptions of him in Stanley Mayes’s 1957 biography The Great Belzoni include phrases that remind me of how Gilgamesh is described in The Epic of Gilgamesh. For example: “Broad-shouldered, deep-chested, long of limb, with a noble head carried splendidly erect upon a strong neck, he moved as gracefully as a ballet dancer amongst ordinary shuffling humanity.” (Mayes 19) Hot stuff.
Belzoni was actually in Rome in 1798 when Napoleon’s army came knocking. Nobody’s quite sure what he was doing there beyond trying to find his fortune. In his 1820 memoir, Belzoni claims that Rome is where he learned hydraulics and engineering, but he’s very vague about this. Regardless, he didn’t fancy fighting in Napoleon’s ceaseless wars, so he left Rome in a hurry.
He tried to become a monk in another part of Italy. When that didn’t suit him, he set out as a traveling peddler, selling religious icons and rosaries. Next, he and one of his younger brothers schlepped over the Alps and the Pennines, eventually washing up in Amsterdam, where they tried their hands at being merchants. This also failed to prosper, and there seemed to be no escaping Napoleon on the continent, so Belzoni sailed for London in 1800. There he would begin his first career of note: a career on the stage.
Belzoni quickly became established as a successful theatrical strongman. At first, he performed at fairs and carnivals. Then, around 1803, he became part of the company that put on variety shows at Sadler’s Wells theatre. These were low-brow entertainments, but popular with people from all social classes—it’s almost certain, for instance, that the poet William Wordsworth saw one of these performances, based on analysis of his diaries and letters. (Mayes 38)
During this phase of his career, Belzoni was known as “The Patagonian Sampson”, and his main trick was “The Human Pyramid”. This involved him putting on a special harness that had seats and stirrups on it, then inviting about ten members of the public to climb onto the harness and hang on to him. He would then walk around the stage with all these people on him, quote, “as though the men were kittens.” (Mayes 20)
As Belzoni’s English improved, he began to branch out a little, taking bit parts in pantomimes and comedies. He then taught himself to play musical glasses, to create magic lantern shows, and to perform conjuring tricks, including an illusion that involved sawing off a man’s head and reattaching it. Once, in Perth, Scotland, he actually had the audacity to play Macbeth.
Aside from a multi-pronged talent, Belzoni also contributed to these productions in other ways, using his mysteriously acquired knowledge of hydraulics and other scraps of engineering know-how to create special effects, such as fountains, lights, and projections on stage. In spite of all this creative experimentation, he was clearly itching for some new path in life away from the stage. Once Napoleon was safely in his first exile in 1814, Belzoni packed up his English wife Sarah and his teenaged Irish servant James Curtain, and left England. The Belzoni party’s ultimate goal was to get to Constantinople. They travelled through Spain and France, working odd shows to make a living, then sailed for Malta, which had just been captured by the British. It was there, while performing at Malta’s tiny theatre, that Belzoni met someone who would change his life for good.
It’s not really clear to me where Belzoni met Captain Ismail Gibraltar. None of the sources I consulted could tell me. I like to imagine that it was at an after-show party, as the snacks and drinks were circulating, that this mysterious Arabic fellow approached the Italian giant. I wonder how he opened—probably by complementing Belzoni’s skill on the musical glasses. I try to grasp how the conversation evolved until eventually Gibraltar brought up the job he was hiring for. It wasn’t a theatrical job, nor even a nautical one. No, Gibraltar was an agent of Muhammad Ali Pasha, the new ruler of Egypt. The Pasha was keen to modernize the country, and he had sent agents out to recruit westerners with skills that could advance Egypt’s economy. Skills like, say, hydraulics.
I guess I must lack entrepreneurial vision, because I don’t really grasp how the knowledge involved in creating an on-stage fountain for a Christmas panto could be applied to improving agricultural yields for an entire African country. But it seems either Gibraltar had this vision, or Belzoni was an exceptional blagger, because Belzoni was now engaged to go to Egypt and help design a water wheel that would improve the Egyptian irrigation system. He, Sarah, and James all left for Egypt in May 1815, travelling on an English passport. “Here,” writes Stanley Mayes, “Was the chance Giovanni had been waiting for all his life, to turn his scientific knowledge to some serious purpose. He seized the opportunity with both hands.” (Mayes 73)
The Belzonis arrived in Alexandria at the end of a plague pandemic. They spent most of their first month in Egypt in and out of quarantine lockdowns—first in Alexandria, then in Cairo. On their voyage from Alexandria to Cairo, Belzoni befriended two young men who would prove invaluable influences and allies.
One was an adventurer named John Louis Burkhardt, a Swiss fellow who’d been raised in England, and who was basically Lawrence of Arabia a century before Lawrence of Arabia. Burkhardt was a geographer by trade, and prior to this jaunt to Cairo, he travelled all over north Africa and the Middle East. In fact, he had become the first modern European to lay eyes on the hidden city of Petra in Jordan. If you’ve ever seen Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, you can picture part of this city—it’s the huge ornate building carved into the canyon wall where Indy finds the Holy Grail.
The other young man was William Turner—not the artist, you understand, but a young official from the Foreign Office who was returning to his post after an absence. He was an engaging travel writer and is one of the few people who knew Belzoni well enough to write about him.
Once the plague subsided, Belzoni applied for his appointment to meet the Pasha so he could present plans for his water wheel. While he was waiting for that, he went with Turner and Burckhardt to visit the pyramids at Giza. These pyramids—the last remaining wonders of the ancient world, iconic and famous monuments from more than four thousand years ago—are just three of the more than 100 pyramids found, in whole or in ruins, throughout Egypt. But they are by far the most renowned.
At the time of Belzoni’s first visit, modern people had only been able to find entrances for the northernmost pyramid—the Great Pyramid of Khufu—and for the smaller pyramid at the far southern end of the site, the pyramid of Menkaure. The central pyramid, the one near the Sphinx, seemed to be impenetrable, and most western visitors accepted the opinion of the ancient Greek writer Herodotus, who said he’d been told by an Egyptian that the central pyramid had no chambers underground.
At any rate, Belzoni and his new friends went into the Great Pyramid of Khufu to have a look around. Meyer notes that “[it] must have been an uncomfortable experience for a man of Giovanni’s size,” (Mayes 93) because most of the passages are less than five feet high, and only about three or four feet wide. In 1815, those corridors were also likely to be piled with rubble and bat guano, so that visitors would have to lie down flat and scramble or wriggle through. At one point on this first visit to the pyramid, Belzoni found himself stuck in one of these chokepoints, and he had to wait for several anxious minutes while the local guides they’d hired them dug him free.
Speaking as a claustrophobe, that would have been the last time I’d have entered any pyramids. But it seems to have planted a seed in our Belzoni’s big heart, one that would stand him in good stead when his water wheel ultimately failed to win a contract from the Pasha. It wasn’t because it didn’t work, apparently—after several months of delays and frustrations with various contractors and officials, Belzoni got his prototype operational. But on the day that he demonstrated it to the Pasha, there was an accident that left one of the workmen—and Belzoni’s young assistant, James—badly injured. So the Pasha turned him down.
It was early 1816, and after about a year in Egypt, Belzoni now found himself out a job. Fortunately, he was about to stumble into a new one.
A new British Consul had just arrived in Cairo—one Henry Salt. He was in his mid-thirties, and rising through the diplomatic ranks. In addition to acting as Britain’s representative to the Pasha, he had also been tasked with sourcing new antiquities for the British Museum. There was one piece in particular that he was interested in—a piece that he’d actually been tipped off about by Belzoni’s friend Burckhardt. This piece was lying right out in the open down the river at Thebes, near an enormous ruined temple known by its Greek name—the Tomb of Ozymandias, which we know from the last episode was actually the Tomb of Ramesses II, or Ramesses the Great.
This piece Salt wanted was a colossal head and torso that had broken off one of the statues that used to flank the doors of the tomb. The statue had likely been wrecked in an earthquake around 27 BCE. The torso had been identified by previous experts as the Younger Memnon (but, again: it was Ramesses the Great). It was an exquisite example of ancient portrait sculpture. Bringing it back to England would be a cultural triumph. It would also require a triumph of engineering, however. The Younger Memnon weighed several tons and was half-buried in soft sand. Napoleon’s boys had tried to move it in 1800, drilling a hole right above one of statue’s nipples to try to attach a towing cable to it, but they hadn’t been able to budge it.
Getting the colossus out of position would take ingenuity. It would take grit. It would take lots of big, brawny guys. Maybe that’s why, when he was introduced to Giovanni Belzoni, Henry Salt thought he was the ideal man for the job. Never mind that Belzoni had no experience with excavation or moving large objects. He was a whopper of a fellow—really fills in a doorway, what?—and very confident he could solve the problem. And William Turner and John Louis Burkhardt both vouched for their friend’s resourcefulness and skill.
Belzoni set off on a month-long river journey toward Thebes, with lots of official letters from both Henry Salt and the Pasha on his person authorizing him to claim on behalf of the British Government not just the head of the Younger Memnon, but anything else he might find. He arrived at the site in June 1816 and was immediately fascinated. “The ruins lay about,” he said in his memoir, “like . . . a city of giants who, after a long conflict, were all destroyed, leaving the ruins of their various temples as the only proofs of their former existence.” (Belzoni, quoted in Mayes 122)
Belzoni and his team, which included his wife, set up camp within the ruins of the great temple—possibly even above the older tombs where, some 80 years later, James Quibell would find his papyrus copy of The Tale of Sinuhe. Belzoni located the head, which lay “with its face upwards, and apparently smiling on me, at the thought of being taken to England.” (Belzoni, quoted in Mayes 124)
His plan was to get the head from the temple to the river, which sounds simple enough until you realize that the river was beginning its annual rise. Belzoni couldn’t wait for the river to flood the ground near the temple, because the water there wouldn’t be deep enough to float the head. He’d have to get the head out of the sand, somehow drag it to the riverbank (which was roughly a kilometer away) and then guard it until a boat big enough to sail the statue back to Cairo could arrive at the peak of the Nile’s flood in the autumn. He set the carpenters he’d brought with him to work building a sled to put the head on while he went off to nearby villages to recruit some labour.
Belzoni had a lot of trouble with the local officials. But you can kind of see it from their side—for generations the Egyptians had been constantly bothered by these Europeans looking to hire people out of the fields or pastures, people who often were injured or even killed during these odd jobs, and for what? For some old rocks and broken statues. Belzoni was obliged to smile through a lot of excuses from the leaders about how it was planting season, Ramadan was about to start, and everyone knows you can’t move that head anyway. After judiciously applying gifts of cash, gunpowder, and coffee, Belzoni was at last able to assemble a gang of workers.
On Saturday, July 27th, the head of the Younger Memnon moved for the first time in nearly two millennia. Belzoni and a dozen or so men levered it up a few inches while the carriage his carpenters had made was hastily wedged under it, along with wooden rollers. Teams of men pulled the carriage, others ran the rollers from the back to the front, and yard by painful yard, the colossal head ground its way toward the river. This went on for fifteen grueling days, with men—including Belzoni himself—falling prey to heat stroke. But by the 12th, Belzoni had maneuvered the head to the agreed landing place on the riverbank. He’d done what Napoleon’s army had been unable to accomplish.
He set a guard to watch the head and then began travelling around Thebes and surrounding areas, casing out other potential acquisitions he could take to Henry Salt. He went as far down the river as Nubia, where he tracked down a site Burkhardt had told him about—a village called Abu Simbel, where there was a mountain of sand with colossal heads half-buried inside it. He spent several weeks at Abu Simbel, working out how he could move the sand, and how far down he’d probably have to go before he might find an entrance to a tomb or temple.
But autumn was approaching, and he’d have to get back to the Younger Memnon. When he returned to Thebes, he found the French sniffing around the site, and he found that all the locals were suddenly uncooperative with him—they’d been bribed to hinder Belzoni about getting the head off the riverbank until the French could bring their own boat and snatch it away from him, the way the Rosetta Stone had been snatched away from them.
Fortunately, one of the Egyptian officials didn’t feel he’d been bribed enough by the French, and Belzoni was able to cut a deal with him. The Younger Memnon was loaded onto a boat on November 21st, 1816. It would wind up stuck in customs in Alexandria for almost a year before finally arriving in England in 1818, but that was no longer Belzoni’s problem. He’d delivered, and he’d done it more successfully than anyone could have hoped.
Flush with this success (and with a £100 bonus from Henry Salt), Belzoni embarked on an incredible 18-month spree of discovery. I’ll just cover the three main highlights here. In the summer of 1817 he returned to Abu Simbel, where he assembled yet another gang and succeeded in digging out the entrance to an enormous temple—the first of two—that were full of brightly coloured, well-preserved wall sculptures (and also lots of graffiti from Ancient Greek tourists).
In the autumn of 1817, he headed back to Thebes and began searching for previously undiscovered tombs, all the while constantly loading up boats with small statues, grave goods, and other finds. Over the course of just 12 days in October, he found four new tombs, two of which would eventually be identified as belonging to pharaohs—Ramesses I and Seti I, respectively. Seti I’s tomb made Belzoni’s reputation (not that anyone knew it was Seti I’s tomb at this point – for a long while it was just called “Belzoni’s tomb”).
It was a winding, long chain of rooms, each more lavishly decorated than the last. What’s more, while the grave goods had long gone, the outer sarcophagus was still intact, and it was unlike any of the big, dark, bulky outer sarcophagi yet found. It was made of a light, shell-like white stone—you could put a lamp inside it, and it would illuminate the carvings from the inside. Copies and drawings of the reliefs, as well as the sarcophagus and a careful plan of the tomb’s layout, were duly packed up to be sent to Henry Salt.
Early in 1818, Belzoni turned his attention back to the pyramids of Giza. He studied the plan of the Great Pyramid, then began excavations around the impenetrable second Pyramid of Khafre. On March 2, 1818, he finally made his breakthrough, discovering the entrance on the north side of the pyramid buried deep under centuries of compacted rubble. He then left his mark on the monument—or defiled it, depending on your point of view—inscribing “discovered by G. Belzoni 2 March 1818” in letters several inches high on the wall inside the first passage. His graffiti is still there today.
He may have felt like he needed to take a more active role in claiming credit for his discoveries. By this point in 1818 he was engaged in a series of conflicts with Henry Salt about pay and attribution. While Belzoni was never actively erased from the history of Egyptology the way Hormuzd Rassam was erased from Assyriology, much of his work was ascribed to Henry Salt. Salt, to his credit, was nowhere near as devious or malicious as E.A. Wallis Budge would prove to be. He was, however, not too quick to correct people’s wrong perceptions, and he was also very condescending in his attitude toward Belzoni. Mayes writes that:
“[Salt] looked upon [Belzoni] with the same high regard that a gentleman would have for the architect whom he had commissioned to build his house. All the merit belonged to the one, but the other supplied the means, and the house was his.” (Mayes 191)
This is probably why Belzoni then embarked on a PR tour. He and Sarah returned to England in 1919. Belzoni quickly produced his memoir, which became an instant best-seller in spite of its cumbersome title. Ahem: “Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries Within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs, and Excavations, Egypt and Nubia, and of a Journey to the Coast of the Red Sea in Search of the Ancient Berenice and Another to the Oasis of Jupiter Ammon.” That’s 42 words, if you lost count.
He also fell back on his showbiz roots, and opened an exhibition that featured reproductions of the art in Seti I’s tomb, plus some of his own personal collection of artefacts—including mummies. He lucked into a site in London’s West End at a building that had a faux-Egyptian façade already.
The grand opening of the Egyptian Exhibition was May 1, 1820. According to the author Andrew Robinson, Belzoni actually appeared at this inaugural ceremony dressed as a mummy. (Robinson 12) 2,000 people attended that first day, and the Exhibition was so popular that he later went to franchise it in Paris and St. Petersburg (Mayes 273). He became the toast of London, even attending the Coronation of George IV in the summer of 1820.
But soon the Great Belzoni felt the siren call of adventure again. In late 1822, he set off on a journey to search for the source of the Niger River and to explore the legendary city of Timbuktu. Beset by bad weather, re-routings and bureaucratic delays, he made it all the way to Nigeria, where he took sick in a small village and died of dysentery on December 3, 1823. He was forty-five years old.
Giovanni Belzoni was survived by his wife Sarah—they had no children. She spent the next 47 years of her life subsisting on a small pension from the government, occasionally trying to revive her husband’s legacy when a wave of Egyptomania swept over the country. Charles Dickens, writing many years later about his memories of the Egyptian Exhibition, would recall Belzoni mostly as a rags-to-riches story (of course he would):
“The once-starving mountebank became one of the most illustrious men in Europe! An encouraging example to those, who have not only sound heads to project, but stout hearts to execute.” (Dickens, quoted in Mayes 12)
But Dickens would also mention Belzoni in his last, unfinished novel, the Secret of Edwin Drood, even grafting some aspects of Belzoni’s biography—such as an interest in Egyptian excavation and engineering—onto the title character. (Park 530)
Belzoni’s real legacy, of course, is in the artefacts he “retrieved”, let’s say, for Britain. He ultimately contributed 21 major pieces to the British Museum, plus countless other small finds that may not have been accurately attributed to him. But over time, his reputation grew sour along with those of his cohort from the early days of Egyptology. Like many of them, he was all too eager to participate in repackaging Egyptian culture as popular entertainment. And his methods were bad, honestly. He used a battering ram to open one tomb, didn’t mind poking fingers or feet through the bodies of mummies, and, of course, there’s the graffiti in the Pyramid of Khafre. One article I read for this episode sums it up with its title: “Belzoni the Plunderer.”
Belzoni can’t really be faulted for failing to singlehandedly invent sound scientific practices for investigating historic sites. After all, during his magical three years as an archaeological explorer, there wasn’t anyone who could read the hieroglyphs on anything he excavated. By the time someone could, the Great Belzoni was already literally halfway to Timbuktu and his final destiny. Given Belzoni’s loyalty to his adopted country of England, he would probably have been very annoyed to learn that the man who cracked the hieroglyphic code was, in fact, French.
Jean-François Champollion was born on December 23, 1790 in Figeac, the youngest of seven children. His father, the humble owner of a bookshop, had a serious drinking problem, and he relied on other relatives to help care for this last addition to his family. By the time Jean-François was 11 years old, he was living with his eldest brother Jacques-Joseph who was 23 and working in an office in Grenoble.
Jacques-Joseph encouraged his brother’s interest in languages, which was genuinely remarkable in someone so young. Jean-François, by the time he was 15, had not only mastered Latin and Greek. He’d also learned a whole fistful of other languages as well. He had an affinity for the Semitic languages – Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, and Chaldean.
Jean-François’s precocity brought him to the attention of the prefect of Grenoble, one Joseph Fourier. Fourier was a veteran of Napoleon’s Egypt campaign, one of the savants, and he was project-managing the publication of the findings from the expedition. This was an immense undertaking—the final product, The Description of Egypt, would run to 23 volumes, and wouldn’t be complete until 1822. There’s a nice little story that Fourier invited the brothers Champollion to his home to see his personal collection of Egyptian artefacts, and that little Jean-François, upon learning that the hieroglyphs were indecipherable, prophetically declared that he would be the one to translate them.
But Andrew Robinson, in his 2012 biography “Cracking the Egyptian Code: The Revolutionary Life of Jean-François Champollion” notes that neither Jean-François, nor his brother, nor Fourier ever mentioned this story during their lifetimes. (Robinson Loc. 790) It seems to be one of those legends that spring up around people who change the world—think of George Washington and the cherry tree, for example.
One thing that is certain is that Fourier put the elder Champollion to work for him, helping with research and corrections for The Description of Egypt, and that he encouraged the younger Champollion to develop his own interest in Egyptian culture. It was around this time that Jean- François became interested in Coptic, one of the major languages of modern Egypt. It would prove critical to his eventual success with hieroglyphs—Coptic is descended directly from Ancient Egyptian.
It was also around this time that Jean-François probably first saw a copy of the Rosetta Stone inscriptions. One of the wildest facts I learned when researching this episode is that Jean- François Champollion almost certainly never saw the Rosetta Stone in person in his lifetime. He did all his work from copies. If you are one of the millions of people who has walked past the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum, regardless of whether you paused for a good long look, or just caught a glimpse of it between the bodies of other tourists pressing around it—you, my friend, have spent more time in its presence than the first person who could read it all ever did.
Anyway. Jean- François soon exhausted all the resources Grenoble could offer him, educationally, so in 1807, when he was 16, he and his brother moved to Paris, where Jean- François began studying at the National University. Napoleon was still on the throne—or at least he was when he wasn’t off prosecuting endless wars—and Jean- François was naturally a fan of the man who had made it possible for him to study Ancient Egypt in such detail.
Some of his instructors were less keen on Bonaparte, however. His main teacher during this time, Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy was a passionate, if discreet, royalist, and this would become a wedge between student and master later. Silvestre de Sacy was also the first Frenchman to try to decipher the Rosetta Stone—again, working only from copies of the inscriptions.
I should probably pause and summarize what scholars thought about hieroglyphics prior to the Rosetta Stone. The latest known inscription in hieroglyphics was created around 350 BCE, and by that point it had dwindled to a mostly ceremonial form of the language. Over the centuries various scholars had tried to have a crack at decrypting hieroglyphics, but they kept getting stuck on an Ancient Greek scholar’s assertion that hieroglyphics were ideograms, not alphabetical letters. That is, each symbol could stand for multiple ideas, rather than for sounds. How would they ever learn all the meanings?
Thanks to the Rosetta Stone, this embedded idea was beginning to be questioned. For example, in a letter to a correspondent of his in England, de Sacy mused about how the Chinese, who use a largely ideogrammatic writing system, will often spell out foreign names and words phonetically. Maybe the Ancient Egyptians did the same thing, he suggested. Maybe there was a way to at least translate some of the Greek names in the Rosetta Stone’s proclamation.
Silvestre de Sacy’s English correspondent thought this was a capital idea. The Englishman was the Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society of London, and he was also one of the most remarkable men of the age. Dr. Thomas Young was a physician, physicist, and linguist of the most penetrating intelligence. His work on the nature of light—in particular, his experiments which confirmed that it behaved as a wave, and not a particle, as Isaac Newton suggested—would have been enough to win him a Nobel Prize, if such things existed in those days. His work on the function of the human eye would have won him a second—he was the first researcher to describe the condition of astigmatism, among other things.
The Ancient Egyptian decipherment wheeze was almost an afterthought for Young—not quite on the level of doing a sudoku, but one that came a distant second to his main scientific research. Champollion’s biographer Andrew Robinson notes that “Young never went to Egypt, and never wanted to go.” (Robinson loc. 1394) But Young was intrigued by de Sacy’s theory about foreign names. Handily, the Ancient Egyptians always enclosed proper names within an oval shape, known as a cartouche, so Young went through the hieroglyphics looking for cartouches that roughly corresponded to the position of names like Alexander and Ptolemy in the Greek text. From this he was able to get a partial alphabet for foreign names, but he went on assuming that anything outside the cartouches was written in an impenetrable ideogrammatic system.
Another thing Young had noticed when comparing the hieroglyphics to the demotic characters, that the demotic characters bore many similarities to the hieroglyphics. It was almost as if demotic was a cursive form of hieroglyphics, he wrote to de Sacy. (Robinson Loc. 1483) That’s as far as Young had gotten with the Rosetta Stone inscription when a letter from a new correspondent arrived in 1815 from a young provincial librarian in Grenoble named Jean-François Champollion.
This fellow, then only 24, was writing to ask if anyone could help him with issues he was having with his copy of the inscription on the Rosetta Stone—he had reason to suspect the one he had been using in Paris had errors in it. Champollion went on to relate how he had worked out that foreign names within cartouches were represented phonetically, and he wanted to test it on other inscriptions. “I dare to hope,” he added to the distinguished Dr. Young, “that [this request] will permit me to continue a correspondence in which the entire benefit is certain to be on my side.” (Robinson loc. 1319) What the request did was open a new front in the imperialist rivalry between England and France. Young, who’d only been working on the Rosetta Stone for a year at that point, redoubled his efforts.
By 1815, Jean-François was struggling. Napoleon, after returning from his first exile, had finally been defeated at Waterloo, which meant that the pro-Bonaparte brothers Champollion were suddenly political outcasts once the Bourbons came back to the throne. In addition to being politically unpopular, Jean-François had become professionally unpopular—he was abrasive and argumentative, impatient with people who didn’t immediately accept his brilliance.
Unfortunately for him, de Sacy was rewarded for his loyalty to the new French king with a baronetcy and new powers over the young scholars under him. He had decided Jean-François was full of hot air—“no one likes a precocious young upstart,” as Andrew Robinson puts it—and he began discreetly putting it about that much of the young man’s work was “mere charlatanism.” (Robinson loc. 1553) He rejected the manuscript of a Coptic dictionary Jean-François had been trying to get published for years, and he began writing sniffy little letters to Thomas Young warning him not to share any of his work on the Rosetta Stone with Monsieur Champollion, because “It could happen that he might afterwards lay claim to the priority.” (Robinson loc. 1553) This interference by de Sacy led to Young dropping his correspondence with Jean-François, and seems to have contributed to Young’s gradual drifting away from the Rosetta Stone project beginning in 1816—though he still had one major publication brewing, as we’ll see.
It could also be that Young had become stuck on that old idea that Egyptian hieroglyphics only represented concepts, not sounds. Or it could be that his medical practice, scientific research, and contributions to various societies began to claim more of his time. Both would have been to Jean-François’s advantage: after enduring the turmoil of Napoleon’s return from exile and eventual defeat, he had washed up in Paris again, jobless after yet another political denunciation, so he had a lot of time on his hands. More importantly, he had come to realize that if hieroglyphics represented ideas, there ought to be far fewer of them on the Rosetta Stone, because you’d only need one or two symbols for each of the Greek words. Maybe the conventional wisdom was wrong: maybe hieroglyphics were both alphabetic and ideogrammatic.
Ironically, it was very possibly an article on hieroglyphics that Young contributed to the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1818 that gave Jean-François the nudge he needed to test this idea. Young’s article covered his early work on the royal names in the Rosetta Stone, and gave his partial hieroglyphic alphabet, which he assumed only applied to foreign names inside cartouches. Not long after reading this article (and criticizing it in a letter to his brother Jacques-Joseph), Jean-François began applying this idea to on other inscriptions, and he soon found that he was able to translate names of native Egyptian rulers in cartouches, not just foreign ones. He was also able to expand the number of hieroglyphs in the “alphabet”, and correct a few that Young had got wrong.
Then he tried using the alphabet he had worked out on symbols outside of cartouches, and here his knowledge of Coptic came in handy: Ancient Egyptian is a forerunner of Coptic, and he soon knew he was translating actual Egyptian words, not gobbledegook. This breakthrough came on September 14, 1822. Champollion, clutching the papers on which he’d worked out his translation, ran through the streets of Paris until he reached his brother’s office. “Je tiens mon affaire!”, he cried, “I’ve done it!” Then he apparently collapsed from exhaustion and went to bed for five days. (Robinson loc. 2302)
He wrote up his findings in a few days, addressing them to the president of the Academy of Inscriptions and Historical Literature. He was invited to read out the letter at an assembly of the Academy on September 27, 1822. By an amazing coincidence, Thomas Young was in the audience that night—he happened to be visiting Paris with his wife at the time. He congratulated Jean-François on his breakthrough, even though Jean-François’s findings did not mention anywhere that he had used Young’s earlier work on the Rosetta Stone to guide his own ideas.
Young was, by nature, a generous, even-tempered scholar, genuinely interested in the exchange of ideas and the extension of knowledge. But it was obvious to pretty much everyone that Jean-François had been helped in his breakthrough by Young’s work, and the lack of any type of credit wounded the older man. He was moved to bring out a book the following year—another long title incoming, sorry, but it’s important: “An Account of Some Recent Discoveries in Hieroglyphical Literature and Egyptian Antiquities: Including the Author’s Original Alphabet, As Extended by Mr. Champollion.”
This sent Jean-François—who was, by nature, a prickly and suspicious scholar—through the roof. He angrily denounced any suggestion that his work had built on Young’s—they had simply arrived at it independently, that was all. Robinson writes that:
“[B]y sticking intransigently to his claim of sole authorship, Champollion would achieve his ambition and come to enjoy wide acceptance in his lifetime as the decipherer of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. But in so doing he would lose his good name . . . Champollion’s personal reputation would be forever tainted by his hubris toward Young.” (Robinson loc. 2400)
Regardless of the issue of credit, there is a kind of justice, to me, in the fact that it was a French guy who cracked the Rosetta Stone after the English had nicked it off them. It would be an even greater justice if he’d been Egyptian, though.
Champollion’s career, sadly, didn’t last too much longer, but it was brilliant while it did last. Rehabilitated in the eyes of the King of France, Champollion was named curator of Egyptian Antiquities at the Louvre and the first professor of Egyptology. He went on a tour of other European cities, inspecting and producing translations of any Ancient Egyptian artefacts they may have had. In one memorable experience in Italy, he describes being led into a room where there was a table piled high with delicate papyrus scraps, all thousands of years old, all crumbling into dust even as he looked at them—that is the scene he’s describing in the letter I quoted at the start of today’s episode.
He also spent several years in Egypt, walking in the footsteps of Belzoni and others, giving the mute monuments a voice for the first time in 1,500 years and filling in many gaps in our history and understanding of the culture of Ancient Egypt. Tragically, he died in Paris following a series of strokes in 1832, just ten years after his big breakthrough. He was forty-one years old.
I think I’ll give the last word on Jean-Francois Champollion to the modern-day Egyptologist Richard Parkinson. He’s the translator of the edition of The Tale of Sinuhe that I read for last week’s episode, and he was also the curator of the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum until 2013. In a short 2005 book for the British Museum about the Rosetta Stone, he said that:
“Even if one allows that Champollion was more familiar with Young’s initial work than he subsequently claimed, he is the sole decipherer of the hieroglyphic script: any decipherment stands or falls as a whole, and while Young discovered parts of an alphabet—a key—Champollion unlocked an entire written language.” (Parkinson, quoted in Robinson loc. 2127)
That’s where we’ll wrap for this week—with the stories of two Europeans who made Egypt legible to other Europeans through the use of stolen artefacts—but we’re not done in this part of the world yet. Next episode we’re looking at the Book of Going Forth by Day, a/k/a the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and its influence on occult and spiritualist organizations like the Order of the Golden Dawn. We’ll also be talking about—ugh—E.A. Wallis Budge again. Don’t miss Episode Five, The Egyptian Book of the Dead: This Thing Reads Like Stereo Instructions, coming Thursday, April 25th.
Books of All Time is written and produced by me, Rose Judson. Lluvia Arras designed our cover art and logo. Special thanks to Yelena Shapiro, Cathy Merli, Matt Brough and the Books of All Time Advisory Council: Ed Brown, Beck Collins, Neil Dowling, Caitlin McMullin, Hugh Parker, and Jonathan Skipp. You can support the show by subscribing and leaving a rating or review at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening! I’ll be back in two weeks.
References and Works Cited:
Fagan, Brian M. “BELZONI The Plunderer.” Archaeology, vol. 26, no. 1, 1973, pp. 48–51, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41685219.
Mayes, Stanley. The Great Belzoni: The Circus Strongman Who Discovered Egypt’s Treasures. Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 2010.
Park, Hyungji. “‘Going to Wake up Egypt’: Exhibiting Empire in ‘Edwin Drood.’” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 30, no. 2, 2002, pp. 529–550, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25058603.
Reeves, C. N. “Belzoni, the Egyptian Hall, and the Date of a Long-Known Sculpture.” The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, vol. 75, 1989, pp. 235–237, doi:10.2307/3821916.
Robinson, Andrew. Cracking the Egyptian Code: The Revolutionary Life of Jean-Francois Champollion. Thames & Hudson, 2022.
Urbanus, Jason. “In the Time of the Rosetta Stone.” Archaeology, vol. 70, no. 6, 2017, pp. 50–55, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26349029.
Westerfeld, Jennifer. “Decipherment and Translation: An Egyptological Perspective.” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 16, no. 1, 2016, pp. 29–36, doi:10.14321/crnewcentrevi.16.1.0029.
Wilkinson, Toby. A World Beneath the Sands: The Golden Age of Egyptology. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2022.
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