My Journey to Egypt: By the Code-Breaker of the Hieroglyphs

By Jean-François Champollion, Martin Rynja and Joyce Tyldesley

Jean-François Champollion broke the code of the hieroglyphs on 14 September 1822. But this didn't yet mean understanding how old the culture of the pharaohs was, or any of its details. This next milestone Champollion achieved six years later when he embarked on a two-year expedition to Egypt and became the first person to read the hieroglyphs on the monuments that had been built along the Nile for three thousand years. Single-handedly he paved the way for the scientific expeditions that would follow in his footsteps. Every day brought new discoveries and insights which he excitedly recorded in his letters and diaries. But he also marvelled at the lives of the 'modern' descendants of the ancient Egyptians and in these letters he provides a snapshot of both cultures, showing how little had changed in five millennia.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gibson Square
• Release date: Oct 31, 2019
• ISBN: 9781783340408

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Jean-François Champollion

My Journey to Egypt

http://www.gibsonsquare.com

Printed ISBN: 9781783341078

Ebook ISBN: 9781783340408

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Original title: Lettres et journeaux écrits pendants le voyage d’égypte

Published by Gibson Square

Copyright © 2019 by Gibson Square

Preface: Dr Joyce Tyldesley

Editor: Peter A. Clayton

Translator: Martin Rynja

Praise

‘Neither Champollion’s journal nor the letters from that journey have been translated into English, which makes the selection published… all the more valuable… One of the great pleasures… is the way the 38-year-old scholar emerges as an obsessive man in a hurry, as though he knew his time was limited (he died two years after his return to France). His enthusiasm is infectious: here is someone whose lifelong wish is coming true and it happens with enormous pomp and ceremony. There are discoveries and reappraisals… something perhaps even more interesting, the opportunity of watching a man realise the extent and effect of his genius.

Anthony Sattin, Sunday Times

‘His essays, literary correspondence and poems may earn him a minor place within French literature. In the manner of the time, he kept journals. Here, for the first time in English, is the account of his sole visit to the country whose history he recreated…. [I]t well conveys the seemingly inexhaustible energy of the man…. Here are his impressions of a country largely untouched by the influence of the West. The main exception was the rapid growth of the trade in antiquities to Europe, many of whose exponents were suspicious of someone who was out to pollute the pure waters of profit with the murky stream of scholarship…. On almost every page, he records his amazement at what he saw.’

Prof. John Ray, The Times

‘Burn with the passion that he dedicated his life to cracking the hieroglyphic code.’

Guardian

‘A vigorous translation of the journal and letters… At long last, English readers can form a reliable impression of an intellect that was always known to have been remarkable in any age… Champollion was seduced by ancient Egypt… The immediacy and pungency of the letters and journal reveal the depth of the seduction…. There are vivid, penetrating and often entertaining descriptions of contemporary Islamic Egypt and Egyptians – mosques and palaces, pashas, priests and peasants; of the machinations of French officialdom whose trade in antiquities Champollion’s excavations threatened; and of the difficulties and dangers of travel on the Nile, including a New Year dinner in Nubia with two rare bottles of Saint-George…. It is Champollion’s observations on the hieroglyphs that have a special fascination.’

Andrew Robinson, Times Higher Education Supplement

‘We travel with the exuberant Champollion making his first journey to Egypt, we share the wonder of it all fresh before his eyes, and also the incredible way in which he organises his researches… here in these letters we can once more relive the magic.’

Minerva

‘A wealth of observation of many familiar (and some less familiar) sites and monuments and their current condition, and innumerable historical musings… A welcome addition.’

Egyptian Archaeology

‘Wonderfully ebullient…. entertaining letters to his brother, he chronicled his increasing sense of excitement about his discoveries. This is the first UK publication of the diaries.’

History Today

‘In 1828 Jean-Francois Champollion sailed for Egypt, fulfilling a lifelong dream and permitting him to make use of his hieroglyphic discoveries on the standing monuments themselves. During the year and a half he was away, he travelled as far south as the Second Cataract and filled many volumes with copies of texts and tableaux. In addition, he kept his own diary, and wrote letters to family and friends that allow one to journey with in Egypt and share his enthusiasm and joy at being able to confirm many of his ideas in the field…. The availability of this material for the first time to English readers is thus to be applauded…. Strongly recommended.’

KMT, a Modern Journal of Ancient Egypt

‘It’s the enthusiastic words of Champollion himself that make the best reading, describing his travels and discoveries and the dangers he met on the way. He writes about sleeping in an empty tomb and being less than impressed by the pitiful Egyptian sculpture from the time of the Ptolemies. He also records snippets of modern life at the time of his visit, including a religious feast where three hundred men chanted until they dropped with exhaustion and white foam spouted on their beards.’

Ancient Egypt Magazine

Translator’s Note

Champollion wrote these diaries and letters from May 1828 to March 1830 during a time when the political situation in France was in a turbulent state. The reign of the reactionary Bourbon King Charles X was slowly moving in the direction of the July Revolution of 1830 that would force him to abdicate on 2 August 1830. Moreover, Egyptology continued to be a highly sensitive subject for France’s Catholic clergy who were in the ascendant under Charles X. They realized that the texts of ancient Egypt, which had been unintelligible for most of Christianity, might provide an awkward source of information on statements in the Old Testament. It was better not to know what they said than risk damaging the orthodoxy and authority of the Church of Rome.

Champollion’s unguarded tone in these diaries and lively letters may, therefore, seem surprising. He and his older brother Champollion-Figeac, to whom most letters are addressed, however, had worked together for most of their lives, exchanging views in crisp notes interspersed with blunt advice. In addition, Champollion had evidently decided to publish his early findings through the journalism of his brother rather than himself, as he had done before, through letters to distinguished Egyptologists which would then be published. Champollion-Figeac was to take from the letters what he could for his paper, the Moniteur, to keep Parisians informed about his brother’s progress. After Champollion’s death in 1832, Champollion-Figeac published the first collection of these popular letters. Later, in 1909, Professor Hermine Hartleben published the standard work of the letters, Lettres et journeauxécrits pendants le voyage d’égypte, which has remained in print ever since in France (a new edition appeared as recently as 2019). The present book is based on Hartleben’s volume and it is the first time that Champollion’s letters are published in the English language.

In their original, Champollion’s letters contain hieroglyphs, Arabic, Coptic and some Latin and Greek, as well as sketches of various cartouches as he interpreted them, or other small details spotted and remarked on in tombs. This book does not aim to reproduce these words from the Hartleben edition (which itself leaves out parts of the letters) as only a number of specialists will be able to enjoy them and, likely, they already have the French Hartleben edition. For the same reason, some not entirely related material has also been omitted — the aim here is to recreate the historical context 1828-1830 before Champollion’s arrival: the virtually blank canvas of ancient Egypt itself. Hartleben’s extensive notes have been incorporated in the text that introduces the letters. Champollion’s spelling of some names is strange to present usage – some of these have been changed (or notes added in square brackets) to help clarity, but others close to the modern name, and thus easily identifiable, have been left.

Map of Champollion's Expedition

18 August 1828 - 29 November 1829

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Champollion's expedition reached the Second Cataract before returning (more detailed maps at the end of the book)

Preface

Jean-François Champollion was the first, and to many the greatest, hero of Egyptology. Like all true heroes he was an attractive and determined young man who rose from a humble background to battle a formidable series of enemies – years of poverty, ill health and unemployment compounded by the after-effects of the French revolution, and a host of political and intellectual rivals (he remained pro-Napoleon after France was restored to the Bourbons) – before winning the ultimate academic prize: the decoding of the Egyptian hieroglyphic script. The dramatic climax of his story is familiar to all Egyptologists. On 14 September 1822 Champollion was working alone in his Paris home, poring over texts copied from the Great Temple of Abu Simbel. To his great surprise he found that he could decipher the royal name ‘Ramesses’ embedded in the text. Running to his brother’s office he burst through the door, shouted ‘Je tiens l’affaire!’ (‘I’ve got it!’), and dropped to the floor in a faint. Ten years later, suffering from consumption, diabetes, gout, paralysis, heart, kidney and liver disease, Champollion died, apparently of a stroke. He was just 41 years old.

Champollion’s great achievement was not, of course, a sudden flash of inspiration. It was a triumph founded on many years of patient linguistic study, and he made full use of the work of previous scholars, most notably the English polymath Thomas Young. Nor were the events of September 1822 the end of the quest. There was a mountain of work still to be done and Champollion himself would do much, both in Europe’s museums and on the lengthy visit to Egypt described in this book, to verify his conclusions and quieten the sceptics who remained vociferously unconvinced by his arguments.

Nevertheless, it would be hard to over-estimate the importance of Champollion’s breakthrough. France had beaten England at Egyptology. For the first time, scholars had a realistic prospect of reading the hieroglyphs that decorated Egypt’s ancient stone monuments. And this, in turn, offered the prospect of reconstructing Egypt’s long-lost history and understanding her curious religion. An understanding of Egyptian chronology would naturally affect the understanding of other cultures, including the controversial Biblical chronology, which dated the creation of the world to 23 October 4004 BC. Egyptology had been transformed, almost overnight.

So much for the storybook hero. But how much do we know about the man behind the legend? The two-dimensional image of Champollion the code breaker, the solitary student of dry and dusty texts, has become ingrained in the public imagination. Reports of a sickly and lonely childhood dedicated to the self-imposed study of languages ancient and modern – at various times the young Champollion is said to have studied Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, Chaldean, Chinese, Coptic, Italian and English – do nothing to alter this perception, while formal portraits of Champollion present us with a staid, bewhiskered, and entirely conventional scholar, and offer no clues to his personality.

We can expand our understanding slightly by considering Champollion’s deeds, and the deeds of those around him. It is clear that the brother who paid for his education and gave him financial support throughout his life, and the wife who stood by him with unswerving loyalty, loved him. It is equally clear that his uncompromising support for the Bonaparte cause, and his intellectual arrogance (at just sixteen years of age he had announced to the Grenoble Society of Science that he was destined to decode the hieroglyphic script) won Champollion some powerful enemies. These included his former tutor Silvestre de Sacy, who actually wrote to Thomas Young, warning him not to trust Champollion, and the university authorities who refused to employ him. His authorship of a series of limericks and lampoons on the royalist movement hints at the presence of a strong, if perhaps slightly childish, sense of humour, while a series of academic books confirm, if confirmation were necessary, his prodigious intellect, his tireless energy and his deep obsession with anything and everything Egyptian.

Then, in 1828-9 we meet an entirely different man. In 1828 Champollion, now curator of the Egyptian collection of the Louvre Museum paid his first and only visit to Egypt. This was the ideal opportunity to collect new inscriptions from temple and tomb walls and, of course, to check and correct texts that had been copied carelessly in the days when hieroglyphs were nothing more than pretty pictures. During his Egyptian visit Champollion kept a detailed travel journal. It is in these pages, and in a series of lengthy letters written principally to his brother, that we meet Champollion the explorer; an intrepid yet light-hearted adventurer happy to take physical and intellectual risks to advance his knowledge of ancient Egypt, and eager to inform and entertain his readers. This relaxed Egyptian Champollion is a delightful contrast to the more formal French version, and it is hard not to warm to a man who takes the time to describe an impromptu act performed by two comedians who ‘started their routine with spasms and body movements that would have been very becoming at a satanic rite for the Goat of Mendes’.

Champollion found himself transformed, intellectually and physically, by Egypt. His health experienced a temporary improvement and his persistent headaches vanished as, abandoning his formal western garments, he donned a European version of native dress: ‘I am truly a newborn man. My shaved head is covered by an enormous turban. I am dressed completely like a Turk, an attractive moustache decks my mouth, and a large scimitar dangles from my hip. This clothing is very hot and is exactly what is needed in Egypt: one perspires freely, and so does everyone here’. So complete was the change that, at the temple of Hathor at Dendera, ‘… dressed like Orientals and wearing a wide white burnous with a hood, we looked, to Egyptians, like a tribe of nomads, while without any hesitation a European would have taken us for a group of Chartreuse guerrilla monks armed with guns, sabres and pistols.’

Champollion’s diary, written half a century before Amelia B. Edwards’s classic travel guide A Thousand Miles up the Nile, provides a delightful, sensitive and often amusing introduction to an unexplored land virtually untouched by western culture. The archaeology and the inscriptions are naturally Champollion’s main topic of interest, but he also shows an engaging interest in modern Egypt. We find him sleeping in an empty tomb, sliding down a bank of sand to enter the almost unbearably hot Abu Simbel temple, collapsing in the Valley of the Kings, recording the chin tattoos worn by the women of the Delta, and, in celebration of his daughter’s birthday, contemplating a meal of sliced crocodile served in a spicy sauce. In a hastily written postscript we learn that the eagerly anticipated crocodile feast was not to be: ‘Our dish of crocodile went off overnight, – the meat had become green and putrid’. A man of his time he identifies the Luxor and Karnak temples as palaces (Egypt’s palaces were, in fact built of mud-brick, as were her houses) and, in a carefully worded letter written anonymously to the Revue encyclopédique – he applauds the patriotic sentiments of the Frenchmen who cut the zodiac ceiling from the Dendera temple and transported it to France as a response to the British seizing of the Rosetta Stone, before gently questioning their actions. Champollion was quite happy that unattached monuments – obelisks included – should be sent abroad, but felt it wrong to destroy a beautiful and intact building.

On 28 November 1829, his great adventure over and his health again causing problems, Champollion prepared to leave Egypt. ‘Goodbye then. The end of the drama is drawing to a close, I hope, as happily as the first four acts. Adieu, yours with heart and soul… Vive la France!’ Before leaving Egypt, Champollion spoke enthusiastically to the Pasha about mounting a future expedition, this time to discover the source of the Nile. It would take him beyond the second cataract deep into Nubia, and would allow further investigation into the ancient Egyptian empire. But that was not to be. Jean-François Champollion died in Paris on 4 March 1832, and was buried beneath an uninscribed pyramid. His devastated brother, Jacques-Joseph Champollion-Figeac, completed and posthumously published his groundbreaking Egyptian Grammar (Grammaire égyptienne) in 1836. Champollion had hoped that his Egyptian journal would serve as the basis for a more detailed publication of his adventure. Today, however, we have the privilege of reading his words as he wrote them on the spot, in Egypt. It is hard to think of a more sympathetic or enjoyable introduction to the world of the pharaohs.

Dr. Joyce Tyldesley

University of Manchester

Introduction

Jean-François Champollion was born in Figeac in north west France on 23 December 1790. Less than ten years later, the young Napoleon would try to realise his ambitious plans in the Valley of the Nile. His idea was to conquer Egypt in order to build the Suez Canal and open up the route to India for France and thus strike a devastating blow to the British economy. Like Julius Caesar before him, however, Napoleon was at the same time deeply interested in understanding the people he was conquering. He brought with him a delegation of scholars whose task it was to describe Egypt and its monuments, and the news of their early work and discoveries very quickly reached Europe where it whetted a popular appetite for ancient Egypt that had hitherto been limited to scholars and universities.¹

Napoleon’s expedition was a military disaster, yet its significance today lies in its scientific results. A ‘Commission of Egypt’ gathered 167 artistic and academic savants who had come over voluntarily in 1798, after an appeal to the Institut de France by Napoleon. With the aid of the chemist Berthollet he recruited cartographers, bridge engineers, zoologists, botanists, mineralogists, painters, draughtsmen, journalists and economists. The Commission held its first meeting in an ancient Cairo palace abandoned by the Mamelukes, and for three years it produced an impressive number of artistic and scientific studies on just about any aspect of Egypt.

Apart from the artist Vivant Denon, one of Champollion’s heroes, it was mostly to the engineers of the Commission that the early nineteenth century owed its knowledge of pharaonic art. After scientific sorties into the Said (the south of Egypt) in 1799, it became possible to recreate on paper the architecture, sculpture and crafts of the New Kingdom (1600-1000 BC) and the Ptolemaic period (300-30 BC).² Returning to France, the French savants brought back portfolios stuffed with notes and drawings. These results, published in the twenty one volumes of the Description de l’Égypte (1809-1828) under the editorship of the geographer Edmé Jomard, at last provided a reliable image of ancient Egypt, and through them the members of the expedition laid down the procedures for objective description that became the exclusive method for publishing Egyptian antiquities until the use of photography. Thus, from 1809 Champollion had access to Egyptian texts which were reproduced with sufficient precision to allow his breakthrough – finding the code of the hieroglyphs.

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The most important consequence of the Egyptian campaign was the discovery of the famous Rosetta Stone. In July 1799 a French officer, P.F.X. Bouchard, discovered in the foundations of Fort St Julien near Rosetta a fragment of basalt with some ‘inscriptions which would appear to be of interest’. The Rosetta Stone was covered with text in two languages and two scripts: hieroglyphs, demotic (cursive, late-Egyptian) writing and Greek. The French realised instantly that this fragment of basalt would one day provide the key to deciphering ancient Egyptian. In 1801, after the French surrender to General Sir John Hutchinson, the savants refused to hand over the fruits of their work, their notes, threatening to burn them all. One of them put it thus: ‘Without us this material is useless; neither you nor your people [the English] will understand it. Rather than be party to such evil and allow spoliation, if not vandalism, to take place, we will destroy everything that belongs to us, we will scatter it across the Libyan sands, we will hurl it into the sea, we will burn all these riches. Everyone is aware that you want to claim them as your own. Do so, but beware: history has a long memory; you too will be guilty of having burnt the library of Alexandria.’ The savants could keep their notes, though the Rosetta Stone (which is today in the British Museum) was confiscated.

The French had however taken the precaution of making several copies. It was on one of these that Champollion would be working as the last in a long line of scholars obsessed with breaking the hieroglyphic code. When in 535 AD the Byzantine Emperor Justinian forbade the cult of Isis and closed its temple on the island of Philae, there was no longer anyone capable of reading the long pharaonic litanies that covered the Egyptian temples. Even though the Coptic spoken by the Egyptian peasants (fellahs) was a language that had developed from ancient Egyptian, they had become unintelligible because written Coptic used the Greek alphabet to which several characters were added to transcribe sounds which were unknown to the Greeks.

Well into the Renaissance, these mysterious signs excited the imagination of scholars, without leading to any significant efforts to penetrate their mysteries. During the sixteenth century, however, Roman and Greek writers became popular again and several new attempts were made. But scholars continued to take as the basis for their studies the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo, written around the fourth century AD and containing information that was of little use. At the same time, potions produced from mummy powder became a trusted medical treatment and some merchants sold papyri in the Coptic language alongside, supplementing their profits from the lucrative business of trafficking unprocessed mummies. These became sought after because they contained information relevant to biblical studies. A Jesuit, Athanasius Kircher (1628-1680), thus developed a lively interest in the study of Coptic. He was the first to grasp one of the strands of ancient Egyptian when he suggested that Coptic and hieroglyphic writing were one and the same language, written in two different forms. Basing himself on the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo, Kircher unfortunately also thought that hieroglyphic writing was exclusively based on the use of images. His lapidary scientific methods and lack of a critical mind, moreover, gave free rein to his fertile imagination. Instead of translating a cartouche as the name of the Pharao Apries, for example, he put forward the following extravagant translation: ‘the rewards of the divine Osiris must be procured by means of sacred ceremonies and a chain of geniuses so that the rewards of the Nile may be obtained.’ After such flights of fantasy no serious scholar dared touch the subject again. Everyone agreed that there was a dramatic shortage of accurately copied ancient Egyptian texts.

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Athanasius Kircher (1628-1680)

This dearth of reliable material only disappeared upon the return of the French savants from Egypt, after the surrender to the English in 1801. At last, it was possible to set to work with some chance of success. However, there still remained an obstacle to decoding the hieroglyphs: Horapollo continued to be treated as a key to the language and scholars remained convinced that hieroglyphs related to ideas rather than sounds.

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Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832)

One of the aspects of Champollion’s genius was to detach himself from this idea. When he set to work on penetrating the great enigma, he was the only scholar for whom the conditions for breaking the code coincided. He had an excellent understanding of Coptic as well as a thorough understanding of, notably, Semitic, Syrian, Arab and Hebrew, and he even learned Chinese because he thought that perhaps the alphabet of this language was influenced by ancient Egyptian. But, most important of all, he had at his disposal the work of the Commission of Egypt and a copy of the Rosetta Stone.

Champollion was not without competition however. The English physician Thomas Young (1773-1829) was also trying to decode the hieroglyphs. He had identified the proper names of the Kings mentioned on the Rosetta Stone (it was known from the eighteenth century that these were surrounded by a ‘cartouche’). He also tried to translate the name of Ptolemy. But instead of translating his Roman epithet ‘autocrator’ he misunderstood this word and translated it as the surname of several Ptolemies, ‘Evergetes’. Likewise, where the hieroglyphs said ‘Caesar’, he thought they said ‘Arsinoe’. Young failed because he did not know any Semitic languages and his knowledge of Coptic was cursory; besides, his research only extended to a few ancient Egyptian texts. Young, however, can claim the distinction of ‘having discovered that hieroglyphic writing is not alphabetic and that hieratic and demotic writing – which derived from the hieroglyphs – is determined by the same principles’.³ These results made him think that he could deny all importance of Champollion’s work and accuse him of plagiarism. Nonetheless, the starting point of Champollion’s success lies where Young failed to make further progress.

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Thomas Young (1773-1829)

*

In order to understand the stages of Champollion’s achievement, one has to understand the principles of hieroglyphic writing. ‘Everything starts with a drawing.’ In order to write ‘goose’ they used the image of the animal. But ‘adhering strictly to this system would not allow you to write very ordinary words such as father, son, etc…, and one would be unable to indicate any grammatical inflection. You therefore have to resort to a very simple procedure: you replace the thing that needs to be characterised with a sign that has the same sound. Goose, which has the same consonants as the word son, serves [also] to write the word son. Or else you add a sign to images which can be read in several ways which is only for reading.’⁴ Thus the word which is transcribed in our alphabet as ‘RM’, meaning fish, consists of three elements in Egyptian: two phonetic signs, the ‘R’ and the ‘M’, and a figurative sign without a phonetic value (the image of a fish) which ‘determines’ to which category the word belongs.

The hieroglyphic system contains thus three types of signs: the first are figurative (or ideographic), directly representing the object, the second are phonetic, and the third are determinatives. Champollion already wrote in 1810, when he was barely twenty, that hieroglyphs ‘possess the characteristic of producing sounds’ because they transcribe proper names; he combined the brilliant intuition of a genius with rigorous methodology. This is how he himself described the method underlying his analysis: ‘The care I took not to invent anything myself but to have everything present itself through a multitude of facts, observed with attention and compared with strictness, this care, I would say, gives some weight to my conclusions and to the ideas which continue to be put forward by me.’

Between 1810 and 1820 Champollion assembled an impressive documentation which allowed him to decipher the name of one of the Ptolemies in the text of the obelisk on the island of Philae near Aswan. He proved that the name of the pharaoh was followed by the epithets: ‘living-forever’ and ‘loved-by-Ptah’. Moreover he succeeded in identifying in the same text the words ‘son of Osiris’. Here we see the first great step towards the unveiling of the mystery of these writings.

A little later, after having located the name ‘Cleopatra’ in the same text, he had the idea of comparing the Egyptian and Greek forms of this name. Thus, step by step, he increased the number of known letters of ancient Egyptian. More importantly, he started to understand the principles of the hieroglyphic system: Champollion had, in effect, discovered the use of the determinative. He was now close to translating the names of all the Roman emperors.

But there was one question that continued to vex him: could it not be that this phonetic writing was introduced in Egypt under the influence of the Greeks so as to transcribe names which were foreign to the Egyptian language? In that case the hieroglyphs used before the arrival of the Greeks could have been purely based on images, as had been generally assumed by scholars in the centuries before him.

It was on 14 September 1822 that he made his conclusive discovery. On that day Champollion received a number of documents sent by the architect Jean-Nicolas Huyot from the great temple at Abu Simbel. In them he found a crucial cartouche of four characters. Its last two characters were already known to him; they were two s’s. The first character stood for the sun, which in Coptic reads as ‘Ra’. As for the central character, this one was also engraved on the Rosetta Stone in an expression which translated the Greek word ‘anniversary’. There it read: day of birth. Champollion immediately saw that the final missing character should be equated with ‘m’, which, followed by the ‘ss’, transcribed the word ‘mise’: ‘put on the world’. Through this he rediscovered the name in Egyptian of its most celebrated Pharao, Ra-m-s(e)s. ‘Ra put him on the world’.⁵ After having announced his great discovery to his older brother, Champollion-Figeac, Champollion fainted, shattered by tiredness and emotion. His famous Lettre à M. Dacier was only written five days later. In it Champollion set out the principle of hieroglyphic writing, showing that it was ‘at the same time figurative, symbolic and phonetic, a character could represent either a simple sound, or two consonants, or an idea.’ But his discovery was not warmly received.

With the official announcement of his discovery, the dispute about hieroglyphs broadened sharply. One might understand the attitude of Thomas Young, who was driven by jealousy and bitterness, but Edmé Jomard (1777-1862), one of the original members of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, is much more difficult to understand. Jomard believed that his work could not be surpassed. Through him Egypt had spoken its final word; Egypt did not belong to this young upstart from the provinces. Any means would do to disparage the ‘decipherer’ Champollion: political denunciations, support to Thomas Young and even the writing of anonymous letters. Hence, from 1822, Champollion’s career would consist of a careful negotiation of the traps laid by the powers that be in Egyptology.

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Edmé Jomard (1777-1862)

However, the road now lay open for the understanding of ancient Egypt. Champollion was in a hurry to check his discovery on the ground, in Egypt itself. But he decided to first serve an apprenticeship in Italy. This country possessed the richest collection of pharaonic antiquities after Egypt due to their relevance to Biblical studies. On 7 June 1824, he arrived in Turin where he thought he would spend only a few days, though the abundance of papyri and statues was such that he stayed in this city until the 1st of March 1825. He got through a stupendous amount of work: perfecting his reading of hieratic and demotic writings, redrafting the list of pharaohs and their chronology, accumulating information concerning geography, religion, institutions, etc. Here Champollion had to convince himself of yet another new idea (which he vindicates in these letters); the autonomy of Egyptian art in relation to Greek art. These results were set out in two ‘Letters to the Duke de Blacas d’Aulps about the Museum of Turin’, published in 1824 and 1826.

On his return to Paris, Champollion found a very different atmosphere from the one before he left. The reign of Charles X had become much less severe towards former Bonapartists like himself and his resounding Italian successes obliged opponents such as Jomard to behave with more decency and subtlety. In the end Champollion found himself entrusted with an important mission as he had succeeded to wrest from the government their consent to an important acquisition of Egyptian antiquities. This concerned the acquisition of the magnificent Egyptian collection of the English consul in Egypt, Sir Henry Salt (1780-1827), for the Louvre. Champollion was charged with its transport to Paris. During this second voyage to Italy he heard of his appointment, on 14 May 1827, as Director of the Egyptian section of the Louvre. He founded the Egyptian museum with the Salt collection and next added a second one, procured by the French consul in Egypt, Bernardino Drovetti (1776-1852), the man who would turn out to be his next great foe.

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Bernardino Drovetti (1776-1852)

Champollion was now ready to leave for Egypt, the crowning glory of his work. He had minutely prepared his itinerary, as is clear from the memo he addressed to the King petitioning for this expedition:

The members of the Commission of Egypt and the majority of travellers who have followed in its footsteps, convinced perhaps that one would never be able to understand hieroglyphic characters, have attached less importance to copying exactly the long inscriptions in sacred signs which accompanied the figures represented in the historical bas-reliefs: they are almost all neglected, and often, while copying a few scenes of these bas-reliefs, one was satisfied with merely indicating the place these cartouches occupied… In our time… exact copies of the hieroglyphic inscriptions, which were inserted in such huge numbers, have acquired an immeasurable value and will realise, if not completely at least to a very large degree, the high expectations which the historical sciences attach to them.

Among his most important goals was gathering the history ‘of the delivery of Egypt from the yoke of the Hyksos herdsmen, the event to which the arrival and captivity of the Jews is related…’ He also wanted to acquire ‘exceptional works of art, which ‘are most suitable to enrich our royal collections and to enlighten the historical work of our scholars.’

On 18 August 1828, when Champollion set foot on Egyptian soil at last, he did not ignore modern Egypt. His letters often contain observations on life in Cairo. He ‘loved to admire the city of a thousand minarets, embraced by the setting sun behind the Mokattam mountain whose picturesqueness had