The Riddle of the Rosetta

How an English Polymath and a French Polyglot Discovered the Meaning of Egyptian Hieroglyphs

Jed Z. Buchwald, Diane Greco Josefowicz, Jed Z Buchwald

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780691233963, 9780691200903
• eBook ISBN: 9780691200910
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: Social Sciences

A major new history of the race between two geniuses to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, set against the backdrop of nineteenth-century Europe

In 1799, a French Army officer was rebuilding the defenses of a fort on the banks of the Nile when he discovered an ancient stele fragment bearing a decree inscribed in three different scripts. So begins one of the most familiar tales in Egyptology—that of the Rosetta Stone and the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs. This book draws on fresh archival evidence to provide a major new account of how the English polymath Thomas Young and the French philologist Jean-François Champollion vied to be the first to solve the riddle of the Rosetta.

Jed Buchwald and Diane Greco Josefowicz bring to life a bygone age of intellectual adventure. Much more than a decoding exercise centered on a single artifact, the race to decipher the Rosetta Stone reflected broader disputes about language, historical evidence, biblical truth, and the value of classical learning. Buchwald and Josefowicz paint compelling portraits of Young and Champollion, two gifted intellects with altogether different motivations. Young disdained Egyptian culture and saw Egyptian writing as a means to greater knowledge about Greco-Roman antiquity. Champollion, swept up in the political chaos of Restoration France and fiercely opposed to the scholars aligned with throne and altar, admired ancient Egypt and was prepared to upend conventional wisdom to solve the mystery of the hieroglyphs.

Taking readers from the hushed lecture rooms of the Institut de France to the windswept monuments of the Valley of the Kings, The Riddle of the Rosetta reveals the untold story behind one of the nineteenth century's most thrilling discoveries.

PART 1

A QUAKER’S ODYSSEY

CHAPTER 1

DINNER AT LONGMAN’S

In May 1803, the publisher Thomas Norton Longman arranged a Saturday supper for a half-dozen guests at his offices in Paternoster Row, “that crowded defile north of the Cathedral” where stationers and booksellers hawked their wares in the shadow of St. Paul’s. As the church bells tolled quarter-hourly reminders of mortality, smudge-fingered “despots of literature” toiled in the streets below—less noisily, perhaps, but fixed more strongly on the alternative prospect of immortality offered by books. Not that the secular option was easier: “Many a groan,” one contemporary observed, “has gone up from authors in this gloomy thoroughfare,” particularly outside “the immense emporium of Longman’s,” which stretched across two storefronts decorated with “little Ionic pilasters, and [an] iron crane, emblematic of the very heavy commodities in which the proprietors are sometimes compelled to deal.”¹

Any bookman could appreciate the irony. Those splendid neoclassical pilasters juxtaposed with a burdened crane neatly expressed the trouble with literate culture, at least from a publisher’s point of view: a book was a durable object of determinate heft but uncertain value. If some books had the power of monuments, others were just so much dead weight. As the city’s lamplighters plied their trade, a debate arose around Longman’s table that reprised different facets of the same incongruity. In what did a tradition consist? To what extent were ancient sources of any tradition—sacred, secular, classical, scriptural—relevant in rapidly modernizing London? How much authority should be ascribed to ancient sources, and which ones, and why? Among the guests at Longman’s dinner was the physician and natural philosopher Thomas Young. How he tried to read the writing systems of ancient Egypt, and why he only partly succeeded, are questions bound up with the table talk that night at Longman’s. Young’s work with the Egyptian scripts occurred at a moment when traditional forms of authority were rapidly ceding ground to secular ones, particularly modern science. Although the Egyptian controversy was still in the distance, by 1803 Young was already involved in broader but related arguments about the relevance of antiquity to contemporary problems.

“A plain man of the old citizen style,” the redoubtable Longman had selected his guests with a canny publisher’s eye, attentive to their overlapping interests in antiquity and science, subjects of special concern to Longman.² Four of Longman’s guests were additionally committed to establishing a distinct literary heritage for Scotland at a time when Edinburgh vied with London for cultural dominance by positioning itself as morally and aesthetically superior to the corrupt imperial metropolis.³ Two of Longman’s guests that evening, David Irving and Thomas Campbell, were Scots poets with pronounced antiquarian interests. A third was a promising young writer by the name of Walter Scott, then a barrister and sheriff in Selkirk who had just published three volumes of folk ballads collected from the northern border; Longman would soon become his London publisher of a related work, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805).⁴ Joining them was the poet, antiquary, and political satirist George Ellis and two representatives of scientific London: Humphry Davy, presently the toast of London’s social scene thanks to his engaging public lecture series at the newly established Royal Institution, and Young himself, who was also lecturing at the Royal Institution and who was Ellis’s longtime friend. “Such guests as these,” Irving later recollected, “could not now be assembled at any table in the kingdom.”⁵

Of this group, Ellis was the éminence grise. A fellow of the Society of Antiquaries since 1800, Ellis had cemented his reputation with Specimens of the Early English Poets (1790), a wide-ranging miscellany that brought antique poetic forms to contemporary readers; a second edition appeared in 1801, expanded to include examples of poetry in the languages of medieval Scotland and Ireland. Irving was finishing Lives of the Scottish Poets, the first Scots literary historiography, a work he considered no mere scholarly exercise but the first “literary biography of Scotland.”⁶ In contrast to Ellis and Irving, on the evening of Longman’s party, Scott was only thirty-two and virtually unknown. Nevertheless, he was, according to Irving, “at all times conspicuous for his social powers, and for his strong practical sense … full of good humor and [with] many stories to tell.” In keeping with his excellent reputation as a lecturer, the chemist Davy also showed himself admirably, “willing to talk, in an easy and unpretending strain, on any subject that was discussed.” Irving was less impressed by Campbell, who was still a relative newcomer. His pretensions offended Irving, who recalled that “[a]mong these men, Campbell did not appear to much advantage: he was too ambitious to shine, nor was he successful in any of his attempts.”⁷

Irving’s criticism hinted at trouble simmering beneath the evening’s surface while adroitly sidestepping the fact that Campbell was only half-responsible for the argument that boiled over by evening’s end. New methods of textual criticism had recently arrived on British shores, threatening to supplant traditional appreciations of classical sources on antiquarian or aesthetic grounds.⁸ That evening at Longman’s, Young locked horns with Campbell specifically over “the Homeric Question,” an ancient debate concerning Homer’s authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey that had sparked a reassessment of the authority of classical antiquity, its relevance to contemporary audiences, and the relationship of ancient texts to oral sources. Irving recalled that Campbell “was much inclined to dilate on the subject of Homer, and the poems which bear his name, but on various points was opposed with equal decision and coolness by Dr. Young.” Their argument, Irving noted, turned specifically on the significance of Friedrich August Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795), which Irving credited as having “introduced a new era in classical criticism.” The Prolegomena refreshed the question, attributed originally to a group of Alexandrine skeptics known as the Chorizontes, of whether a single person—the bard, Homer—was responsible for the epics. Considered a modern approach to ancient texts, Wolf’s philology carried a strong whiff of fashionable, scientific London, which eagerly sought fresh uses for antiquity in architecture, literature, and fine arts.⁹

Expressions of Scots nationalism may have been uniquely problematic for Young, who was still smarting from an anonymous attack on his wave theory of light in the January 1803 issue of the Edinburgh Review. The author of the attack was Henry Brougham, an Edinburgh lawyer and sometime mathematician who was also one of the Review’s founders.¹⁰ The attack was understood specifically in terms of Scottish perfidy. At the end of the nineteenth century William Henry Milburn, an American Methodist preacher, characterized the affair as nothing less than an infiltration into England from the barbaric North: “No sooner had Young’s ‘Memoir on Light’ appeared than Brougham rushed to attack him with all the fierce savagery of his cattle-stealing, house-burning, marauding forebears,” he wrote, further describing Brougham as a “fierce and turbulent young borderer” with “a memory like a row of pegs to hang grudges on.”¹¹ Young replied to Brougham in a detailed but comparatively restrained rebuttal that concluded with a vow thereafter “to confine my studies and my pen to medical subjects only,” a promise soon abandoned.¹² Others more talented at public relations rallied to his defense, and the matter was dropped in favor of broadsides against the Edinburgh Review and its writers.¹³ Nevertheless, the wound remained. All Campbell had to do was salt it.

Recalling the fight, Irving gave few specifics, so we can’t be sure of the precise terms of either Campbell’s position or Young’s. We can infer some possibilities, however, by examining Wolf’s approach in terms of what it likely implied for them both. Rather than using the Homeric texts as a pretext for effusions over the talents of the bard, Wolf focused on the long trail of transcribed, translated, incomplete, and fragmentary documents comprising the Homeric corpus.¹⁴ By separating the remnant text from its origins, Wolf made it difficult for readers to read Homeric epics literally, that is, to slip imaginatively from Homer’s text to Homer’s world. The boundary Wolf set upon the reader’s imagination would have proven uncongenial to Campbell, who hoped to move readers to identify with collective experiences—of battle, of nationality—through epic poems intended to suggest not fantasy re-creations of the ancient world but its historical and social realities. Wolf’s argument, in contrast, asserted that contemporary Homeric texts not only bore little resemblance to the original poems but also revealed more about the poems’ Alexandrine reception than about either Homer or his context. “The Homer that we hold in our hands now,” Wolf wrote, “is not the one who flourished in the mouths of the Greeks of his own day, but one variously altered, interpolated, corrected, and emended … Learned and clever men have long felt their way to this conclusion by using various scattered bits of evidence; but now the voices of all periods joined together bear witness, and history speaks.”¹⁵

History did indeed speak—though most frequently in ways that modern historians are not likely to applaud. As the favored historical mode of the period, antiquarianism—history as delectation, according to which objects were valued simply for their age or aesthetic qualities—was closely allied to the interests of virtually all the guests at Longman’s party, albeit in different ways. Antiquarianism was, first of all, a way to claim a heritage. In 1818, Scott commissioned J.M.W. Turner as one of several artists to make the sketches for his Provincial Antiquities (1819–26), a catalog of the remnants of Scotland’s remote past that were still extant and visible in the landscape.¹⁶ During a two-week trip around the north, Turner filled three sketchbooks with drawings of prominent ruins juxtaposed with smaller human and animal figures, according to a compositional principle similar to that of his Fifth Plague of Egypt. Although these compositions connected viewers with an exalted heritage, they did so ambiguously, by putting them on the scene of its decay. In Scott’s The Antiquary (1816), ambiguity gave way to outright irony, as the novel poked fun at both the antiquarian’s fantasies of belonging to an exalted past and the scholar who threatened to undermine those fantasies using philology.

Wolf’s historicism notwithstanding, he never claimed that close study of the Homeric texts could offer no knowledge whatsoever of remote antiquity. On the contrary, he believed that Homer was at least partially retrievable by means of the separation of older material—at least as far as Wolf would identify it—from later editorial intrusions.¹⁷ As we will see in later chapters, this methodically comparative approach bore a strong resemblance to the talent for sorting and classifying that Young would later bring to bear on many projects, including his work on the Egyptian scripts. In a cognate manner, Wolf had combed the Venice scholia for inconsistencies of tone, diction, word choice, punctuation, and meter that signaled minute departures from a more authentically Homeric presentation, at least by his lights.¹⁸ The result was dry, tedious, and not especially rewarding to those, like Campbell, who doggedly sought evidence in ancient epics to underwrite claims to a very old, literate civilization with which he could identify on grounds of national heritage.¹⁹

Campbell would certainly have been wary of Wolf’s interpretation of the Homeric epics. To him it was unthinkable that the poems as they stood did not fully convey the rich texture of antique life, and his own verses were steeped in the sentimentality he wished to attribute to Homer. In 1803, Campbell’s offerings included a lyric poem about the battle of Hohenlinden. “The combat deepens. On, ye brave, / Who rush to glory, or the grave!” is an apposite example of his style. Another of his efforts, “Lochiel’s Warning” (1802) effected a similarly lugubrious commemoration of the bloody defeat of Charles Stuart’s forces at the battle of Culloden Moor, with consequent crackdowns on Highlanders. Just as he sought to evoke the emotions of battle in his own poetry, Campbell similarly thought to hear the cries of the Achaeans in the Homeric epics. From the very sonority of the ancient words, he opined, anyone might glean their emotional meaning. Concerning Homer, he once asked a friend, “Don’t the words carry the meaning to your ear?” She replied disappointingly that the poem, “very fine [as] it is,” nevertheless conveyed “no distinct ideas to my mind.”²⁰

Campbell’s heated lyricism appealed to contemporary moods that followed the loss, in the eighteenth century, of the traditional Highlands world. This upheaval...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• Part 1. A Quaker’s Odyssey
• Part 2. Antiquity Embraced
• Part 3. Scripts and Bones
• Part 4. Reading the Past
• Part 5. Antique Letters
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index