MUSEUM OF NATURE

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31832, 9 November 1968, Page 5

MUSEUM OF NATURE

Voice Of The Pharaohs

• Contributed by the Canterbury Museum)

Jean Francois Champollion walked briskly into the Royal Academy of Inscriptions at io o’clock on the morning of September 17, 1822. The crisp air of Paris seemed to intensify his excitement.

A conclave of elderly scholars had assembled in the great chamber that morning to hear of the momentous discovery that this youthful genius had made. Champollion appeared even younger than his 32 years in the presence of this elderly assembly. Monsieur Dacier, secretary of the academy, introduced him with very few words and left him alone at the lectern. Jean Francois took the top paper from the sheaf he had carried with him and began to read: “This is the ninth year. The month is Xandikos, the fourth day. Under the majesty of Horus-Ra, the Pharaoh hath ascended upon the throne of his father, lord of the crown of Upper Egypt and of the crown of Lower Egypt, mighty one of strength . . .”

Oldest Samples The old gentlemen listened with fascination. They knew what Champoilion had accomplished. He had at last deciphered the hieroglyphics of Egypt. He was reading a translation of the writings on the famous Rosetta Stone, found near the old Arab fort at Rashid on the Rosetta branch of the Nile Delta. He was opening the key to the secrets of Egypt’s lost past. A scholar whispered to one of his colleagues, “This is the voice of the Pharaohs speaking again.” And so it was. The oldest samples of Egyptian hieroglyphics date back to about 3500 8.C.; from the first method of straight picture drawing. Because this method did not permit the writing of any thought that came to mind, it was necessary to evolve a form of alphabet, but this took centuries.

The big stride forward came when a script representing sound rather than idea or object gradually came into being. An alphabet based on sound permitted the Egyptians to put the most abstract ideas into their writing. In time, they introduced a priestly or

hieratic script used exclusively for sacred carvings on houses of worship and royal sarcophagi. Another script, called demotic, became the handwriting for everyday use.

Then Egypt fell. In turn the country was overrun by Assyrians, Persians, Macedonians, Romans. Other forms of writing became commonplace until the once popular pictures of hawks, hands, thrones, etc., had slipped beyond the recognition of even the oldest scribe. Centuries passed. From time to time travellers and scholars peered at the strange inscriptions on monuments and the stones of Old Egypt and wondered what it was all about.

But in the early 1800 s a new army was to invade Egypt. This was the French Army under Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon’s shortlived occupation of Egypt kindled intense interest in the lost days of the Pharaohs. Shiploads of papyrus rolls and copies of hieroglyphic markings from obelisks found their way to the European centres of learning.

Careful Study In a tranquil oasis of a French university. Jean Francois Champollion pondered the script of the Egyptians. He had already mastered the better known languages like Greek and Latin. He possessed a thorough knowledge of Sanskrit, Arabic, Hebrew and at least a dozen more Oriental languages, living and dead. He knew Coptic so well that he kept his diary in that language, and this was the successor tongue to the one the last Pharaohs spoke. Here was the man who could make the Pharaohs speak again. The romantic name of Cleopatra was one of the first two words that Champollion decoded. On an obelisk decorated with picture carvings, he detected two sets of symbols enclosed in a cartouche (an elongated circle). The same monument also had carved at its base the Greek words for "Cleopatra” and “Ptolemy”, the surname of the queen. From this he dedued that the word-cutters must always have encircled royal and divine names in their script. Therefore he could work on deciphering the letters in the words “Cleopatra” and “Ptolemy.” From the symbols in the cartouche he finally extracted eleven letters. This was an excellent start but not enough. Imagine trying to read English with a knowledge of less than half of its letters. .

Three Scripts In the midst of his laborious work came a stroke of good fortune. A French soldier on duty as an officer of engineers at Rashid, Egypt, unearthed a broken black basalt slab, 3ft

7in long, 2ft 6in wide and lOin thick. In its original form, with no parts broken off, the stone must have stood five or six feet high and was probably mounted on a pedestal. Time and sand had done their work, however, and the stone, which came to be known as the Rosetta Stone, was not very impressive at first glance. But close examination revealed that inscribed on it was a long passage in three scripts—l 4 lines of hieroglyphics, 32 lines of demotic and 54 lines of Greek characters.

Greek! Jean Francois Champoilion knew Greek as well as he knew his native French. This was the longawaited chance to unravel the script and explore Egypt’s written past. He began by translating the Greek tract into Coptic, matching sounds and looking for repeated symbols as he had done with the obelisk. Slowly a pattern emerged. At least basically, the hieroglyphics were an alphabetic system of writing.

Twenty-year Task That morning in 1822, Champollion spent 25 minutes reading the contents of the Rosetta Stone to the chamber of distinguished scholars. As he read the closing passage slowly, all knew that years of work lay ahead. ‘This decree shall be engraved upon a tablet of hard stone in the writing of the words of the Gods and in the writing of books and in the writing of the Greeks . . . and it shall stand by the side of the Ptolemy . . . the beloved of Ptah, the God who appeareth, the lord of benefits.”

It took Champollion twenty years to unscramble the secret of hieroplyphics with complete accuracy. Why did a linguistic genius need so much time? First, Egyptian script had no punctuation. It was one flow of uninterrupted symbols, some reading left to right, some reading up and down. Second, it used no vowels. Think of the number of possible combinations that the symbols “m and n” standing together could be translated' into as words, for example. Then, too, Egyptian was a flowery language and the scribes never abandoned fully their practice of adding unnecessary and antique symbols that stood for whole words.

A cast of the Rosetta Stone was on display for many years at the Canterbury Museum, but recently it has been placed in storage. It Is proposed that it will once again be displayed when the planned additions are erected in 1970. In the meantime visitors to the Museum can still ponder over the meanings of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics by studying the writings' pp the mummy at the head of the stairs above the Pacific Hall.-J.H.J.