Cracking the Egyptian Code by Andrew Robinson

Author:Andrew Robinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd

Title page of the Lettre à M. Dacier, published by Champollion in 1822

(Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.)

Young’s work was conspicuously downplayed in the Lettre à M. Dacier – so patently, in fact, that anyone knowledgeable about the recent history of the Rosetta Stone could not fail to conclude that Champollion had done so deliberately. As Young would remark publicly in 1823, with notable understatement: ‘I did certainly expect to find the chronology of my own researches a little more distinctly stated.’ Champollion’s first publication of the decipherment in October 1822 shows that from the very beginning he was set on keeping all the glory for himself, since he could have had no other motive to downplay Young’s role at this time, before Young had made a single public criticism of him or his work.

Champollion’s attitude to Young is most evident if we consider Champollion’s description of how he identified Cleopatra’s cartouche and used it, with Ptolemy’s cartouche, to construct an alphabet. The following account is Young’s own translation from Champollion’s Lettre (the emphases are also Young’s):

The hieroglyphical text of the inscription of Rosetta exhibited, on account of its fractures, only the name of Ptolemy. The obelisk found in the Isle of Philae, and lately removed to London, contains also the hieroglyphical name of one of the Ptolemies, expressed by the same characters that occur in the inscription of Rosetta, surrounded by a ring or border [i.e. a cartouche], and it is followed by a second border, which must necessarily contain the proper name of a woman, and of a queen of the family of the Lagidae, since this group was terminated by the hieroglyphics expressive of the feminine gender; characters which are found at the end of the names of all the Egyptian goddesses without exception. The obelisk was fixed, it is said, to a basis bearing a Greek inscription, which is a petition of the priests of Isis at Philae, addressed to King Ptolemy, to Cleopatra his sister, and to Cleopatra his wife. Now, if this obelisk, and the hieroglyphical inscription engraved on it, were the result of this petition, which in fact adverts to the consecration of a monument of the kind, the border, with the feminine proper name, can only be that of one of the Cleopatras. This name, and that of Ptolemy, which in the Greek have several letters in common, were capable of being employed for a comparison of the hieroglyphical characters composing them; and if the similar characters in these names expressed in both the same sounds, it followed that their nature must be entirely phonetic.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.