Story“1822, deciphered hieroglyphs” (2/5). They were the vestiges of a dead language since the IVᵉ century and the closure of the temples of ancient Egypt. Before the French Egyptologist decoded them, many researchers had tried to unlock their secrets.
The oblivion of hieroglyphics? “Another blow from the Christians! », quips Christophe Barbotin, curator of the Egyptian antiquities department at the Louvre Museum. At IVe century, the hieroglyphic system is actually ” breathless “, he adds. The language it codes, ancient Egyptian, has not been spoken for a long time in the country where people speak Coptic or Greek. “We are witnessing a clean slate phenomenon, explains Vincent Rondot, director of the Egyptian antiquities department at the Louvre. For the people of the time, who turned more and more massively towards Christianity, it was a question of putting an end to the false gods. »
The understanding of hieroglyphs, intimately associated with the cult, therefore disappeared with the closing of the last temples. The language was already dead, writing in turn ended up meaning nothing to anyone. All the more so since Egypt may have been visited by a number of Greek and Roman historians and geographers in the time of the pharaohs, “none tried to learn hieroglyphic writingunderlines the Egyptologist Simon Thuault, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pisa (Italy). The Greeks must have considered it archaic. For them, alphabetic writing and Greek writing in particular was the ultimate system, the best that could exist. And then it was certainly not easy to find someone to provide the training. »
Fanciful interpretations
We see all the same, at Ve century before our era, a Herodotus travel to Egypt where, despite the help of a translator, he does not understand the functioning of the hieroglyphic system. “The Greeks and Romans sought explanations that corresponded to their philosophy, to their way of thinking, continues Simon Thuault. This writing made of images gave them the impression of being a set of pure symbols. Herodotus, Plato, Diodorus of Sicily, Strabo and later authors will take up this interpretation without questioning it. » They consider that the hieroglyphs do not encode a language but that each conveys an idea and that the system is similar to a kind of universal language. A hermetic writing, cults full of mysteries, even prohibitions, it did not take much more to “confirm the idea of a civilization of secrecy, of powerful but buried knowledge”, concludes Vincent Rondot.
In the Middle Ages, Arab scholars made real but vain attempts to break through the writing of the ancient Egyptians. This no longer seems to interest Europeans until the Renaissance: “We have new access to ancient sources, we rediscover the taste for the translation of ancient texts”, recalls Simon Thuault. And among the manuscripts that are unearthed is that of a certain Horapollo, a philosopher from Alexandria (and of Greek culture) who lived in the Ve century. His Hieroglyphicaa treatise on the writing of the Egyptians, were printed at the beginning of the XVIe century. Horapollon makes an analysis of the image of 189 hieroglyphs of which he delivers a symbolic or allegorical interpretation. “He contributes to saying that the hieroglyphs, whose sacred character has remained perceptible, served to encode knowledge, reserved for an elite, which had to be kept secret”, explains Vanessa Desclaux, in charge of the collection of ancient Egyptian manuscripts at the National Library of France.
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