Story“1822, deciphered hieroglyphs” (4/5). In competition with the Briton Thomas Young, it is indeed to the French Egyptologist, passionate about languages, that the merit goes for having decoded the writing of ancient Egypt, making possible the study of an entire civilization.
For a long time, some denied Jean-François Champollion the paternity of deciphering hieroglyphs. For a long time, some, especially on the other side of the Channel, attributed it, out of bad faith or chauvinism, to the Briton Thomas Young (1773-1829). For a long time, the research of the two men was presented as a fierce competition. Still, the game was uneven and it’s doubtful the Englishman could have achieved the same results as the Frenchman. Why ? “Young was a jack-of-all-trades and Champollion a monomaniac”, slice Vincent Rondot, director of the department of Egyptian antiquities at the Louvre. Egyptology was almost a hobby for Young, first a doctor and a physicist, while everything in Champollion’s personal history – it is said that he learned to read alone from his mother’s missal – shows him focused on the languages. He will study about thirty of them.
Eighty-eight volumes of his writings are kept at the National Library of France (BNF), which represents several thousand pages. “They show someone who is extremely productive, explains Vanessa Desclaux, in charge of the collection of ancient Egyptian manuscripts at the National Library of France. Papers go back to 1810, when he was not yet 20 years old, but the majority of the written production dates from 1818 until his death in 1832. For the hieroglyphs, we have tracings, stampings, drawings by his own hand and even a kind of experimentation, because he wondered how to collect the inscriptions as faithfully as possible at a time when there was no photography yet. It compiles all the sources that Antiquity has left on Egypt. We see him copying and re-copying the same notes several times to distribute them in different folders. He constantly classifies and reclassifies his knowledge. »
“To write foreign names, which meant nothing to the Egyptians, the latter used a completely phonetic system” – Simon Thuault, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pisa, Italy
Thomas Young’s only advantage is to have on hand, in London, the Rosetta Stone and its text in three scripts (hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek), while his rival has to make do with copies which he considers poor. quality. To date, nothing proves that Jean-François Champollion has ever seen the original stele with his own eyes… To move forward, the two men (and other scholars with them) use a method which consists of comparing the texts and to attempt to match repeated Greek words to sequences of signs which are also repeated in the hieroglyphic and demotic versions, which makes it possible to mark up texts in the two Egyptian scripts.
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