Temple lintel of King Amenemhat III from Hawara, Egypt, 12th Dynasty, 1855–1808 BCE
(Picture: British Museum)Ask any of the staff members helpfully loitering around the entrance to the British Museum’s Great Court and they’ll tell you - there are three things that people ask for. The mummies, the toilets and the Rosetta Stone.
The latter, for future reference, is normally found in the Egyptian Sculpture gallery, though it’s usually impossible to see due to the mass of people crammed around its case, holding up their phones for a snap before moving on, one more world-famous artefact ticked off the list.
For the next five months or so, however, the Rosetta Stone will be the centrepiece of the museum’s new exhibition, Hieroglyphs: unlocking ancient Egypt, which celebrates the 200th anniversary (almost exactly) of the decoding of one of human history’s oldest written languages.
It tells the story of our slow road to understanding hieroglyphs, how two men pursued a (mostly) cordial rivalry over the course of a 20-year race to decipherment, and the vast wealth of invaluable information that the decoding – which happened thanks to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone – gave to the world.
The stone will sit alongside a host of exceptional loans, and treasures from the museum’s own collection. Alongside statues, sarcophagi and a number of beautiful texts, from love poetry to tax returns, international treaties and shopping lists, highlights of the exhibition include the “Enchanted Basin” – a black granite sarcophagus from about 600 BCE, richly decorated with hieroglyphs and images of gods. It was actually the coffin of Hapmen, a nobleman of the 26th dynasty - it was thought on discovery that bathing in it could offer magical relief from the torments of love.
Then there’s a length of mummy bandage of Aberuait, on loan from the Musée du Louvre and never seen in the UK before. A souvenir from an ‘unwrapping party’ held in 1698 CE – yes early European collectors would unwrap a 1,500 year old mummy, cut up the bandages and hand them out – with a mummy from the royal burial grounds at Saqqara, about 30km south of modern-day Cairo.
There’s the even older, beautifully painted cartonnage containing the mummy of the lady Baketenhor, dating from about 945 to 715 BCE, which arrived in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1821 (though she was briefly removed, she was returned to her box mercifully unmolested, and less invasive digital techniques have since been used to identify the various objects carefully concealed within her wrapping).
It will be shown alongside warm correspondence between 19th century scholars about the hieroglyphs it carries, soon after the decoding breakthrough - of which more later - that expanded our knowledge of Egypt’s history by some 3,000 years.
Ever since we stopped being able to read them, humans have been fascinated by hieroglyphs. You can see why – the sheer richness and beauty of the carving or painting on what were often high-end objects, and the mystery of who these lavish people were must have been maddening.
And for an awfully long time, we had completely the wrong end of the stick as to what they meant. Scholars from both East and West (many of whom no doubt thought of themselves as men of reason) indulged in all kinds of flights of fancy as to what the symbols – birds and eyes, boats and snakes, and is that water? Do we think that’s a cup? – might represent.
Medieval Islamic scholars leaned on “magical interpretations” says the exhibition’s curator, Ilona Regulski; they thought the markings contained “secret knowledge, the key to the laws of nature”, whatever that means, while European scholars “contributed to the misunderstanding of ancient Egypt owing to their tendency to view the culture through the lens of classical and biblical sources”.
They thought hieroglyphs were symbols that corresponded to the essential natures of the things they represented (again, whatever that means). It didn’t occur to them that it might actually be writing.
One or two early Arabic scholars did dare to posit the idea that hieroglyphics might be a language, but that work was mostly lost to view and not picked up again for centuries due to Western scholars mainly not bothering to learn Arabic (eye roll).
Things started to move again with the massive increase in Egyptian artefacts travelling to Europe in the 17th century, due to the explosion in popularity of Cabinets of Curiosity (the site of the infamous unwrapping parties). Scholars started to get excited about it again, but decipherment still far eluded them.
Then everything changed, with the discovery by a classically educated young French lieutenant of a large, dark, very dusty stone in the rubble of the old fort at Rashid (then known as Rosetta; now a thriving fishing port about an hour’s up the coast from Alexandria) in 1798.
It was a time of both an enthusiastic flowering of interest in ancient cultures, and an equally if not more enthusiastic treasure hunt.
In 1798, Napoleon invaded Egypt to cut off Britain’s lucrative overground trade with India and it led to an amazing discovery. During the conflict, Lieutenant Pierre-Francois Bouchard was supervising the rebuilding of a 15th-century fort using ancient Egyptian blocks, when he noticed an interesting slab poking out of the rubble.
It bore three distinct texts, each in a different script - ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs at the top, ancient Greek at the bottom and something else in the middle, now known to be Demotic, a cursive script that represents a later development of the ancient Egyptian language.
If these three texts were the same, reasoned Bouchard, might it prove useful in the decoding of hieroglyphs? He took it to the Commission of Arts and Sciences, 167 scholars known as the ‘savants’ Napleon had brought with his invading force, and, according to the exhibition’s curator Ilona Regulski, “its importance was recognised immediately”.
In the meantime, the British, unhappy about the French incursion into Egypt, retaliated, led by Lord Nelson and in 1801, the French capitulated. Following an occasionally bad-tempered negotiation, the savants relinquished much of their scholarly material and acquisitions (though in the spirit of global intellectual advancement they were allowed to take copies).
The stone’s discovery inspired a fever of scholarly endeavour for the next 20 years, bolstered by the material that flooded out of Egypt in the decades that followed the British victory (the de facto ruler Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman viceroy, was keen to retain both British and French support for his modernising agenda, and granted huge numbers of permissions to excavate, collect and remove pharaonic antiquities). In the end though, it came down largely to the work of two men, to unlock 4,000 years of ancient Egyptian history.
Thomas Young was a British physician and polymath who also established the wave theory of light, among other remarkable achievements (he literally pursued his hobby of deciphering one of the world’s oldest written languages in his “leisure hours”). Jean-Francois Champollion was the precocious son of a rather rackety bookseller, who became fluent in Coptic, Ancient Greek, Hebrew, Latin and Arabic and gave his first public paper on the decipherment of Demotic while still in his teens.
The process by which both Young and Champollion incrementally but steadily worked towards decipherment is so complicated that trying to understand it made me want to lie down in a desert tomb. But it is, as ever, not a story of individual genius but one of scholarly collaboration and breakthroughs precipitated by other people’s work.
Both men published frequently and though they didn’t agree on many things, it was clearly Young’s work that led Champollion’s own thinking down the necessary path, to the point of understanding that hieroglyphs are not just symbolic, alphabetic or phonetic, but all three.
This led the Frenchman, on September 14, 1822, to stagger to his brother’s front door clutching a sheaf of notes and gasp, “Je tiens mon affaire, vois!” (“look, I’ve got it!”) before “collapsing in a dead faint”. As Regulski notes dryly, Champollion’s eureka moment “literally knocked him off his feet”.
Inevitably, the Rosetta Stone, the British Museum’s star exhibit, is, in and of itself, a bit dull. It carries the rather tedious, formulaic text, in triplicate, of a decree issued at Memphis (the original none, not the one in Tennessee) on March 27, 196 BCE, establishing the divine cult of the new ruler, 13-year-old King Ptolemy V.
It describes what the priests should be doing to glorify and deify the king and the various reasons for doing it, including his generous gifts of silver and grain to the temples, and his damming of the excess waters of the Nile during a period of particularly high flooding, to benefit the farmers. Basically is a glorified parish newsletter.
But what it represents, its status as the key to 4,000 years of civilisation, means that this slab of black granodiorite still has a tight hold on the imaginations of scholars and the public alike.
The Rosetta Stone, the first object of its kind to be found, has been in the British Museum’s collection since 1802. Since its discovery, 28 stelae engraved with the same decree have been discovered, and 21 of those remain in Egypt. But it’s this one (which, comparatively, is not in the best nick, having been broken at some point during the French-British handover) that people want to see.
Just this week a new petition has been set up by prominent Egyptian archaeologists for its return to the country, though according to the British Museum, there has been no formal request for the return of the stone from the Egyptian government. Even among all these treasures, it’s still the star of the show.
