The Code Book

by Simon Singh

  The most famous, and arguably the most romantic, of all decipherments was the cracking of Egyptian hieroglyphics. For centuries, hieroglyphics remained a mystery, and archaeologists could do no more than speculate about their meaning. However, thanks to a classic piece of codebreaking, the hieroglyphs were eventually deciphered, and ever since archaeologists have been able to read firsthand accounts of the history, culture and beliefs of the ancient Egyptians. The decipherment of hieroglyphics has bridged the millennia between ourselves and the civilization of the pharaohs.

  The earliest hieroglyphics date back to 3000 B.C., and this form of ornate writing endured for the next three and a half thousand years. Although the elaborate symbols of hieroglyphics were ideal for the walls of majestic temples (the Greek word hieroglyphica means “sacred carvings”), they were overly complicated for keeping track of mundane transactions. Hence, evolving in parallel with hieroglyphics was hieratic, an everyday script in which each hieroglyphic symbol was replaced by a stylized representation which was quicker and easier to write. In about 600 B.C., hieratic was replaced by an even simpler script known as demotic, the name being derived from the Greek demotika meaning “popular,” which reflects its secular function. Hieroglyphics, hieratic and demotic are essentially the same script-one could almost regard them as merely different fonts.

  All three forms of writing are phonetic, which is to say that the characters largely represent distinct sounds, just like the letters in the English alphabet. For over three thousand years the ancient Egyptians used these scripts in every aspect of their lives, just as we use writing today. Then, toward the end of the fourth century A.D., within a generation, the Egyptian scripts vanished. The last datable examples of ancient Egyptian writing are to be found on the island of Philae. A hieroglyphic temple inscription was carved in A.D. 394, and a piece of demotic graffiti has been dated to A.D. 450. The spread of the Christian Church was responsible for the extinction of the Egyptian scripts, outlawing their use in order to eradicate any link with Egypt’s pagan past. The ancient scripts were replaced with Coptic, a script consisting of 24 letters from the Greek alphabet supplemented by six demotic characters used for Egyptian sounds not expressed in Greek. The dominance of Coptic was so complete that the ability to read hieroglyphics, demotic and hieratic vanished. The ancient Egyptian language continued to be spoken, and evolved into what became known as the Coptic language, but in due course both the Coptic language and script were displaced by the spread of Arabic in the eleventh century. The final linguistic link to Egypt’s ancient kingdoms had been broken, and the knowledge needed to read the tales of the pharaohs was lost.

  Interest in hieroglyphics was reawakened in the seventeenth century, when Pope Sixtus V reorganized the city of Rome according to a new network of avenues, erecting obelisks brought from Egypt at each intersection. Scholars attempted to decipher the meanings of the hieroglyphs on the obelisks, but were hindered by a false assumption: nobody was prepared to accept that the hieroglyphs could possibly represent phonetic characters, or phonograms. The idea of phonetic spelling was thought to be too advanced for such an ancient civilization. Instead, seventeenth-century scholars were convinced that the hieroglyphs were semagrams—that these intricate characters represented whole ideas, and were nothing more than primitive picture writing. The belief that hieroglyphics is merely picture writing was even commonly held by foreigners who visited Egypt while hieroglyphics was still a living script. Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian of the first century B.C., wrote:

  Now it happens that the forms of the Egyptians’ letters take the shape of all kinds of living creatures and of the extremities of the human body and of implements … For their writing does not express the intended idea by a combination of syllables, one with another, but by the outward appearance of what has been copied and by the metaphorical meaning impressed upon the memory by practice.… So the hawk symbolizes for them everything which happens quickly because this creature is just about the fastest of winged animals. And the idea is transferred, through the appropriate metaphorical transfer, to all swift things and to those things to which speed is appropriate.

  In the light of such accounts, perhaps it is not so surprising that seventeenth-century scholars attempted to decipher the hieroglyphs by interpreting each one as a whole idea. For example, in 1652 the German Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher published a dictionary of allegorical interpretations entitled Œdipus œgyptiacus, and used it to produce a series of weird and wonderful translations. A handful of hieroglyphs, which we now know merely represent the name of the pharaoh Apries, were translated by Kircher as: “the benefits of the divine Osiris are to be procured by means of sacred ceremonies and of the chain of the Genii, in order that the benefits of the Nile may be obtained.” Today Kircher’s translations seem ludicrous, but their impact on other would-be decipherers was immense. Kircher was more than just an Egyptologist: he wrote a book on cryptography, constructed a musical fountain, invented the magic lantern (a precursor of cinema), and lowered himself into the crater of Vesuvius, earning himself the title of “father of vulcanology.” The Jesuit priest was widely acknowledged to be the most respected scholar of his age, and consequently his ideas were to influence generations of future Egyptologists.

  A century and a half after Kircher, in the summer of 1798, the antiquities of ancient Egypt fell under renewed scrutiny when Napoleon Bonaparte dispatched a team of historians, scientists and draftsmen to follow in the wake of his invading army. These academics, or “Pekinese dogs” as the soldiers called them, did a remarkable job of mapping, drawing, transcribing, measuring and recording everything they witnessed. In 1799, the French scholars encountered the single most famous slab of stone in the history of archaeology, found by a troop of French soldiers stationed at Fort Julien in the town of Rosetta in the Nile Delta. The soldiers had been given the task of demolishing an ancient wall to clear the way for an extension to the fort. Built into the wall was a stone bearing a remarkable set of inscriptions: the same piece of text had been inscribed on the stone three times, in Greek, demotic and hieroglyphics. The Rosetta Stone, as it became known, appeared to be the equivalent of a cryptanalytic crib, just like the cribs that helped the codebreakers at Bletchley Park to break into Enigma. The Greek, which could easily be read, was in effect a piece of plaintext which could be compared with the demotic and hieroglyphic ciphertexts. The Rosetta Stone was potentially a means of unraveling the meaning of the ancient Egyptian symbols.

  The scholars immediately recognized the stone’s significance, and sent it to the National Institute in Cairo for detailed study. However, before the institute could embark on any serious research, it became clear that the French army was on the verge of being defeated by the advancing British forces. The French moved the Rosetta Stone from Cairo to the relative safety of Alexandria, but ironically, when the French finally surrendered, Article XVI of the Treaty of Capitulation handed all the antiquities in Alexandria to the British, whereas those in Cairo were allowed to return to France. In 1802, the priceless slab of black basalt (measuring 118 cm in height, 77 cm in width and 30 cm in thickness, and weighing three-quarters of a ton) was sent to Portsmouth onboard HMS L’Egyptienne, and later that year it took up residence at the British Museum, where it has remained ever since.

  Figure 54 The Rosetta Stone, inscribed in 196 B.C. and rediscovered in 1799, contains the same text written in three different scripts: hieroglyphics at the top, demotic in the middle and Greek at the bottom. (photo credit 5.2)

  The translation of the Greek soon revealed that the Rosetta Stone bore a decree from the general council of Egyptian priests issued in 196 B.C. The text records the benefits that the Pharaoh Ptolemy had bestowed upon the people of Egypt, and details the honors that the priests had, in return, piled upon the pharaoh. For example, they declared that “a festival shall be kept for King Ptolemy, the ever-living, the beloved of Ptah, the god Epiphanes Eucharistos, yearly in the temples throughout the land from the 1st of Troth
for five days, in which they shall wear garlands and perform sacrifices and libations and the other usual honors.” If the other two inscriptions contained the identical decree, the decipherment of the hieroglyphic and demotic texts would seem to be straightforward. However, three significant hurdles remained. First, the Rosetta Stone is seriously damaged, as can be seen in Figure 54. The Greek text consists of 54 lines, of which the last 26 are damaged. The demotic consists of 32 lines, of which the beginnings of the first 14 lines are damaged (note that demotic and hieroglyphics are written from right to left). The hieroglyphic text is in the worst condition, with half the lines missing completely, and the remaining 14 lines (corresponding to the last 28 lines of the Greek text) partly missing. The second barrier to decipherment is that the two Egyptian scripts convey the ancient Egyptian language, which nobody had spoken for at least eight centuries. While it was possible to find a set of Egyptian symbols which corresponded to a set of Greek words, which would enable archaeologists to work out the meaning of the Egyptian symbols, it was impossible to establish the sound of the Egyptian words. Unless archaeologists knew how the Egyptian words were spoken, they could not deduce the phonetics of the symbols. Finally, the intellectual legacy of Kircher still encouraged archaeologists to think of Egyptian writing in terms of semagrams, rather than phonograms, and hence few people even considered attempting a phonetic decipherment of hieroglyphics.

  One of the first scholars to question the prejudice that hieroglyphics was picture writing was the English prodigy and polymath Thomas Young. Born in 1773 in Milverton, Somerset, Young was able to read fluently at the age of two. By the age of fourteen he had studied Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Hebrew, Chaldean, Syriac, Samaritan, Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Ethiopic, and when he became a student at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, his brilliance gained him the sobriquet “Phenomenon Young.” At Cambridge he studied medicine, but it was said that he was interested only in the diseases, not the patients who had them. Gradually he began to concentrate more on research and less on caring for the sick.

  Young performed an extraordinary series of medical experiments, many of them with the object of explaining how the human eye works. He established that color perception is the result of three separate types of receptors, each one sensitive to one of the three primary colors. Then, by placing metal rings around a living eyeball, he showed that focusing did not require distortion of the whole eye, and postulated that the internal lens did all the work. His interest in optics led him toward physics, and another series of discoveries. He published “The Undulatory Theory of Light,” a classic paper on the nature of light; he created a new and better explanation of tides; he formally defined the concept of energy and he published groundbreaking papers on the subject of elasticity. Young seemed to be able to tackle problems in almost any subject, but this was not entirely to his advantage. His mind was so easily fascinated that he would leap from subject to subject, embarking on a new problem before polishing off the last one.

  Figure 55 Thomas Young.

  When Young heard about the Rosetta Stone, it became an irresistible challenge. In the summer of 1814 he set off on his annual holiday to the coastal resort of Worthing, taking with him a copy of the three inscriptions. Young’s breakthrough came when he focused on a set of hieroglyphs surrounded by a loop, called a cartouche. His hunch was that these hieroglyphs were ringed because they represented something of great significance, possibly the name of the Pharaoh Ptolemy, because his Greek name, Ptolemaios, was mentioned in the Greek text. If this were the case, it would enable Young to discover the phonetics of the corresponding hieroglyphs, because a pharaoh’s name would be pronounced roughly the same regardless of the language. The Ptolemy cartouche is repeated six times on the Rosetta Stone, sometimes in a so-called standard version, and sometimes in a longer, more elaborate version. Young assumed that the longer version was the name of Ptolemy with the addition of titles, so he concentrated on the symbols that appeared in the standard version, guessing sound values for each hieroglyph (Table 13).

  Table 13 Young’s decipherment of the cartouche of Ptolemaios (standard version) from the Rosetta Stone.

  Although he did not know it at the time, Young managed to correlate most of the hieroglyphs with their correct sound values. Fortunately, he had placed the first two hieroglyphs (), which appeared one above the other, in their correct phonetic order. The scribe has positioned the hieroglyphs in this way for aesthetic reasons, at the expense of phonetic clarity. Scribes tended to write in such a way as to avoid gaps and maintain visual harmony; sometimes they would even swap letters around in direct contradiction to any sensible phonetic spelling, merely to increase the beauty of an inscription. After this decipherment, Young discovered a cartouche in an inscription copied from the temple of Karnak at Thebes which he suspected was the name of a Ptolemaic queen, Berenika (or Berenice). He repeated his strategy; the results are shown in Table 14.

  Of the thirteen hieroglyphs in both cartouches, Young had identified half of them perfectly, and he got another quarter partly right. He had also correctly identified the feminine termination symbol, placed after the names of queens and goddesses. Although he could not have known the level of his success, the appearance of in both cartouches, representing i on both occasions, should have told Young that he was on the right track, and given him the confidence he needed to press ahead with further decipherments. However, his work suddenly ground to a halt. It seems that he had too much reverence for Kircher’s argument that hieroglyphs were semagrams, and he was not prepared to shatter that paradigm. He excused his own phonetic discoveries by noting that the Ptolemaic dynasty was descended from Lagus, a general of Alexander the Great. In other words, the Ptolemys were foreigners, and Young hypothesized that their names would have to be spelled out phonetically because there would not be a single natural semagram within the standard list of hieroglyphs. He summarized his thoughts by comparing hieroglyphs with Chinese characters, which Europeans were only just beginning to understand:

  Table 14 Young’s decipherment of , the cartouche of Berenika from the temple of Karnak.

  It is extremely interesting to trace some of the steps by which alphabetic writing seems to have arisen out of hieroglyphical; a process which may indeed be in some measure illustrated by the manner in which the modern Chinese express a foreign combination of sounds, the characters being rendered simply “phonetic” by an appropriate mark, instead of retaining their natural signification; and this mark, in some modern printed books, approaching very near to the ring surrounding the hieroglyphic names.

  Young called his achievements “the amusement of a few leisure hours.” He lost interest in hieroglyphics, and brought his work to a conclusion by summarizing it in an article for the 1819 Supplement to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

  Meanwhile, in France a promising young linguist, Jean-François Champollion, was prepared to take Young’s ideas to their natural conclusion. Although he was still only in his late twenties, Champollion had been fascinated by hieroglyphics for the best part of two decades. The obsession began in 1800, when the French mathematician Jean-Baptiste Fourier, who had been one of Napoleon’s original Pekinese dogs, introduced the ten-year-old Champollion to his collection of Egyptian antiquities, many of them decorated with bizarre inscriptions. Fourier explained that nobody could interpret this cryptic writing, whereupon the boy promised that one day he would solve the mystery. Just seven years later, at the age of seventeen, he presented a paper entitled “Egypt under the Pharaohs.” It was so innovative that he was immediately elected to the Academy in Grenoble. When he heard that he had become a teenage professor, Champollion was so overwhelmed that he immediately fainted.

  Figure 56 Jean-François Champollion. (photo credit 5.3)

  Champollion continued to astonish his peers, mastering Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Ethiopic, Sanskrit, Zend, Pahlevi, Arabic, Syrian, Chaldean, Persian and Chinese, all in order to arm himself for an assault on hieroglyphics. His obsession is illus
trated by an incident in 1808, when he bumped into an old friend in the street. The friend casually mentioned that Alexandre Lenoir, a well-known Egyptologist, had published a complete decipherment of hieroglyphics. Champollion was so devastated that he collapsed on the spot. (He appears to have had quite a talent for fainting.) His whole reason for living seemed to depend on being the first to read the script of the ancient Egyptians. Fortunately for Champollion, Lenoir’s decipherments were as fantastical as Kircher’s seventeenth-century attempts, and the challenge remained.

  In 1822, Champollion applied Young’s approach to other cartouches. The British naturalist W. J. Bankes had brought an obelisk with Greek and hieroglyphic inscriptions to Dorset, and had recently published a lithograph of these bilingual texts, which included cartouches of Ptolemy and Cleopatra. Champollion obtained a copy, and managed to assign sound values to individual hieroglyphs (Table 15). The letters p, t, o, l and e are common to both names; in four cases they are represented by the same hieroglyph in both Ptolemy and Cleopatra, and only in one case, t, is there a discrepancy. Champollion assumed that the t sound could be represented by two hieroglyphs, just as the hard c sound in English can be represented by c or k, as in “cat” and “kid.” Inspired by his success, Champollion began to address cartouches without a bilingual translation, substituting whenever possible the hieroglyph sound values that he had derived from the Ptolemy and Cleopatra cartouches. His first mystery cartouche (Table 16) contained one of the greatest names of ancient times. It was obvious to Champollion that the cartouche, which seemed to read a-l-?-s-e-?-t-r-?, represented the name alksentrs—Alexandros in Greek, or Alexander in English. It also became apparent to Champollion that the scribes were not fond of using vowels, and would often omit them; the scribes assumed that readers would have no problem filling in the missing vowels. With two new hieroglyphs under his belt, the young scholar studied other inscriptions and deciphered a series of cartouches. However, all this progress was merely extending Young’s work. All these names, such as Alexander and Cleopatra, were still foreign, supporting the theory that phonetics was invoked only for words outside the traditional Egyptian lexicon.