Countless such stories circulate about him, along with rumors of his slave dealings: girls he brings from Ethiopia and eunuchs from the Sudan—young men captured from desert tribes and castrated by Coptic priests. More than half die while the survivors are sent to tend harems in Cairo.
But if Drovetti has many sins on his head, he remains a hero of sorts. Statues of him are raised in his native Italy, acknowledging the service he has performed in gathering together the magnificent works of Egyptian art and astonishingly beautiful papyri for Europe.
If he is despoiling Egypt, well, his admirers would say, consider the destruction visited on the antiquities by the Egyptians themselves. Indeed, Mohammed Ali, who rules Egypt after the French are forced out, desires to pull down the pyramids themselves in order to use their huge stones for the dams and canals he is building. He is only dissuaded by the difficulty he encounters in the attempt.
Drovetti has Mohammed Ali’s ear: Will the statues and papyri bring a high price? Will they win the good will of European nations? The pasha is only too ready to dispose of them, just as a century earlier tons of pulverized mummies were shipped to Europe either as fertilizer or as a medicine for every ailment from gout to impotence.
From Turin, Champollion will write to Drovetti, asking about the provenance of various antiquities, not knowing that the place of origin has been purposely obscured to conceal the brigandage by which they were obtained.
While polite in his response to the awkward questions, Drovetti’s civility masks a deep malice. Working behind the scenes, through a network of political friends, the consul will try to prevent Champollion’s visit to Egypt.
When Champollion, circumventing him, finally does arrive in Egypt, Drovetti will try to prevent him from traveling down the Nile, creating all kinds of obstacles to keep him under his eye in Alexandria. Wherever Champollion goes, he is in the way. Champollion is forever stumbling into one or another of the “turfs” into which Egypt has been divided by the principal collectors: Drovetti; Henry Salt, the British consul; the German consul—harsh, greedy men and their Egyptian accomplices who conduct “business” with duplicity and violence.
“. . . you will be pleased to hear of the discovery I made of a bilingual stone among Drovetti’s things,” Champollion’s rival, Young, writes during a visit to Italy, “which promises to be invaluable.”
Young engages an artist to copy the inscriptions on the object, but Drovetti denies him permission: “Drovetti’s cupidity seems to have been roused . . . and he has given me to understand, that nothing should induce him to separate it from the remainder of his . . . collection, of which he thinks it so well calculated to enhance the price. He refuses to allow any kind of copy of it to be taken.”
Thus the possibility of a great advance in the knowledge of the human past is turned into a familiar object of sordid barter: filthy lucre. As are moving and intimate images from the far distant past: a delicate carving of a queen playing on her game board with the god of Eternity . . . An inscription recalling an expedition to the eastern desert to quarry stone in which a gazelle giving birth is chanced upon and immediately sacrificed, together with her young, to the gods . . . The tale of Snefru, a pyramid-building pharaoh suffering from ennui five thousand years ago, asking his harem to become “sailors” and dressed in nothing but fish nets to row him about the sacred lake:
. . . a pleasure though I found none. And Zazamonkh said: “If Your Majesty would take the beauties of the palace to the lake of the Great House . . . Then will the heart of your majesty be made joyous as they row to and fro . . . Then will happiness enter your heart . . .”
The rapacious foreign consuls—Drovetti foremost among them!—with their corrupt agents, feverish with greed, scavenge among the ruins—oblivious to death by plague or massacre in the lawless countryside, obsessed with gain as they gather their great collections: sphinxes and gods and demons, the sculptures which have lain under the sand for an eternity, the powerful, brooding faces of kings which the modern world will gaze upon with awe.
THE DECIPHERMENT BEGINS with a handful of “letters” thrown down on a page of Jean Francois’ notebook—Ptolemaios, the Greek form of Ptolemy, next to the eight hieroglyphs encircled in the cartouche on the Rosetta stone: if the cartouche is encircling a foreign name, it stands to reason that these eight letters must spell Ptolemy:
Not only Champollion but Young had been working on the problem of the foreign names—or rather, the foreign “name” on the Rosetta stone, for there was only one of them, “Ptolemy.”
Of the eight letters, Young got five of them right, but more important than conjecturing the value of a letter more or a letter less was Champollion’s overall approach.
At this point, both men assume that only the names of foreign kings would have to be written with an alphabet in Egyptian. How else but phonetically could Ptolemy or Berenike or Xerxes or Darius, etc., be recorded?
The principle for indicating such sounds might be like that of a “rebus,” Jean François conjectured. It would be as if when writing the English word “seer” one used a picture of the sea plus an “ear.” Or as if “seersucker” was jotted down—as in a seersucker suit—by joining a bearded sage to a fool scratching his head—a sucker—and so on, using fertile, inventive combinations for every contingency.
Or, Champollion also opined, these special cases where phonetic writing was required might use the “acrophonic” principle—a “rabbit” for the letter “r,” a door for the letter “d,” etc.; the initial sounds of a word being indicated by its picture.
Apart from these foreign names, though, the pure hieroglyphs “depict the ideas and not the sounds of the language . . .” as Champollion puts it.
This far, there is general agreement. But Egyptian script is another matter. The script had been thought to be a different form of writing from the “pure” hieroglyphs, and what’s more an alphabetic or phonetic one.
On the Rosetta stone, the Egyptian section made use of both hieroglyphs and “demotic” script, the latest and simplest form of cursive Egyptian. And there are also two other Egyptian scripts (not used on the Stone): the so-called “hieratic” or priestly script; and linear hieroglyphs, both simplifications of the detailed carvings and paintings on tombs and monuments. For example, old man in its four forms:
Now while Young never learned to distinguish between “demotic” and “hieratic” and probably never even realized that linear hieroglyphs existed, Champollion immersed himself in the scripts obsessively. Going back and forth between them, he finally came to realize that all four forms of writing operated on the same principle. Therefore, the scripts—like the pure hieroglyphs—could not be phonetic since the pure hieroglyphs were not. They were not an alphabet.
Champollion became so expert in recognizing the correspondences between the scripts, that he would transcribe words, whose meaning he still did not know, back and forth from cursive to hieroglyph and from hieroglyph to cursive, until, like Coptic, it became second nature to him.
This fluency in the scripts—along with his deep knowledge of Coptic—gets him over his next and perhaps most formidable hurdle. But before he can take that leap, first there is a vital piece of the puzzle which Fate or Chance must supply.
For up until this point, the eight letter/hieroglyphs which have been deciphered from the name of Ptolemy are only guesses or conjectures. In order to proceed according to sound linguistic principles, Champollion needs to cross-check them against a second ancient source. And like the Rosetta stone, this second source—whatever it might be—must contain a known, foreign royal name other than Ptolemy—yet containing some of the same letters.
Even as Jean François wrestles with this problem, this second ancient source—a gift of the gods—has finally, after endless difficulties and delays lasting more than a decade, reached England.
Granada, Spain. 1809.
WILLIAM BANKES was a member of parliament and lord of Kingston Lacy, one of the great landed estate
s in nineteenth-century England. A nobleman who usually took his place among statesmen and generals and royalty, on this hot July day in 1809, he could be seen lolling in the shady hills above Granada with a band of Gypsies.
He had not accompanied Wellington to fight the French in Portugal and Spain. Rather, he had come along to watch his countrymen fight the French, led by Napoleon’s brother Joseph whom the Emperor has put in charge here. As the campaign drags on, Bankes, aesthete and misfit, becomes bored and wanders off to consort with thieves and Gypsies in the south. For a while he gives himself up to all-night revelries and feasts of miscellaneous scraps including a “sublime ragout of cat,” as he writes his friend, Lord Byron, “receipt [recipe] as follows . . .”
While thousands die in battle, in Spanish guerrilla actions and in brutal French reprisals, Bankes whiles away his time listening to love songs and having his fortune told by his new friends—none of whom will predict his actual fate: he will eventually be forced to flee England and live in exile to avoid imprisonment for “sexual depravity.”
For the time being, his passions are not yet criminal (or not yet exposed as such). By the time Wellington has left Spain as a hero to pursue a woman who had rejected him years before, Bankes has also left Spain, and is also in pursuit of an ancient object of desire: a fallen obelisk on the island of Philae he has long dreamed of claiming for his own.
Bankes had begun to covet the massive monument from the moment he had first seen Denon’s sketch of it in The Description of Egypt . . . as only a man of his means might covet a six-ton objet d’art—or as only the lord of Kingston Lacy might dream of transporting it from the remote island in the Nile where it had first been raised millennia before by that naturalist and bigamist Ptolemy VIII Physcon and his mother-daughter team of wives, Cleopatra II and Cleopatra III.
That there might be difficulties involved in bringing it to Kingston Lacy, even Bankes admits. But his determination only becomes stronger when, after making the long pilgrimage down the Nile, he finds the obelisk lying half covered with sand near a ruined temple.
In its original position, it would have soared skyward and shimmered with “electrum”—a gilding of white gold and silver long since stripped away by thieves. Even as it is—slender and graceful despite its weight; exquisitely carved and covered with hieroglyphs—it is more splendid and beautiful than he had imagined it.
Bankes stands before it lost in admiration, oblivious to the heat and the importunate beggars and clamorous guides surrounding him. What the monument once meant, what any of the obelisks could have meant for the Egyptians, he has no way of knowing. How could he—when even in antiquity the meaning of the obelisks had been forgotten? Even the ancient Romans brought the great monuments from Egypt in all ignorance. They had lashed the granite monoliths to three-tiered slave galleys, some of the obelisks two or even three times the size of the beauty which entranced Bankes. For the Romans, the obelisks are fitting symbols of the power, a world empire now passed to Rome.
Perhaps some old priest of Ra or Isis or Ptah, some living relic come to end his days in Rome, could explain the Egyptian theology: how the god Ptah, in the beginning of time, in darkness and solitude, had brought the world into being by marrying his hand to his member . . . And thus in the midst of the watery chaos called nun, a primeval mountain arose, formed of the god’s semen. This divine act of onanism is recorded by the obelisks which, recalling the first mountain, soar and shimmer in the sun.
More likely, though, the priest himself would no longer remember the ancient cosmogony. It is just one of many: a hundred contradictory explanations of existence were proposed by the metaphysicians of Egypt, whose wisdom consisted of including them all.
But of what use would it be for the old priest—even saying he remembered them—to try to explain the ancient images and ideas? How much easier to make up a rigmarole for any idle, rich Roman who cared to ask (and to pay for the answer): a hodgepodge as meaningless as the fake hieroglyphs sometimes found in Rome, copies of Egyptian writing made by charlatans for curious Romans.
These copies—sometimes copies of copies—will be unearthed long afterward, during the European Renaissance when the popes set chained criminals to digging in the ruins of Rome. Thus, there will be spurious and corrupt specimens of the hieroglyphs for Renaissance scholars to puzzle over . . . along with the authentic ones. The obelisks, hurled to the ground during barbarian invasions, have been raised once again by these same antiquity-hunting popes who now rule Rome in place of emperors. They crown them with crosses and sprinkle them with holy water and claim them in the name of Christ, though there is no mistaking the signs of the sun inscribed on them, or the profile of the jackal-headed Anubis, or the breasts of Hathor, goddess of pleasure and love.
WHILE IN EGYPT, Bankes arranges a meeting with the Italian strongman Belzoni who has been scavenging among the ruins in the south. And for a price Belzoni promises to circumvent the two most dangerous of the foreign consuls in Egypt, Drovetti, acting for France, and Salt, acting for England.
Working in stealth and secrecy, Belzoni floats the massive obelisk hundreds of miles upriver to the coast and thence to England. He manages to accomplish this feat with a small army of Egyptian fellahin he recruits, despite the fact that boats sink and piers collapse under its weight and the precious object is almost lost in the Nile.
When it finally does arrive in England, no less a personage than Wellington will lay the foundation stone for its new base in Kingston Lacy. However, by the time the obelisk stands erect, pointing toward the sky, Bankes has fled England—one step ahead of the law.
The name Kleopatra is found inscribed in Greek on the broken-off pedestal of Bankes’ obelisk; it is a name which provides the interlocking letters which should then appear in the hieroglyphs carved on the obelisk’s side: the “L”; the “T”; the “O”; and the “E” = the “AI” or “Y” sounds
PTOLEMY, PTOLEMAIOS, PTOLMYS
KLEOPATRA
However, the , the “T” in Ptolemy is represented by a hand, , “T” in Cleopatra. It is not a major stumbling block, in any case, since more than one sign can represent the same sound, Champollion knows. He goes ahead and applies the twelve sounds he has now proven to other cartouches with interlocking letters.
For example, there are the letters he now knows from a cartouche reproduced in The Description of Egypt:
Al SE TRS
By simply adding a “K” and an “N” the cartouche would yield “Alksentros” or Alexander—for Alexander the Great (keeping in mind that in hieroglyphs the vowels would probably be irregularly indicated—sometimes present, sometimes left out, as in Hebrew or Arabic):
ALKSNDRS
Once again, however, there is a difficulty. There are two “S”s in Alexander’s name. Sometimes they are both given by a double-bolt sign: . And sometime they are given as a folded cloth or bent scepter, the way the “S” is indicated in the Ptolemy cartouche: .
Champollion allows for the possibility of homophones, or two different signs expressing the same sound, in this case “S.”
He leaves the realm of speculation, though, when he comes to the interlocking “K” of Kleopatra, a semicircle or loaf of bread: ; and the “K” of Alexander, a basket with a handle: .
For here his knowledge of the scripts comes into play and he realizes that the demotic script form of the bread-loaf “K” in Cleopatra’s name equaled a hieratic script sign which in turn equaled the “K”-basket-with-handle sign in Alexander’s name.
In this way Champollion, unlike Young, proves, and does not merely guess, the existence of homophones—a fact that will eventually account for the huge numbers of letters found in the hieroglyphic alphabet.
Furthermore, he can be reasonably sure that the bread-loaf sign always seen in feminine names would = TE in Coptic, “the” (the feminine form of the article). Again drawing on his wide knowledge of Coptic, he makes the claim that the hand-sign which equals “T” is related to the Coptic word f
or hand, TOT—another example of the way in which initial sounds of words are used as letters (the “acrophonic” principle).
With this established, Champollion goes on to decipher a long list of Greek and Roman cartouches, increasing the letters of his Egyptian alphabet to over forty hieroglyphs which—he still believes—are used only for the writing of foreign names.
But Champollion begins to reconsider: there are five hundred words in the Greek section of the Rosetta stone corresponding to 1,419 hieroglyphic signs in the Egyptian section. If the hieroglyphs each stood for a single word, it would make for a great disproportion.
More important, using his alphabet of hieroglyphs to sound out groups of hieroglyphs, he begins to notice grammatical constructions as he pores over copies of the cartouches inscribed on the obelisks of Rome.
Domition his father Vespasian is written on the obelisk in the Piazza Navona—the hieroglyphic possessive form the same as the Coptic. Champollion considers the horned viper, the letter “F” in hieroglyphics— .
In linear hieroglyphics:
In hieratic:
In demotic:
In Coptic:
It is a letter whose shape and sound not only has remained constant for more than three thousand years but whose function—it is the third person pronoun in both Coptic and ancient Egyptian—remains the same.
In hieroglyphic texts even outside of the cartouches, in texts which could not be foreign names, certain signs—like the horned viper—are encountered again and again, with surprising frequency. If these hieroglyphs are sounds, letters expressing grammatical principles, if they are alphabetical, wouldn’t it mean—couldn’t it be—that the hieroglyphs constitute an alphabet after all, at least in part?
The Linguist and the Emperor Page 17