Ten Discoveries That Rewrote History

by Patrick Hunt

  Such was the continuing intense rivalry between France and Britain over Egyptian antiquarian interests, no doubt in part fueled by that French resentment over having lost the Rosetta Stone, widely popularized as the “key” to Egyptian hieroglyphs. By 1816 Thomas Young had long recognized the importance of the cartouche “envelope” seen around Egyptian royal names and had correctly translated the cartouche-enclosed name of Ptolemy in the hieroglyph portion of the text and accurately recognized sound signs for p, t, i, s and m, among others. Young’s credit, however, was acquired in Britain mostly after his death.

  After Napoleon’s 1815 defeat at Waterloo and exile to Elba, Champollion continued his unpopular public support for Napoleon and lost his professorship at Grenoble in 1821. His brother Jacques Joseph came to his rescue, and Champollion went to Paris to live under his brother’s roof.

  In 1819 Thomas Young published his translations of the names for Ptolemy and Cleopatra in A Supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which most British (but not French) historians of Egyptian linguistics maintain Champollion soon read and annotated with his own ideas.

  On September 14, 1822, Champollion received and read long-awaited and detailed reports of hieroglyphs at Abu Simbel, sent from a friend on his travels in Egypt. These included inscriptions for Rameses II and the god Thoth as well as others with Pharaoh Thutmose III. His sequence of deductions went something like this, although there is still a great deal of debate about the reconstructed events: By comparing them with copies of the Rosetta Stone text, Champollion could verify and reestablish some of the phonetic signs that Thomas Young had already suggested. These included excellent logical guesses for Ptolemaic variants of k, l, m, p, r, s and t, several of which were shared (l, p, t, r) between the royal cartouches (elliptical “braided” envelopes around names) for the names Ptolemy and Cleopatra. Champollion then saw a sun disc symbol as representing the god Ra and followed by a double s. He correctly deduced that the symbol in between the Ra and the ss must be an m sound. He verified this by examining an ibis symbol for the god Thoth, which was combined with a similar m plus s, establishing his primary breakthrough in a table of Egyptian phonetic sounds. Champollion was fortunate that Ptolemaic Egyptian had added some vowels to translate Greek equivalents, where earlier Egyptian did not use vowels. Champollion’s achievement—not unaided—was that he showed Egyptian could now be proven to contain some phonetic alphabet letter equivalents as well as readable nonphonetic symbols, now called logograms, the latter working like a rebus. A rebus is a combination of ideas, often abbreviated visually and phonetically. For example, modern symbols combining pictures for an eye and a heart and the letter U can be read as an English rebus for “I love you.” Without doubt it was the Rosetta Stone itself with its triple ancient language texts that provided the comparative linguistic framework and impetus for both Young’s and Champollion’s research. Public interest in this famous stone must have certainly attracted other researchers, such as Silvestre de Sacy, Johann Akerblad, and Stephen Weston, to its text again and again and likely whetted their scholarly appetites and linguistic abilities for its decipherment. Soon enough, Champollion could finally confirm his new hieroglyph assessments, the mathematician Young’s research having paved the way for years with so many logical tips and linguistic directions.

  Legend says Champollion went running to his brother’s office at the institute and shouted “I’ve done it!” The Champollion myth also says he collapsed for five days from his mental exertions, but this is likely a Romantic invention. Champollion’s older brother now had access to the French Institute for Inscriptions and Belles Lettres as secretary to one of its chief officers, Baron Joseph Dacier. To immediately publish his findings, Champollion wrote his famous Letter to M. Dacier over the next few days, yet cautiously backdated it to September 22, probably for fear of being upstaged. This backdating seems to many British historians to be evidence of guilt over an unacknowledged debt to Thomas Young. But there in his official document Champollion explained his seemingly individual discoveries and solutions for Egyptian hieroglyphs with tables of phonetic readings. Almost a week later he read this document in Paris before the entire assembly of the French Institute.

  The results were received with near spontaneous praise and wonder in Paris and soon after across all of Europe. Now a national hero for beating the British to the discovery, Champollion was universally hailed as a genius (which was true, after all) and the sole antiquarian linguist who had solved the mystery of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs (not true), whose meaning had been lost to the world of history for almost two millennia. Apparently Champollion’s address did not once credit anyone else, certainly not his British rival Thomas Young, whose years of careful work he had built upon without acknowledging his debt. What is not often recorded is that Thomas Young was in that very audience on that day, September 27, when Champollion read his report to thunderous acclaim. Without too much bitterness, Thomas Young wrote this subtly revealing letter to Sir William Hamilton, the most famous collector of antiquities of his generation:

  I have found here . . . M. Champollion, junior, who has been living for these ten years on the Inscription of Rosetta . . . It may be said that he found the key in England, which has opened the gate for him . . . You will easily believe that were I ever so much the victim of the bad passions, I should feel nothing but exultation at Mr. Champollion’s success.

  Perhaps oddly, the off-and-on correspondence between Champollion and Young continued until 1829 when Young died, generous with his research to the end. Champollion went on to become a chief officer of the Louvre Museum in 1826. Finally traveling to Egypt in 1828-29, he died in 1832 at age forty-one, having received, through to this day, the lion’s share of fame for decoding the Rosetta Stone.

  Conclusion

  The Rosetta Stone connects ancient Egypt to the Ptolemaic period and is without question our link to a forgotten language. As Egyptologist J. G. Manning recently (2007) wrote to me in response to my question about his view of its importance:The fortuitous discovery of the Rosetta Stone, and Champollion’s brilliant and groundbreaking work on the texts recorded thereon, opened up Egyptian civilization in its own terms for the first time. Simultaneously, and equally importantly, it shed important light on the relationship between the Ptolemaic kings and the Egyptian priests in an epoch when Egypt’s ancient past was being reinvigorated. The Rosetta Stone is, at once then, the foundation text of Egyptology and a crucial link between ancient Egypt and its legacy to the modern world.

  Seven years after Champollion’s momentous Paris event in 1822, Thomas Young died in 1829 in his mid-fifties without public acknowledgment of his huge role in deciphering the Rosetta Stone, remembered and honored instead in his lifetime and beyond for his scientific genius. Young was even elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 1827 as one of only eight foreigners, but ironically it was for Young’s accomplishments in the sciences and not for his decoding work on the Rosetta Stone and deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Even if we can never fully properly credit Young and Champollion and their predecessors equally, that our understanding of the world of ancient Egypt was forever changed after the Rosetta Stone is without question.

  Chapter 2

  Troy

  The Key to Homer and Greek History

  Hisarlik, Turkey, 1870

  Holding a favorite book in one hand, Heinrich Schliemann stood on the windy hill, facing north in the breeze off the sea. His eyes could just barely pick out the far sliver of water as the setting sun glinted off it. He looked down at his text. It was the Iliad, Homer’s great epic poem about Troy. Schliemann’s fingers moved down the text to where he could read about the streams of the Simois and the Scamander running to the sea. He looked up again and his eyes then traced along the valley below, just the kind of terrain where such rivers could have meandered thousands of years before. He calculated the distance to the sea and thought it was just about right, imagining Greek warships once landing where a bay might have b
een long ago, now filled up with silt. Then he pivoted around on his boot and turned south, straining his eyes in the distance to find the last light of the day glowing on a mountain that would have been easily visible for any people living on this hill so long ago. His eyes dropped back down to his text, and he searched for the passage about Mount Ida in Homer, mentioned in the poem as being to the south of Troy. The poem and the landscape in which he stood really did match, he realized. Noticing something for the first time, he stooped down and picked up an old broken piece of pottery, thick and worn. Turning it over in his hand, he wondered how long ago the complete pot had held water, grain or olive oil. With his boot he kicked at the soil beneath him, and dusk settled in, but not before he had brought to the surface several other potsherds. None of the broken pottery matched, he noted in the growing dimness. But this was a good sign, suggesting there must be a lot of broken pottery beneath his boots. Clearly a lot of pottery meant a substantial settlement of people had lived here at one time. His mind racing, Heinrich Schliemann wondered if this really could be Troy. Putting the broken potsherds in his coat pocket, he walked down the hill, vowing to return in the morning with some tools and baskets. He began to believe that Homer’s details about the fortress of Troy perfectly matched this old hill. He could almost hear the cries of battle in his imagination, one strong voice belonging to the mighty Greek hero Achilles. . . . Whether or not this story is true, Schliemann was right that Troy existed.

  The destruction of Troy

  The hilly streets ran with blood and the night air was filled with the clashing of swords and shields and the cries of people as doors were battered down. Everywhere was the choking smell of fires burning. The high and broad walls of massive stone were intact, but the wooden gates were breached. The bright flames could be seen for miles over the blackened silhouettes of falling towers, and a thick column of smoke billowed above the proud fortress city that guarded these hills and valleys where two continents came together. If people could flee, they went eastward and southward away from the marauders whose ships were beached not far below the hill. The smoke was visible for miles as mighty Troy was destroyed.

  After hauling the bloodied surviving men and weeping women away into slavery, the looted city would be abandoned for centuries. Erosion of the upper mud brick walls, dissolving into indistinguishable soil, would eventually affect most of the remaining walls. Wind-driven seeds would grow in the ash and soon new grasses would cover the softening hill, waving in the wind from the sea. Then native shrubs would grow back over the bits of stone foundations and finally trees would make the landscape no different from any other in the region. If an eagle or seabird landed on the wooded hill a few generations later, it would detect almost no trace of its great past. The birds would not hear echoes where battle cries once rang out, or before that the songs of children, the banter of merchants and the decrees of kings and queens. Only silence would reign at Troy for a long time.

  We are fairly able to reconstruct this event or one like it; this is not just the subject of poetry and myth but, in fact, the closing hours of a great civilization that came crashing down around 1200 to 1100 BC. Whether there was one war or a series of many smaller battles, whether the cities were invaded from the outside or collapsing from within, this story became legend. This legend was repeated at Mycenae, Thebes, Tiryns and many other fortress cities of the Late Bronze Age in and around Greece when order descended into chaos and the Dark Ages fell upon Greece for hundreds of years. In that intervening period, the time of heroes and the legend of Troy was not forgotten but the language changed greatly. The new way of writing its sounds was altogether different; instead of the old method of inscribing a picture-based type in the Late Bronze Age (ending around 1100 BC), as seen on clay tablets found at many of the old sites like Knossos and Pylos, the new writing form used an alphabet borrowed from the Phoenician traders after 900 BC. What had been written in the old form is now called Linear B and is identified as a Mycenaean-style text. Now we know that Linear B was essentially an early form of Greek. Both the language and the new way of writing it as an alphabet changed in the transition of civilizations.

  But these new Greeks remembered the stories that were handed down from parent to child, from poets reciting by the hearths to audiences eager to hear of past glories. The story of Troy was a fabled one they all knew from being told many times over. No doubt the rapt listeners could anticipate some familiar words and phrases and even appreciate the poets’ innovations about once-great Troy.

  Since the nineteenth century, Troy has been transformed from myth into history. While stories about Troy and the Trojan War have dominated the Western imagination for millennia, they also inspired the foundation of modern archaeology. Every new generation peering back through time at Troy seems to need to ask: Why is Troy and its discovery so important? The rediscovery of Troy helped establish modern archaeology, as matching Homer’s epic poem to the landscape set precedents for other discoveries along the same method of matching texts to topographies. In fact, Troy was not just a place connected to the Bronze Age epics; it had many layers of civilization, stretching over thousands of years. The first excavator at Troy, Heinrich Schliemann, amazed the world with startling showmanship and a knack for media manipulation, but, however questionable his motives and methods, he persuaded the world that Troy had really existed. Troy serves as a good example of a kernel of historical truth embedded in myth. One of the core myths of Troy, the Trojan War, would not have happened because of a beautiful woman like Helen, but would more likely have been a territorial battle over trade rights. Another core myth, the Trojan Horse, also has historical roots in the westward migration of horses and their first arrival in the Mediterranean world from the central Asian steppe lands. Troy was also known outside Greece; texts from the Bronze Age Hittites, a prominent culture of ancient Turkey, show they knew the place, also called Ilion, as Wilusa. This proves Troy’s existence at that time. Long after Schliemann did his initial work at Hisarlik, Turkey, renewed modern excavations at Troy continue to demonstrate its importance.

  On the hill of ruined Troy in 480 BC, the Persian emperor Xerxes ordered the sacrifice of a thousand cows before setting out to attempt to conquer Greece, affirming Homer’s legends that this site marked the age-old conflict between Asia and Europe. After conquering Constantinople in 1453, Sultan Mehmet II rode his horse up the then mostly bare hill at Hisarlik, Turkey, again marking the site for Asia instead of Europe. This is in contrast to Homer’s poem where the Greeks burn Troy, then called Ilion. As late as 1453, people knew this was the site of ancient Troy. But after the Byzantine world was conquered and Constantinople became Istanbul, the historical Troy was replaced by the Troy of myth. Indeed, by four hundred years later, when Schliemann made his discovery, Troy had been relegated to myth, and very few believed it had even existed except in the imagination of Homer and his Greek heirs.

  The rediscovery of Troy helped establish modern archaeology

  Before 1872, the majority of European scholarship treated Troy solely as the subject of an epic poem, certainly among the world’s greatest, but a place unlikely to exist outside its mythological subject. Poetry after all could hardly be expected to be historical, regardless of how many people could recite many lines from Homer by heart from their school days. Evoking the names of heroes like Achilles, Odysseus and Hector was merely a literary pastime; no one tried to assert in the early nineteenth century that these legendary figures existed. The same judgment was made about Troy, immortalized again much later than Homer in Christopher Marlowe’s lines about Helen: “Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships / and burnt the topless towers of Ilium?” Furthermore, archaeology as we know it now was not an academic discipline taught in the great European universities. Archaeology was still in its infancy and consigned mostly to treasure hunting for antique sculptures to adorn the great houses of Europe as a romantic reminder of ancient times.

  While we can trace the Western ideas of archae
ology back to the ancient Greeks—a historian named Idomeneus in the third century BC wrote about “ancient words” (archaiou logou)—it was apparently mostly about the study of old languages. The very definition of the word archaeology has greatly changed in the last few hundred years.

  The first great English dictionary writer, Samuel Johnson, suggested around 1755 that books record all we can know about history, expressing no perception about what of the past could be recorded through physical remains. Archaeology was then defined as what could be gleaned about general ancient history from texts, and it was only gradually expanded over the next century to include the study of material remains. Troy’s role in that changing perception should not be underestimated. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, one of the first uses of the word archaeology in English occurs in 1607 with “archaiology of the Jews,” but it was mostly about texts and general antiquity. By 1872 the dictionary said, “Archaeology displays old structures and buried relics of the remote past.” This evolution of the word is confirmed by 1880, after Troy’s seminal excavations, when we read, “The archaeologists have raised the study of antiquities to the level of a science.” Suddenly with Troy—where Heinrich Schliemann was searching for an ancient lost city—and related methodological excavations, there was a huge watershed change. Archaeology became both a merging and redividing of the old discipline of ancient history, reading ancient texts, and the new discipline, “reading” what was in the very ground. Now the ancient materials themselves, the buried past, formed the new focus of archaeology.

  By approaching Troy and other ancient places in a new way, pioneering archaeologists set about proving hypotheses that a given ancient city existed rather than just plundering a site for its antiquities. In this way Troy served a higher purpose: it was necessary to engage the skeptical academic world with material evidence. Schliemann is surrounded by a swirl of controversy today, not the least of the charges being that he might have fabricated the so-called Treasure of Priam or salted the site with modern or reworked artifacts. But what is often forgotten is that he heralded a whole new era, in which material artifacts buried for millennia have a story to tell. In Schliemann’s case, his version of the story may not be reliable, but the heart and soul of archaeology is the reconstruction of the past from its material remains. Thus, Schliemann and his early work at Troy deserve credit for drawing the world’s attention to Troy as history instead of Troy as simply myth.