14 - 20 February 2002
Issue No.573
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 14 - 20 February 2002 Issue No.573 |
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Song of the stone
Egyptian Diaries: How One Man Solved the Mysteries of the Nile, Jean-François Champollion, London: Gibson Square Books, 2001. pp284
The cover of Egyptian Diaries, the first English translation of the letters and diaries of Jean-François Champollion, and covering the period of the "momentous journey he made to Egypt in 1828 to 1829" (as the afterward to this volume has it) makes a fairly concentrated sales pitch: "How one man solved the mysteries of the Nile," it announces, and then, beneath Champollion's name, the one thing everyone knows -- "The man who broke the code of the Rosetta Stone."
The colossus of Memnon and its companion
This latter, and conclusive claim to fame, though, had taken place some seven years before the commencement of these diaries and letters. It was on 14 September, 1822, that Champollion received the records, sent to him from Abu Simbel by the architect Jean-Nicolas Huyot, that contained the crucial cartouche of four characters: through cross referencing with the Rosetta Stone Champollion was able to decipher the name of Egypt's most celebrated Pharaoh, Ra-m-s(e)s, after which discovery he promptly fainted. The celebrated Lettre à M Dacier, in which the principle of hieroglyphic writing was explained as being "at the same time figurative, symbolic and phonetic, a character [representing] either a simple sound, or two consonants, or an idea" was not written until 19 September, five days after the initial shock of discovery and the fainting fit it had induced.
The introduction to these diary extracts and letters provides a useful summary of the professional jealousies and ugly politicking to which Champollion's discovery would give rise. Indeed, it was only after his return to France from Egypt in 1830 that Champollion was to begin to really reap the rewards that were rightfully his, whatever the whisperings of his spiteful elders, not least among them Edmé-François Jomard whose participation in Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, Jomard assumed, guaranteed him a monopoly on the interpretation of all things ancient. Sadly, Champollion's was a short period of grace: he died, aged 42, on 4 March, 1832, barely a year after being appointed an academician and professor at the Sorbonne.
Following his momentous 1822 discovery Champollion became increasingly aware of the importance of travel in Egypt, given the limitations of available materials for study in Europe. Jomard, though, consistently exercised his influence at the court of Charles X to scheme against his younger rival's plans to stage an expedition and it was not until 1827, by which time Charles X had become noticeably less severe in his attitude towards former Bonapartists, that Champollion found himself charged with the task of acquiring the Egyptian collection of Sir Henry Salt, one-time English consul in Egypt, for the Louvre. The confusion that followed in the wake of the Greek war of independence, and the defeat of the Ottoman forces in the Battle of Navarino on 20 October, 1827, though, would further delay his departure, and Champollion was to first set foot in Egypt only on 18 August, 1828, much to the annoyance of the French consul-general in Egypt, Bernardino Drovetti, who suspected that Champollion's arrival would not be in the interests of his most lucrative side- line, dealing in antiquities.
On 3 May, 1828, Drovetti replied to a letter of Champollion's, after a two month delay for which no explanation is given, lamenting, duplicitously, as it would turn out, that "if only Pasha Muhammad-Ali's guarantee to prevail over this unrest were required little would be easier to secure from him than what you are asking me, but he himself is the object of animousity because of his European leanings, and he does not wish to give me the assurances that I have asked from him on behalf of you and your associates."
Within just three months Champollion was to find himself in the presence of Egypt's ruler who, he writes to his brother on 24 August, granted the necessary permissions on the spot "together with two of the Pasha's kavass [guards] to accompany us and make sure we would everywhere be treated with due respect." His Highness, indeed, "saw us off with greetings by hand that could not possibly be more gracious," yet even this show of hospitality aroused no suspicion of Drovetti's role in the earlier refusals: "I am in my element here, deluged by everyone's attentions, particularly M Drovetti's," he writes elsewhere in the same letter. The man who had deciphered hieroglyphs was to find the manners of diplomacy somewhat more opaque.
Mohamed Ali was to remain something of a favourite of Champollion's for several more months: writing to his brother in mid-September Champollion reports "Muhammad Ali wanted to know just how far into Nubia I intended to push my expedition, and he assured me that we would receive due respect and welcome everywhere. I left him with great compliments which he humbly played down in an extremely likeable way." By July of 1829, however, Champollion was advising sheikhs on the west bank of Luxor on ways to avoid any new oppressive measures from the pasha, while earlier, in Cairo, he argued in his diary that "the hand of civilisation would move very fast here if there were a well-intentioned government presiding over the destiny of poor Egypt. But everything is consumed by a scorching totalitarian temperament." The honeymoon with Egypt's ruler, it seems, was over.
It took rather less time for Champollion to break with those of his compatriots that had earlier conspired against his mission. shortly after arriving in Alexandria, and on a note of impecunious optimism, he informed his brother that "everything is turning out in the best possible way for my future work, and the Alexandrians are so pleasant that I have thrown out all prejudices which the Egyptian Commissioners [Jomard among them] instilled against them."
"Doubtless, excavation of these hills will reveal highly important funerary monuments. This location appears to have been a necropolis for distinguished families. The lower part of the cover of the sarcophagus still lies on the rim of the crater. The top part was presented to the imperial museum of Vienna by M Rosetti:" a random extract of the kind of writing that comprises the bulk of the diary extracts included here. These, though, are punctuated by items of less specialised interest, some illustrated by the writer and reproduced here: drawings of dogs, for example, showing an upwardly curved tail that explain, he believes, that particular ideogram, as opposed to the image used for a jackal, or else sketches of the tattoos he sees on the faces of village women, recorded together with a description of the technique used to produce them. There are, too, moments of simple lyricism: "the long lines of sad and slow camels attached to each other," or an adulterated delight in his new surroundings, as in the sometimes excitable accounts of the many entertainments to which he was invited, or this description of Ibn Tuloun: "a model of chic and elegance...even though it is half destroyed...the delicacy of its sculpture is unbelievable and its suite of arcaded porticoes bewitching."
"I won't," Champollion writes to his brother, "tell you about the other mosques, nor the tombs of the caliphs and Mameluke sultans which form a suburb around the first that is even more magnificent; it would take too much time, as there is too much of ancient Egypt to be able to deal with the new." For which it is perfectly possible to feel just a hint of regret, should one not quite share Champollion's overwhelming enthusiasm for the antique.
Reviewed by Nigel Ryan
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