Cracking the Rosetta Stone code

Richard Collins on the translator whose persistence solved a mystery.

FIGEAC is a picturesque town on the banks of the river Célé, in the Lot region of France. Stone and half-timbered houses, with rich carvings and ironwork, adorn the winding streets of its medieval centre. In a courtyard there is an extraordinary object, a giant underfoot representation of a slab discovered in Egypt, by a French army officer, in 1799.

The 120 x 80cm Rosetta Stone, now in the British Museum, was carved in 196 BC on the orders of Pharaoh Ptolemy V. It informed his subjects of measures to be taken for coronation celebrations; statues to be erected, tax rebates, etc. But the real importance of the stone is that its inscription appears in three languages. One of them is Greek and this, it was hoped, would enable the two other scripts to be deciphered.

But cracking the ancient codes proved far more difficult than expected and the experts of the day remained baffled.

Visitors to Egypt, nowadays, are told that the ibis, with its long curlew-like beak, represented Toth, the God of writing. His crescent-shaped bill resembled a new moon and he rose at night to vanquish the darkness. The falcon stood for Horus, son of Isis.

Cats were revered; the first domesticated ones were brought into Egyptian homes around 2,000BC. Evidently, we now know a great deal about Egypt civilisation; visitors to the pyramids of Giza and the temples of Karnak have at their disposal accurate and detailed histories.

That we are so well informed is due, in no small measure, to the work of an extraordinary genius from Figeac. Jean-Francois Champollion, the son of the town’s bookseller, was born in 1790. At the age of 11 he determined to crack the codes of the Rosetta Stone. To his elders this seemed a silly fantasy; Jean-Francois was regarded as a dunce. Taken out of school, he was coached by a priest, Abbé Calmels, who soon recognised in the boy an extraordinary facility for languages. By the age of 14, Champollion was studying Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and Syrian. He also had a flair for history and, when only 19-years-old was appointed an associate professor at Grenoble University. He could now embark, in earnest, on his great project.

Only rough copies of the Rosetta inscriptions were available to Champollion. Oddly, far more characters appeared in the stone’s Greek text than in either of the two Egyptian versions. The symbols, therefore, could not be the letters of an alphabet. Perhaps they represented syllables or complete words. The characters might be pictograms, like modern road-signs or the icons of computer screens. Or could they be ideograms, symbols of concepts as with the Christian cross or communist hammer and sickle?

Champollion, who had mastered over 20 ancient tongues, became convinced that the language of Egypt was related to modern Coptic, the structures and sounds of which might throw some light on the problem. It was a shrewd intuition. He realised that hieroglyphs were not just pictograms and ideograms but also represented the sounds of the ancestor of Coptic. His breakthrough came when he decoded the names of Pharaohs and gods. It took him two years to crack the full code. By 1822 he had completed his great task; Egyptian scripts could, at last, be read.

Hieroglyphs were used for formal and religious discourse. The second language on the stone, known as demotic, was for everyday use. Here was the ancient equivalent of present-day official notices in Ireland, with both an English version and an Irish one, which hardly anybody reads.

Now a famous man, Champollion, became director of the Egyptology Museum at the Louvre and Professor of Archaeology at the College de France. He made only one visit to his beloved Egypt. A diabetic, exhausted from overwork, he died of a stroke in 1832 at the age of 41.

Champollion’s childhood home is now part of a superb museum, celebrating the history of languages, writing and calligraphy. It has excellent IT facilities and some fine artefacts. The exhibit on the town’s famous son is arranged like a tomb from the Valley of the Kings. The displays are in French but there’s a booklet in English. www.tourisme-lot.com.