Cracking the Egyptian Code: What the Sphinx Said
On Sept. 14, 1822, as legend tells the tale, Jean-François Champollion burst into his brother’s Paris office at the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres, flung a bundle of drawings upon the desk and cried, “Je tiens mon affaire!” (“I’ve done it!”). Champollion promptly fainted before he could utter news of the great intellectual feat for which he is still celebrated: the decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. The story of the young, frail, hotheaded scholar and his volatile time, full of upheavals political and scientific, is a remarkable tale, wonderfully told in Andrew Robinson’s “Cracking the Egyptian Code: The Revolutionary Life of Jean-François Champollion.”
The founding father of Egyptology started young and lived a relatively short life. Born in 1790 in southwest France, Champollion became fascinated by Oriental history and languages not long after he was sent to school in Grenoble at age 10, having exhausted local teachers. France was still basking in the exotic glow of Napoleon’s Egypt campaign (1798-1801), when scientists as well as soldiers helped introduce the wonders of ancient Egypt into Western consciousness. Images and accounts of pyramids, temples and mysterious hieroglyphs—including those on the recently discovered Rosetta Stone—enchanted the young Jean-François, who soon set his sights on learning the Coptic language of old Egypt.
The scale of his ambition and talent was soon apparent. At age 13, he had set out to compile a complete “chronology from Adam up to Champollion,” and he later honed his Coptic by mentally narrating his daily life. But as Mr. Robinson stresses, Champollion’s learned brother Jacques-Joseph, who hosted him in Grenoble, played an essential role as his sibling’s constant supporter and facilitator. He provided a large personal library and connections to some of the leading philologists of the day.