The Riddle of the Rosetta: How an English Polymath and a French Polyglot Discovered the Meaning of Egyptian Hieroglyphs

by Jed Z. Buchwald, Diane Greco Josefowicz

Overview

A major new history of the race between two geniuses to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, set against the backdrop of nineteenth-century Europe

In 1799, a French Army officer was rebuilding the defenses of a fort on the banks of the Nile when he discovered an ancient stele fragment bearing a decree inscribed in three different scripts. So begins one of the most familiar tales in Egyptology—that of the Rosetta Stone and the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs. This book draws on fresh archival evidence to provide a major new account of how the English polymath Thomas Young and the French philologist Jean-François Champollion vied to be the first to solve the riddle of the Rosetta.

Jed Buchwald and Diane Greco Josefowicz bring to life a bygone age of intellectual adventure. Much more than a decoding exercise centered on a single artifact, the race to decipher the Rosetta Stone reflected broader disputes about language, historical evidence, biblical truth, and the value of classical learning. Buchwald and Josefowicz paint compelling portraits of Young and Champollion, two gifted intellects with altogether different motivations. Young disdained Egyptian culture and saw Egyptian writing as a means to greater knowledge about Greco-Roman antiquity. Champollion, swept up in the political chaos of Restoration France and fiercely opposed to the scholars aligned with throne and altar, admired ancient Egypt and was prepared to upend conventional wisdom to solve the mystery of the hieroglyphs.

Taking readers from the hushed lecture rooms of the Institut de France to the windswept monuments of the Valley of the Kings, The Riddle of the Rosetta reveals the untold story behind one of the nineteenth century's most thrilling discoveries.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691233963
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	05/24/2022
Pages:	576
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Jed Z. Buchwald is the Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology. He lives in Altadena, California. Diane Greco Josefowicz is a writer, editor, and activist. She has served for more than a decade as science and technology editor for the Victorian Web (victorianweb.org). She lives in Providence, Rhode Island. Buchwald and Josefowicz are the authors of The Zodiac of Paris: How an Improbable Controversy over an Ancient Egyptian Artifact Provoked a Modern Debate between Religion and Science (Princeton).

Table of Contents

List of Figures vii

Introduction 1

Part 1 A Quaker's Odyssey 11

Chapter l Dinner at Longman's 13

Chapter 2 In the Classroom of Nature 23

Chapter 3 An Errand in the City 42

Chapter 4 The Vocal Circle 57

Chapter 5 Lecturer and Physician 70

Chapter 6 The Herculaneum Papyri 82

Part 2 Antiquity Embraced 97

Chapter 7 Words from Egypt's Past? 99

Chapter 8 The Sounds of an Ancient Language 119

Chapter 9 Paris Atmospheres 139

Chapter 10 Rooted in Place 159

Chapter 11 Hier pour Demain 170

Chapter 12 L'Affaire Polycarpe 185

Chapter 13 An Egyptian Geography of Egypt 199

Chapter 14 Indications 209

Part 3 Scripts and Bones 223

Chapter 15 Summer at Worthing 225

Chapter 16 Letters from Paris 245

Chapter 17 The Papyri of the Description de l'Égypte 263

Chapter 18 Seeking Uxellodunum 283

Chapter 19 The Master of Conditions 296

Chapter 20 Abandoning the Alphabet at Grenoble 308

Chapter 21 Demonstrations 324

Chapter 22 Iconoclasm at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 332

Part 4 Reading the Past 341

Chapter 23 The Obelisk from Philae 343

Chapter 24 A Singular and Puzzling Artifact 353

Chapter 25 A Momentous Change 360

Chapter 26 Words and Sounds 372

Chapter 27 Parisian Reactions 390

Chapter 28 Words across the Channel 395

Part 5 Antique Letters 405

Chapter 29 Grey's Box 407

Chapter 30 An Opportune Encounter 413

Chapter 31 The "True Key" to Egyptian Hieroglyphs 418

Chapter 32 The Semantic Trap Avoided 427

Chapter 33 The Reception of the Précis 436

Chapter 34 "Hold your laughter, friends!" 456

Acknowledgments 461

Notes 463

Bibliography 521

Name Index 543

Subject Index 553

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Buchwald and Josefowicz bring together vast amounts of evidence that have not been used in conjunction before, providing novel insights into how the centuries-old mystery of Egyptian hieroglyphs was unlocked."—Theresa Levitt, author of A Short Bright Flash: Augustin Fresnel and the Birth of the Modern Lighthouse

"This is one of the most impressive, carefully researched, and beautifully written books I have read in a long time. No one else working in the history of philology has described what it means to decipher a lost language so fully or so well as Buchwald and Josefowicz."—Suzanne L. Marchand, author of German Orientalism in the Age of Empire

"This extraordinary book is the first to place the decipherment of hieroglyphs firmly in its wider intellectual context of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European thought, bringing to the subject new sources and a scholarly breadth not found elsewhere. The Riddle of the Rosetta is a great pleasure to read."—T. G. Wilfong, author of Death Dogs: The Jackal Gods of Ancient Egypt

Editorial Reviews

"Combining exhaustive excavation of British and French archives with eclectic biographical elements, [this] valuable new book explains in unique detail . . . the twists and turns behind the perpetually fascinating decipherment."—-Andrew Robinson, British Museum Magazine

"Rarely have I seen the false starts and blind alleys, firm beliefs and 180-degree recalibrations, exhilaration and loneliness of pioneering thought captured so well. . . . If The Riddle of the Rosetta won’t be coming to screens anytime soon, its achievement is no less admirable."—-Maxwell Carter, Wall Street Journal

"Arguably the most meticulous and thoroughgoing account of the work of Young and Champollion. . . . The dazzling scholarly nimbleness of Champollion and Young is richly illustrated throughout the book — that is no myth, but it emerges as something a little more human."—-Elizabeth Frood, The Spectator

From the Publisher

2020-06-06
Comprehensive account of a dense and daunting project: deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics two millennia after their composition.

Buchwald, a historian at California Institute of Technology, and writer Josefowicz put a decade’s worth of work into this book, and it shows. Their story begins with a stone tablet bearing three inscriptions, one in ancient Greek, one in hieroglyphic Egyptian, and one in demotic (or “Coptic”) script. French troops had mauled it to keep it from their British enemies during the Napoleonic Wars, but the damage wasn’t catastrophic, and the tablet was hauled off as a spoil of war, delivered to London in 1802. British scientists puzzled over the thing and then published not entirely accurate lithographs of the Rosetta Stone that found their way into scholarly journals in Britain and France. Enter Jean-François Champollion, “a fiery Bonapartist…[who] narrowly avoided incarceration and worse during the Bourbon Restoration.” An atheist and freethinker, Champollion set to work with an idea that was shared by Thomas Young, an older, pious Englishman who was much better grounded in mathematics (and thus cryptography): that the texts said the same thing, so that using the Greek, which was known, one might figure out the corresponding Egyptian characters. Both worked on their translations for years, sometimes sniping at, sometimes collaborating with each other. Buchwald and Josefowicz deliver an account that sometimes seems as if in real time, describing the blind alleys, intuitions, and thorny debates that surrounded the scholars’ investigations. For example, “Young happily conceded that orthographic shifts could and did occur as writers labored to effect accurate transcriptions…[but] maintained that Egyptian hieroglyphs had never changed from the originals, neither in shape nor in meaning.” Readers will find some grounding in linguistics to be helpful, as the authors discuss phonetics, phonemics, morphemics, and other technical matters surrounding whether the hieroglyphics in particular represented sounds, words, or concepts—the answer being “all of the above.”

Knowledgeable fans of Egyptology, cryptography, and languages will enjoy this exploration of the ancient past.

Kirkus Reviews