Senior conservator Stephanie Vasiliou prepares the Rosetta Stone (Jonathan Brady/PA)
Many of us like nothing more than an Egyptian exhibition, preferably featuring mummies. But I had doubts about the British Museum’s show Hieroglyphs, which delves into the story of how these ancient symbols was unlocked.
For all its importance – and 2,500 academics have signed a petition to call for its repatriation to Egypt – the Rosetta Stone isn’t terribly prepossessing. And a series of hieroglyphic texts, however fascinating, can’t, I thought, really make for compelling viewing.
I was wrong. This is a fascinating show, being at once an account of a written language that disappeared and reappeared, unlocking the meaning of countless artefacts, and of the competition to crack the code. This involved a succession of international players over centuries and eventually resolved into a contest between the Brit, Thomas Young, and the young French genius, Jean-Francois Champollion.
So very far from being a dry academic investigation, it was the early 19th century equivalent of Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, which aroused strong feelings in both countries.
The Eureka moment came about as a result of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone by Napoleon’s armies in Egypt in 1799 – an expedition accompanied by a phalanx of savants: scholars and linguists – with its inscription in hieroglyphs, Egyptian demotic (the easy popular version) and Greek. It’s a sobering thought that if it hadn’t been for Napoleon’s army demolishing a fort at Rosetta, the stone, hidden in its foundations having been taken from a nearby ancient site and reused, might never have been discovered.
Finding it was one thing; matching the known Greek with the unknown Egyptian was far from straightforward: hieroglyphs are partly phonetic, partly symbolic. Matters were complicated by a showdown between the British forces and the defeated French general, Jacques Menou, concluding with the British making off with the Stone.
But it was Champollion who discovered the phonetic element of the code. The story goes that he rushed to his brother on September 14, 1822 – this year is the bicentenary – thrust a sheaf of notes into his hands, exclaiming the equivalent of “I’ve got it!” and collapsed in a faint. Yet the honours were divided; if Champollion cracked the code for the hieroglyphs it was Young who did most to unlock the demotic – easier to write – popular version of Egyptian script.
This exhibition, then, has several strands. There’s the disappearance of the written language, partly as a result of its displacement by Greek and later Arabic, though the oral language survived in archaic forms of Coptic.
There’s the European fascination with Egypt generally – in the Middle Ages, Christians and Arabs assumed that the hieroglyphs were magical and that Egyptian was the language of alchemical spells (there are indeed a number of spells in Egyptian, mostly appearing on sarcophagi and scrolls buried with the dead, as an aid to their onward journey).
There’s the acquisition during the Renaissance of Egyptian artefacts, including papal obelisks, and the men who tried to crack the code. There’s the Young-Champollion contest. And then there are the objects and inscriptions which were made intelligible by their achievement. The scripts are interspersed with hieroglyph-bearing objects, including the massive black sarcophagus later turned into a bath supposed to cure lovesickness.
The latter part of the show is a celebration of the culture revealed by our knowledge of the script, including an interesting star calendar inside the inner coffin of a mummy and a section on the writing instruments that were the scribes’ kit, complete with little ink pots.
Elsewhere there’s a tiny seal which was rolled over wax. And just to show that the Egyptians weren’t wholly obsessed with the dead, there’s a fun bit of 3,000 year old pornography: a filthy sketch on limestone and a little man with a huge phallus wrapped over his head, 2,500 years old.
So, what about the possible repatriation of the Rosetta Stone, as demanded by all those academics? It turns out that the Rosetta stone was only one of a series of near identical royal proclamations issued under successive pharaohs. There are no fewer than 28 of them, some older and several in much better condition than the Rosetta stone, and most of them remain in Egypt.
What makes the Rosetta Stone remarkable is that it was the first to be discovered, and the one that enabled Europeans to crack the code. My view, therefore, is that it should stay right here.
