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thinkers recorded their sense that pro-
found, perhaps even occult, teachings
were lurking there. According to the
third-century philosopher Plotinus,
Egyptian scribes did not bother with
“the whole business of letters, words,
and sentences.” Instead, they used signs.
And each sign, Plotinus said, was “a
piece of knowledge, a piece of wisdom.”
In the absence of anything to oppose
this rather spooky and thrilling idea, it
persisted, even into the Enlightenment.
Isaac Newton firmly believed that the
ancient Egyptians had solved all of na-
ture’s apparent mysteries—that, as Dol-
nick writes, “they had known the law
of gravitation and all the other secrets
of the cosmos; the point of hieroglyphs
was to hide that knowledge from the
unworthy.” This belief, a sort of curse of
the mummy avant la lettre, did not en-
courage the average linguist to have a
go at the Rosetta Stone.
T
he first person to make real prog-
ress with the stone was Thomas
Young (1773-1829), an English physician
who had come into a large inheritance
when he was still in school and there-
fore did not have to confine his adult
years to the treatment of patients. Young
began work on the stone in 1814, when
he was in his early forties. A brilliant,
ambitious, and modern-minded scien-
tist, he was wedded to empiricism and
did not stand back in awe before the
hieroglyphs’ supposedly ungraspable
truths. He just went ahead and looked
at them for a long time and counted
things and took notes and then drew
conclusions. His most important con-
clusion was that some hieroglyphs ap-
peared to give phonetic cues, signs of a
word’s sound. That is, a hieroglyph might
not represent the riddle of the sphinx
or the meaning of the universe, but
maybe just the sound “d.” Young cush-
ioned this finding in caution, saying
that it was true only of names, and names
only of non-Egyptian rulers, and only
when the names were set within car-
touches, oval-shaped enclosures in the
Rosetta Stone text, because those were
the only cases in which he could demon-
strate the truth of his claim. But even
this modest assertion was significant,
because it said, implicitly, that hiero-
glyphs obeyed rules. They were some-
thing you could figure out.
Young opened the door, but he wasn’t
the one who walked through it. Young
was a born scholar, the kind who sel-
dom left his desk and was proud of that.
When he proposed the creation of a
society to collect and publish hiero-
glyphic inscriptions, he maintained that
he saw no need to “scramble over Egypt”
looking for more; that task could be left
to “some poor Italian or Maltese.” As
for him, he would stay home, where, if,
say, he was caught up in his
speculations when dinner
was announced, his meal
could be brought to him on
a tray. Besides, he was a
polymath. He was inter-
ested, and expert, in many
things. Hieroglyphic writ-
ing commanded his atten-
tion for only about three
years, until 1817, and, for the
most part, only during his
summer breaks. In 1819, he summarized
his findings in the “Egypt” article of the
Encyclopædia Britannica and turned to
other matters. By then, he knew that
another scholar, in France, was work-
ing on decoding the hieroglyphs. Within
a few years, it was evident that he had
fallen too far behind to catch up.
The other scholar was Jean-François
Champollion (1790-1832), seventeen
years Young’s junior. Champollion grew
up in southwestern France, the young-
est of seven children. His father was a
bookseller; his mother couldn’t read or
write. He had little money. Until he
was middle-aged and had already, more
or less, founded Egyptology, he could
not afford to go to Egypt. But, from an
early age, he had shown an extraordi-
nary gift for languages. While still in
his teens, he acquired not only Greek
and Latin but also Hebrew, Arabic,
Amharic, Sanskrit, Syriac, Persian,
Chaldean. Most important for his fu-
ture work, he set about learning Cop-
tic, the language of the Egyptian Or-
thodox Church, which was thought
(correctly, as it turned out) to be de-
scended from Ancient Egyptian.
Champollion was aided in his stud-
ies by his brother Jacques-Joseph, who
was twelve years older than Jean-
François and not just his brother but
his godfather, too—an important job
in the old days. Seeing Jean-François’s
genius, he was happy to support him,even housing him when necessary. A
linguist himself, he encouraged his
brother’s passion for languages. Once,
when the young man was recover-
ing from an illness, he asked Jacques-
Joseph for a Chinese grammar, to help
him recuperate.
At sixteen, Champollion presented
his first paper, on place-names in an-
cient Egypt, and announced to the
Grenoble Society of Sciences and the
Arts that he was going to
decipher the hieroglyphs
and reconstruct the history
of pharaonic Egypt. He de-
voted himself to that proj-
ect for the rest of his life.
Dolnick takes Champollion
as a sort of paragon of the
scientific mind, above all in
his willingness to dwell on
a problem without ceasing.
(He quotes Newton, who,
when asked how he arrived at the the-
ory of gravitation, replied, “By thinking
on it continually.”) In such an endeavor,
it helps to love one’s subject. “Enthusi-
asm, that is the only life,” Champollion
proclaimed. The great moments of his
life were his advances in research. After
one breakthrough, he gathered up his
papers, ran out into the street, and raced
to his brother’s office. Bursting through
the door, he yelled, “Je tiens l ’affaire!”
(“I’ve got it!”), and fainted on the floor.
In time, Champollion wrested from
the Rosetta Stone most of its secrets.
First, he showed that Young was right:
hieroglyphs did communicate through
sound, like English and French. But,
whereas Young believed that this was
true only with names, and only foreign
ones, Champollion showed that it was
also the case with many other words.
Furthermore, phonetic communication
did not rule out its supposed alterna-
tives. A hieroglyph might be phonetic
(sounding out a word), or it might be
pictographic (giving you a picture of
the thing being indicated, as in “I ♥
NEW YORK”), or it might be ideographic
(giving you an agreed-upon symbol,
such as “XOXO” or “&,” for the thing
indicated). As Champollion wrote, a
passage in hieroglyphs was a script “at
the same time figurative, symbolic and
phonetic, in one and the same text, in
one and the same sentence, and, if I may
put it, in one and the same word.” Going