The Keys of Egypt: The Race to Read the Hieroglyphs (Paperback)

Why do I say the book is unusual? Well, most books about scholarly discoveries focus on the work itself. While this one certainly contains information about how the hieroglyphs were translated, the main focus is on what it was like to be a French scholar in a high visibility area from the time after the French Revolution through the Restoration. The story is a fascinating one of constant intrigue, danger, poverty, and overwhelming odds overcome. This book would qualify as an exciting novel if written that way.

Jean-Francois Champollion was the key translator who finally succeeded in 1822, 23 years after the Rosetta Stone was discovered. He was the son of an impoverished book seller at 16 when the stone was found. His main competitor was an English physician, Thomas Young, who was to turn out to be an implacable foe who denigrated and challenged Champollion's work.

The work would have gone on much more rapidly, but there was a shortage of materials available to Champollion to work on. He also had the difficult task of getting an education and then earning his living as a teacher, and often had to put off working on the hieroglyphs for long periods of time. When the Restoration came, he and his brother were exiled to the small town they started in. But they succeeded in regaining official support for their careers, and were able to continue.

Despite the challenges, Champollion (with a lot of help from his friends, and especially his older brother) was eventually able to get recognition for his accomplishments and support from Charles X to go to Italy to study texts and later Egypt to translate the monuments and texts there. In the brief period of time before his death in 1832, he added tremendously to our knowledge of ancient Egypt and its culture.

The key problem was that the same hieroglyph (such as the picture of a duck) can represent an object (the duck), a concept ("son of"), and a sound ("sa"). One of the key breaks came in finding cartouches of foreign names that were easier to decipher because they used the phoenetic versions. Having had success there, with access to more material it was easy to notice cartouches that seemed to represent the names of well-known Egyptian Pharaohs such as Ramses (described as "Rameses" in the book). Cleopatra's name was an early translation breakthrough. Soon, these cartouches provided clues to the multiple ways that hieroglyphs can be used. Numerical analysis showed that the number of hieroglyphs on the Rosetta stone did not match very well to the number of words or letters in the Greek text. That suggested that something more complex was going on than using a straight-forward alphabet from hierglyphs. Champollion soon made quick progress from there. He had an amazing talent for languages, having earlier produced a Coptic dictionary.

Champollion also uncovered that hieroglyphs were formal writing, Hieratic was cursive handwriting, Demotic dated from 650 B.C., and Coptic began in 250 A.D. So the dating of the materials studied could be determined in part by the languages used.

After you finish enjoying this interesting book, I suggest that you think about how languages divide us. Most of us read only in our native language. This means that works in other languages first have to be translated before we can enjoy them. Many works are never so translated. I urge you to take another language that you know and read something in that language. That experience allows you to enjoy the other culture much more than you can with a translation. If your language skills are not sufficient to do this, I suggest that you read something that has been translated by two different translators in separate editions. Compare them to see how much translations can vary. Although my examples focus on languages, you should also realize that such differences in understanding occur in one language. So pay close attention and check your assumptions when you read and listen to someone speak. For example, be open to what is not being said and is not being written, but is present. Don't miss the subtleties that may reveal most of the meaning to you!

Look, listen, and learn.

The tale of the race to read the ancient hieroglyphics is set in a time period of european-wide revolt. Knowing that the results of his own work could go against his very faith, and the beliefs and work of his friends and colleagues, he Battles against what to you or I would be insurmountable obstacles of the body as well as the mind. This amazing tale takes you through a hostile and primitive egpyt, to the underbelly of Napoleonic France and back again into the elite circles of France's Bourgoisie.

The book has a brilliant narrative style, and never dwells too long on any one subject, but gives you enough to allow you to follow their trains of thought. Simply one of the most gripping, and well-told stories I have ever read. You do not need to know anything about archaeology, or history. You don't even need to be massively interested in either to appreciate what is probably one of the most amazing tales of coincidence, treachery, rivalry,human madness and greed.