Cracking Ancient Codes: Egyptian Hieroglyphs - with Andrew Robinson

Thank you so much. I'm talking about the Egyptian, of course, which is a later script. I'm really going to focus on the decipherment and how it was done. I'll be honest with you, in fact, it will be a little strong. biographical talk about how Thomas Young and Sean Paul Young worked on it and it's a real honor to be in the same place where Thomas Young stood so many centuries ago. Now this building is a rather unusual place called the Egyptian Hall, it was on Piccadilly but no one will remember it now because it was demolished in 1905, it was built in 1812 and lasted about a century and was inspired by the plaster mania which really started with the expedition from Napoleon to Egypt.

A very strange and wonderful exhibition opened in May 1821 in the Egyptian Hall and there were 2,000 visitors who paid half a crown the first day, it is a lot of money to see it and it lasted a whole year and what was notable inside was the first scale model of a Egyptian tomb that was shown in London was 15 meters long and had two life-size reproductions of the tomb chambers and was from what was later called the Valley of the Kings, so there was a large crowd to see it. The paintings were made on site in Egypt and here are some of them.

The artist was Alessandro Ricci, he's not well known now, but he was an Italian doctor from Siena and he saved the life of the Egyptian Pasha's son in Egypt and then he traveled extensively in Egypt and became a painter on top of the world. this bas-relief is the vulture goddess Nekhbet and underneath the oval signs, I think they're pretty clear here, a cartouche is called a cartouche, as you probably know, and the signs inside them were thought to be the names. of goddesses, gods and pharaohs but, of course, no one could read them in 1821, no one at all.

I think the most notable thing about the exhibition was this sarcophagus made of alabaster. It arrived quite late from Egypt, in fact in August, long after the exhibition opened, but it soon became the center of attention, almost three meters long and carved with

hieroglyphs

originally known as the color originally known as Egyptian blue, it is actually copper-calcium tetrasilicate and the sarcophagus was sold three years later. to the British Museum, who decided not to buy it and gave it or sold it to the architect John Soane Sir John Soane in 1824 for £2,000 and today it can be seen in London in the basement of the Sohn Museum, with quite atmospheric lighting and I recommend it, It's worth a visit if you haven't seen it now.

The man who discovered the tomb in 1817 was this man, Giovanni Belzoni, another Italian and, as you know, he's quite famous in his own way, he was a converted circus strongman. The Egyptologist was a rather strange combination and was an extravagant showman. On the same day of the opening of the exhibition he appeared before the press and the public wrapped in mummy bandages that were later unwrapped to reveal his book, which is a great pictorial study. of his Egyptian adventures came out in 1820 and almost a century later Howard Carter, the English archaeologist, was inspired by that book, Bella's own, to look for another tomb and of course he found the tomb of Tutankhamun, now according to Belzoni the one that they discovered was on display. in the Egyptian Hall was or was supposed to be the tomb of Sammis PSA mm now no one could be sure because, as I said, no one could read the

hieroglyphs

, not even the Greeks and Romans could read them with knowledge. was lost except to the Egyptians themselves and their priests, so this was conjecture and the assumption came from Thomas Young, who has already been mentioned now young.

I probably don't need to say much about him, maybe I can sum it up by saying that I have written a biography of a young man called the last man who knew it all jokingly, but I must say that when I worked on it I got quite tired even knowing how many topics he had covered. involved was foreign secretary of the Royal Society he was a former professor of natural philosophy at ERI and he was a doctor and eye physiologist and of course if you're a physicist you know he was a very famous young Slits and he was a linguist, he invented the term Indo-European and really many other things, including life insurance work, all quite well paid, now I was not sure about Sammis, since the name of the pharaoh buried in the tomb was a speculation and when the tomb was taken away, the exposure was brought to Paris by bells only in 1822.

Before, yes, it is an interesting fact that Samus was not given the name of the pharaoh in the catalogue, there was no sign of Samus and the reason for this is that the notes for the catalog and In fact, the entire catalog had not been written by Thomas Young. and not belzoni, but the key figure in this story, jean-francois Champollion and here he is in his later life, now in 1822, at the time when the fake polyol exhibition in France had made a surprising announcement that he could read the cartouche of some late Egyptian rulers. like Alexander Cleopatra and Ptolemy, but I still wasn't sure I read Egyptian rulers before the Greek period, as in the quotes Samus and obviously the owner of the tomb was an early Egyptian ruler, not a late one, so I don't identified him and What happened next is that Seanpauley, as we will see in more detail later, suddenly began to make progress, so after 1822 decipherment took off in the 1820s and soon he was able to find the name of the ruler and it turned out . of the tomb that is going to be blown up or SETI, the first one who died, we now know in 1279 BC.

C. and probably more famous his son was Ramses the second Ramesses the great, so we now know that thanks to the Poly hoax, now the key, of course, to the decipherment was the Rosetta stone and I still won't show you the picture familiar to the Rosetta stone, as you can easily see, this is a model from France. The stone was originally discovered in 1799 by the French army in Egypt. It is now in the British Museum. captured in Egypt by the British army in 1801, which is actually written in English on the side of the stone. If you go and take a look, it's pretty hard to read, but it's still visible now.

The copy I'm showing you is from a Frenchman. town called Jack in the southwest of France and the edge of the huge stone palette and this model has one hundred times the area of ​​the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum and is made of black granite from Zimbabwe by an American conceptual artist in 1919 its dates Important because it is the bicentennial of Jean-Paul Eons' birth in 1790, so this was created to celebrate his centenary. There is the street where he was born. He was born on the upper level on the right in one of those rooms over there.

Now the street is called UM Puffs Seanpauley in his honor Now I'm not going to say much about his parents because they didn't have much influence on his life His father was a bookseller but he was the crucial figure and I will talk about him because he is very important He is his older brother Jean polio Jacques Josef seanpauley ah, who is a good scholar in his own right in later years. Here Jacques Josef is shown in his 20s and was 12 years older than Jean Francois and it was effectively in loco parentis he took charge and raised the child.

I think it's true, it's a big claim, but without Jacques Joseph's financial and emotional support for Jean Francois and also his savoir faire, I think he really was a practical figure who knew how to get things done. no one would have heard of Jean Francois today the older brother was absolutely crucial and after the death of the younger brother the older brother said very movingly I think I was alternately his father his teacher and his student and that is certainly true according to the record now briefly Jacques Josef moved to Grenoble for Jack in 1798, took a job there and then his younger brother joined him in 1801, when he was only 11 years old and began living in the same house as his older brother, among a huge and growing library. of books because Jacques Joseph had very strong academic ambitions, so the young man lived there until 1804 and when he was 14 years old and then I must say that the older brother insisted for financial reasons, I suspect that he left and got bored at the local lyceum which The government school had just been established in Grenoble under Napoleonic law in 1804.

In some ways this was a disaster because it was under military discipline and there were quite gruesome stories about some sort of riots and the dormitories, and Jean Francois was quite helpless. , but he and him a lot. He didn't like the place, but he had to stay. There is a lovely letter from you. You don't need to read the details, of course, but it's written to his brother in 1804 at seven and that line says Lu Dollfie Ethiopia grammar and it's Latin. Ethiopian Crypt Grammar and I was asking this teenager for these very scholarly books that he wanted his brothers to provide for his research, but there's a rather nice, plaintive postscript on the side here, I hope you can see June in the clip from the book. would Hulot I don't have buckles for my pants which gives you a little idea of ​​how he lived at that time misery is probably not too strong a word ending in eight seven he was able to return home and live with his brother again because they allowed him to study in home, the school allowed him to do it and the man who allowed it was this man, Joseph Fourier, who is an honorable name in an institution like this, is a mathematician and physicist of great notoriety, Fourier. series, but from our point of view tonight it is not the mathematics and physics that matters, but the fact that Fourier had gone with Napoleon to Egypt in 1799 or 1798 and Fourier was a key scholar, probably the key scholar with Napoleon , was secretary of the asti.

He embarked and when he returned to France with Napoleon, he set about editing a large volume called The Description Though They Heaped, which was the government publication based on all the discoveries made by Napoleon's soldiers and scholars that emerged over many years and Fourier. To begin with, he was the editor and he received help in Grenoble and this is crucial because, unofficially, he was helped by Jacques Joseph Shung Palio and the younger brother who was helping his older brother help Fourier. They did an investigation for him, even though they were away. recognized, but I think it is fair to say that it was through this absolutely practical exposure to the monuments and drawings of

ancient

Egypt and all the things that were brought back that Jacques Joseph and Jean Francois became passionate about

ancient

Egypt and that is how they met Si the young man or teenager Fourier also accepted him and introduced him to a Greek Catholic priest who turned out to be quite crucial because he taught the boy Coptic and guided him anyway, then Jean-François began to teach himself and thought himself that Coptic was the language of the late Egyptian period or at least related to it.

I don't have time to say much about Coptic, but the idea was that if he could learn Coptic, it could help him understand late Egyptian inscriptions, so it turned out to be quite fruitful and Fourier. He also sent him to Paris in 1807, which was of great importance to study ancient languages ​​and his teacher was this man Silvestre de sassy and there is not time to talk much about him, but he is an interesting character in his own right, he was at the School of oriental languages. in Paris, Seanpauley was with his student and they admired each other to a certain extent, but they also had terrible moments in their later lives where they really drew daggers between Seanpauley's decision or partly for political reasons, as I will mention later, but also I think his ambition was to use the Rosetta Stone to decipher hieroglyphs, so the student was really some kind of rival and he didn't encourage him as a result.

Now here is a copy of the stone, the first ever made by lithography. in Cairo in 1800 by French scholars before it was captured, needless to say you can now read through the Greek translation at the bottom and as I hope everyone here knows, the hieroglyphs are at the top broken , very broken, here in the middle is the demotic section. which is a later Egyptian script and the Greek section is in this part at the bottom which is also somewhat broken and the Greek section turned out to be legible in alphabetical writing of course and it is an edict of King Ptolemy V epiphanies dated 196 BC. and what's really crucial is what the Greek says in the last line.

I think the three inscriptions are equivalent in meaning, not exact to each other, but equivalent in meaning, so the Greek was obviously going to be a clue to read the other two and that's the importance of the rosetta stone, of course, now Seanpauley all began the study in 1808, he was still very young and worked at it in various ways until 1815, working on the rosetta stone, but did not make any breakthroughs. he made several contributions but nothing really worked then he abandoned it for a while and the reason is politics which is always part of his life and the Polish Ian returned from Elba and in 1815 he landed with some soldiers he came directly to Grenoble and they must have swallowed loudly high but they opened the doors and Napoleon came in and these are the people who welcome Napoleon, including shampoo The brothers Leon Jacques shows that he actually became Napoleon's secretary went with him to Paris Jean Francois stayed behind to edit the Government Gazette and that same day of the Battle of Waterloo, he recklessly wrote in the Gazetteof the government.

Napoleon is our rightful Prince, so he suffered that they both suffered quite a bit after Napoleon's fall, of which they were exiled because Jack lost his jobs in Grenoble and, to make matters worse, Sassie, who was a royalist through and through. , he actually told Thomas Young in a letter that Thomas Young was in London and the SAS tied him up saying that my former student is a potential plagiarist of his work and probably a charlatan. He used the word, so things got pretty bad for poor Seanpauley. Now they are young. I have to say something about Young and his work and I'll try to keep it as concise as possible.

He possibly published a really remarkable article in the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1819 called simply Egypt based on his work in London over the previous four years and he shows the last line of the Rosetta Stone in this drawing and said I can detect striking resemblances as he. put it between the demotic symbol dear glyphic symbol of Tyra at the top and the demotic below of course it is the Greek on the third line this is the last line of the rosetta stone and if you really study it you can see other similarities with Yung really. He studied that it was quite clear that he was obsessed with his work at the British Library.

You can see that, but there are many signs and demotics that don't look like hieroglyphs and he recognized that too, so he speculated that there was a striking resemblance between some. the corresponding hieroglyphs and demotic signs, but that it was probably a mixed demotic script, they were probably imitations of the hieroglyphs mixed with letters of the alphabet to quote Young, but he was not sure in others, he was suggesting a phonetic element in the demotic script in addition of a symbolic element, but he was not sure if hieroglyphs also had phonetic elements, since most people, including the Greeks and Romans, believed that they were purely symbolic without any phonetic signs, so he decided to investigate it using a SAS idea that I had actually suggested.

Well, let's look at the Greek names and the rosette stone like Ptolemy, that's the code name and see if we can compare our experiment, Allah, with the Greek spelling. Now that, of course, is the Ptolemy Cartridge and I can't go into too much detail. for lack of time, but the idea that Jung had is to compare the two and see if we can give some fanatic values ​​to the signs of the name toll meas as it is written in Greek and I think you can see quite easily that the hieroglyphs are a the left of Ptolemy's name, then there is the phonetic value suggested by Jung in the middle and then the current value accepted by Egyptologists and he did a pretty good job, he didn't get it quite right, then he went further and took another cartridge of A The late Egyptian ruler called the queen Baron Ichi and analyzed it in the same way and then came up with this graph in the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1819.

It sounds questioning, he said he was cautious based on the same principle of comparison with Greek Egyptology and today recognized. Of the signs he had identified, six are correct, three are partially correct and four are incorrect, so it was a mixed picture; He even went further than that, quite surprisingly, he compared eighty demotic words with their hieroglyphic equivalents translated with the help of Greek and you can see here the cartouche of Ptolemy and here the cartouche of Queen Baron Ichi and many other words, so He compared the two and those 80 equivalents are still accepted today, so he was really making progress, but as always with Jung, he was distracted. by the scholar of him II and after 1819, after publishing this great article, he does not advance further.

He didn't exactly abandon ancient Egypt, but he stops progressing. He gets involved with other things, including length and issues like that, it's only late. In the 1820s, Jung returns to Egypt or the study of ancient Egypt and it is good to say some help from Seanpauley even though they were rivals. Jung becomes the decipherer of demotic, not of hieroglyphics, of course, which is Seanpauley's, but demotic is really Young's achievement. but that is later, now Seanpauley on was having a pretty bad time still in France while Young was busy in England from where he had returned to Jack, his native town in 1817, to Grenoble, but the royalist authorities in Grenoble were put on against him and then they tried to put him on trial for leading a rebellion for treason, but he, the government of Paris intervened and said that he went free, but things were really bad between eighteen, seventeen and twenty-one.

He managed to get married, he married the regime, blah, a local woman, son of a Glover's daughter and they had an Ohrid daughter, but he essentially abandoned an ancient Egyptian gypsy for three or four years and thought about becoming a teacher first only to earn money and then in notary and she had completely abandoned the study of Egypt, but there is a publication from April 1821 is a small pamphlet on the Egyptian writing of John Paul II obviously in French and unfortunately for him it contains a real blunder because he says there are no phonetic values ​​in demotic signs or hieroglyphics, he says they represent things, not sounds, in other words, they are symbolic, not phonetic, and he knew he had made a mistake pretty quickly and tried to remove the pamphlet and It amused me because when I was writing his biography I went to the British Library which has one of the few copies of this pamphlet and the French curator said I can't find it so I thought maybe the ghost of fake polyols had removed it and then , three or four years later, the curator said that when my paperback came out well, I think I finally found it, so it was a little lost in the library, but they are extremely rare and that's because Jean Paulhan was fond of embarrassed to want to get rid of it and never refers to it in his later work, so in July he was forced to leave Grenoble and went really desperate to Paris and lived with his brother and thought that maybe that was the end of his career , but it actually turned out to be the absolutely right thing for him.

It was a great blessing. he lived here in the room like arene number 28 he and his brother and the family and the Asti to France the dome where the brother worked is visible in the distance as in the academy of ancient inscriptions and bel leche and there he began to read the work by Thomas Young by his own admission, he claimed that he had not read the Encyclopaedia Britannica article until 1821, possible, but I am not entirely convinced, but he certainly admitted to having read it in the Paris house and never really admits what he got. There are clues to this, but there are also things that are contradictory, so a great argument begins between Young and Jean-Paul Er and it has really lasted two centuries.

No one can really say what Young contributed because Seanpauley stayed silent about some things. perhaps it was his researches, perhaps it was Young's ideas that prompted him, but he certainly makes a breakthrough in 1822 the following year, although it is reminiscent of Young and now, in an analytical approach with Ptolemy and Baron Ichi, This is Cleopatra, another name from late Egypt, not one of the early Egyptian rulers and the clue to the fact that this was her cartouche came from an obelisk that had been brought by Belzoni from Egypt and was brought back to England and now, in fact, it can still be seen in the in Dorset in the garden of a house and was published in 1821 in November and false polio must have been seen soon after in the published version and the really crucial thing is that the obelisk, the shaft of the obelisk has - car - she is in it and in the Greek base block is bilingual like the rosette stone, there are two names in Greek Ptolemy and Cleopatra, so it was quite reasonable to assume that the second or first cartouche was Ptolemy and The second was Cleopatra's so false Paulina.

He tried the same approach of comparing the Egyptian signs with the Greek alphabetic phonetic values ​​and came up with this analysis: Cleopatra on the left and Tomi on the right and I think you can see pretty quickly that there are signs in common, that's how it should be so if the system is parsed correctly, but the T sign in Tommy's sorry, the T sign here, the hand sign differs from the semicircle here, so there is a difference, there are two different signs for the same sound, but Seanpauley said well. That occurs in many languages ​​is known as homophony and Incas in English, for example, Jill was spelled Gi double L or ji double L or Catherine was spelled stamped with a K, so it was not reasonable speculation that this did. well, although in some cases there are two different signs for the same sound.

He now went much further and he observed quite brilliantly this cartouche which had been brought in a drawing by a French architect who visited the Abu Simbel temple at Abu Simbel. and Seanpauley everyone saw this in September 1822 in Paris and he said: I can read the signs on the right, the two hooks are the S for Tommy's, there's no doubt about that, then he said: I think I read the sign on the left. the circle with the dot looks like the Sun and the Coptic for Sun was raw or Lightning, so he got the idea that it started with a lightning bolt and ended in SS and at some point he got the idea that maybe this was the cartouche of a The first Egyptian ruler, Ramses, no one knew anything about Ramses in 1822, except that he appeared in a chronicle by the Greek Ptolemaic historians of ancient Egypt, a man called manna, although a famous priest and Seanpauley himself were aware that he thought well, Sean Ramsey must have been a historical figure, I'll go out on a limb, maybe this is the Ramses cartouche from Abu Simbel and then he took another step that is much harder to understand, but the sign in the middle said: I've seen that sign in the middle with the hook. sign on the rosetta stone where it is translated into Greek as Genelia and Ganassi means to give birth and the Coptic for Ganesha is is I say M is e so maybe he speculated that this is the sign of M or M s now we can see that as an illusion in a way, but it turned out that he was right, this is the cartouche of Ramses and supposedly on September 14, 1822, Shambala in jean francois visits his brother at the institute in france, hits the papers at noon on his desk, says Dirty Amana Fair.

I have done. Eureka collapses to the floor and her older brother is very afraid that he has suffered a stroke and possibly even died, but it turns out that he is just tired as a dog. He goes home, rests, and five days later he gives a big, important speech, which is probably the most important speech he's ever given, later published as the left for a Moose Jaw dossier a month later, in October, and in this report to seanpauley on claims of reading the alphabetical hieroglyphs as he calls them of greek and roman rulers. of Egypt, he does not claim that he can read the first Egyptian names and, in fact, Ramses is not mentioned in the letter, only later does he begin to convince himself that he can.

They had read much more of the script. There is a table of phonetic signs in the very famous let in the phonetic scene of the Egyptology table day, but you can see that there are many separate symbols for one sign here, the Greek Sigma, for example, there are many hieroglyphic symbols, all very different, so this is the demotic here that doesn't have. He cracked it but he has made some progress and it was very proudly signed in the fake Palio in Egyptian phonetics, which gives an idea of ​​his sense of humor and of course his pride in his work, and this is finally him before become famous.

He is holding the tablet that he saw phonetics in 1823 and is a famous portrait. Now his career really takes off in the sense that he becomes internationally known. He has been accepted by the King of France through the Duke in Black, who is a loyal friend and appointee of the King. him as a curator of Egyptian antiquities, the first at the Louvre and Muse in Paris in 1826 and then his life dream comes true the King says I will finance you to go to Egypt as an expedition, we will give you half the money and The ruler of Tuscany will give the other half and will be accompanied by Eppolito Rosselini who was second in command a Tuscan scholar who was a great admirer of Jean-Paul Er well as I say his dream came true he went and landed as Alexandre in August 1828 was embarked by the Pasha of Egypt and the expedition (it is a wonderful story) sailed up the Nile to the second cataract or just before passing Abu Simbel and all the way they stopped to look at these monuments and inscriptions and Seanpauley was in his element because he was able to start reading them for the first time since ancient times, no one had been able to do that for 2,000 years and then they turned the ship around, sailed all the way back and stopped at other places on the way back including Thebes and it was in effect an indication of their system there were a lot of problems but it worked it was very obvious there is a painting of the expedition here that gives you an idea of ​​the atmosphere here is seanpauley or he looked like a bedouin with a sword and spoke fluent arabic so probably could have passed for better and this is Rosselini standing dressed in white and red and they were close to each other as people and as scholars. a portrait or sorry, a small drawing of seanpauley, in fact, from the grave ofRamses room where they stayed for six months in the cool to get away from the sun and it is quite charming because it shows all the beds of the expedition, including me for him and Rosselini is in front and then there is a small portrait of the cat's bed and the bed of the gazelles and at the top is the sarcophagus of Ramses, I'm probably missing it, yes, that's what they were, the sarcophagus haunted them while they lived in the tomb and sometimes Seanpauley was so excited that he would collapse to the ground with the pure drama of what he was experiencing when translating these inscriptions, he even left some graffiti that can be seen today in Karnak and used the old familiar spelling, poor layman. all his name that Napoleon admired quite a lot he said he had ja of my name is a good sign so there is a bit of farce Polly that we can enjoy even today he returned to Paris in 1829at the end of the world he had been absent for a year and now his system was more or less tested but not completely and he really had to work very hard in his remaining years to try to organize his articles and publish some publications. but I am afraid that he did not have long to live: in 1831 he was appointed the world's first professor of Egyptology at the Collège de France, but his health was deteriorating greatly, probably due to illnesses he had contracted in Egypt at the end of 1831. . definitely suffered a stroke and continued to work a little more on his Egyptian grammar with his brother, his ever loyal brother, and then gave it to jock Joseph with the following words, he said, take care of him, I hope he is my calling card for. soon he could no longer speak and in March 1832 he was only 41 years old, apparently according to his family, that night of March 3 he let out a groan and they heard him say what they thought was in French now for the afterlife, to Egypt, to Thebes, which is where he felt he truly belonged.

Now I will finish with what I am sure you will recognize: the cartouche of Tutankhamun discovered by Howard Carter in a century after Seanpauley on the legacy of it took a while to establish itself as I did. I just said it long after his death, people were still arguing about it, in fact it took until the 1860s before it was really accepted, but today we can use it to read Tut and I'll try to do it quickly. This is a phonetic sign. UT toot, that's a UNK symbol, the hooked cross, so it's toutes UNK and then the name of God, our moon is at the top, that's a fanatic symbol and then a consonantal sign, our moon, and that's a phonetic column complement for n to emphasize the N in the continental sign and at the bottom this is crucial, these are three symbols that mean ruler of Heliopolis of Upper Egypt, that is, ruler of Thebes, so there is no phonetic symbol at the bottom, so it is a mixed script, just like the demotic phonetic values ​​and the symbolic values. or logograms, as we call them now, signs of words, so the honor of Seanpauley got it right, he said in 1824, before any other scholar in the world, he said that hieroglyphic writing is a complex system, a writing that is both figurative , symbolic and phonetic in one in the The same text in one in the same sentence and iMeet could even venture into one and the same word and I will really end now by telling myself that this is not, I mean, it is absolutely essential for Egyptologists, but for me, the story of the decipherment of this.

The code is fascinating for another reason because it required a scholar Thomas Young and it required a specialist shampoo liang to crack the code without this combination. I don't think it would have sold or at least not for a long time and the broad mind of an eighteen, fourteen, eighteen year old really has certain insights that are totally invaluable to Seanpauley as to whether he admitted it or not. A shivani failed at that time until 1821, but then after 1821 he probably took Jung's ideas and then his own. their tunnel vision took over and that was really what moved the deciphering forward, so I think it's fair to say that the broad vision of young people and the fanatical approach to fake polio is needed for this revolutionary vision that fake polio heralded on its own in 1820 thanks