Absurd theories of the contents of Egyptian

texts.

Warbur

ton's views

on an

Egyptian

alphabet.

letter on the inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone,' and the work of this learned man was soon after followed by that of Akerblad who, in a letter to M. de Sacy discussed the demotic inscription on the recently discovered Rosetta Stone, and published an alphabet of the demotic characters, from which a large number were adopted in after times by Young and Champollion. It would seem that Akerblad never gained the credit which was due to him for his really clever work, and it will be seen from the facts quoted in the following pages, how largely the success of Young's labours on the Demotic inscription on the Rosetta Stone depended on those of Akerblad. But side by side with the letters of de Sacy and Akerblad and the learned works of Young and Champollion, there sprang into existence a mass of literature full of absurd statements and theories written by men having no qualifications for expressing opinions on hieroglyphic matters. Thus the Comte de Pahlin in his De l'étude des Hieroglyphes, hesitated not to say that the inscription on one of the porticoes of the Temple at Denderah contained a translation of the hundredth Psalm, composed to invite all people to enter into the house of the Lord. The same author said that to produce the books of the Bible, which were written on papyri, it was only necessary to translate the Psalms of David into Chinese and to write them in the ancient characters of that language. Lenoir considered the Egyptian inscriptions to contain Hebrew compositions, and Lacour thought that they contained Biblical phrases. Worse than all these wild theories was the belief in the works of the Kircher school of investigators, and in the accuracy of the statements made by Warburton,' who, it must be confessed,

1 Lettre au Citoyen Chaptal, au sujet de l'Inscription Egyptienne du Monument trouvé à Rosette, Paris, 1802.

2 Lettre sur l'inscription égyptienne de Rosette, Paris, 1802.

3 Published at Paris in 5 vols., 1812.

4 Lettres sur les Hieroglyphes, Weimar, 1802.

In Nouvelle explication des Hieroglyphes, Paris, 1809-10, 4 vols.; and Nouveaux Essais sur les Hieroglyphes, Paris, 1826, 4 vols.

See his Essai sur les Hieroglyphes égyptiens, Bordeaux, 1821.

7 In his The Divine Legation of Moses demonstrated, to which is adjoint an Essay on Egyptian Hieroglyphics, London, 1738, 2 vols.

to have recognized the existence of alphabetic characters, but who in no way deserves the praise of Bailey, the Cambridge prize essayist, "Vir singulari quodam ingenii acumine praeditus, Warburtonus; qui primus certe recentiorum ad rectam harum rerum cognitionem patefecit viam."1

Here naturally comes an account of the labours of Young and Champollion, two men who stand out pre-eminently as the true discoverers of the right method of decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics. As much has been written on the works of these savants, and as some have tried to show that the whole merit of the discovery belongs to Young, and others that it belongs to Champollion, it will not be out of place here to make a plain statement of facts, drawn from the best sources, and to give the opinions of the most eminent Egyptologists on this point; a few details concerning the lives of these remarkable men must, however, be first given.

Dr. Thomas Young was born at Milverton, in Somersetshire, on the 13th of June, 1773. His parents were both members of the Society of Friends. He lived during the first seven years of his life with his maternal grandfather, Mr. Robert Davis, at Minehead, in Somersetshire. At the age of two he could read fluently, and before he was four he had read the Bible through twice. At the age of six, he learnt by heart in six weeks Goldsmith's Deserted Village. When not quite seven years of age he went to a school, kept by a man called King, at Stapleton near Bristol, where he stayed for a year and a half. In March 1782, when nearly nine years of age, he went to the school of Mr. T. Thompson, at Compton, in Dorsetshire, where he remained four years. Here he read Phaedrus's Fables, Cornelius Nepos, Virgil, Horace expurgated by Knox, the whole of Beza's Greek and Latin Testament, the First Seven Books of the Iliad, Martin's Natural Philosophy, etc., etc. Before leaving this school he had got through six chapters of the Hebrew Bible. About this time he

Young and

Cham

pollion.

Early life

and studies

of Young.

learnt to use the lathe, and he made a telescope and a microscope, and the Italian, Persian, Syriac, and Chaldee languages Young's all occupied his attention. From 1787 to 1792 he was private studies. tutor to Hudson Gurney, at Youngsbury, in Hertfordshire,

1

Hieroglyphicorum Origo et natura, Cambridge, 1816, p. 9.

oriental

Young's medical studies.

where he seems to have devoted himself to the study of English, French, Italian, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriac, Samaritan, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Ethiopic, as well as to that of natural Philosophy, Botany, and Entomology.' In 1792 Young began to study Medicine and Anatomy in London, and in 1793 he entered St. Bartholomew's Hospital as a pupil. In 1803 he read a paper before the Royal Society, and was elected a Fellow the following year (balloted for and elected, June 19). Shortly after he attended medical lectures in Edinburgh and Göttingen, and he subsequently went to Cambridge, where he took the degree of Bachelor of Medicine (1803), and afterwards that of Doctor of Physic (1808). In 1798 Young received a splendid bequest from his uncle Dr. Brocklesby, consisting of his house in Norfolk Street, Park Lane, his library, his prints, his pictures, and about £10,000 in money; hence he was free to form his own Discovers scheme of life. In May, 1801, he discovered the undulatory undulatory theory of light, and his paper on this subject was read before theory of light. the Royal Society in the November following; in the same year he accepted the office of Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution. In 1802 he was appointed Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society, and on the 14th of June, 1804, he married Eliza, the daughter of J. P. Maxwell, Esq., of Cavendish Square, and of Trippendence, near Farnborough, Kent. The attention of Young was called to Egyptian inscriptions by Sir W. Rouse Boughton, who had found in a mummy case at Thebes a papyrus written in cursive Egyptian characters, and to a notice of this which Young prepared for his friend, he appended a translation of the demotic text of the Rosetta Stone. As the details of his studies on the Rosetta Stone belong to the history of the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics, they are given further on (p. 141 ff.), but the reader will understand Young's position better by reading Dean Peacock's chapter on "hieroglyphical researches" printed in his life of Young, pp. 258-344, and Mr. Leitch's notes in the third volume of the collected Works of Dr. Young. In 1816 Young was appointed

Young's

study of hieroglyphs.

For the list of books read by him at this time, see the Life of Thomas Young, by G. Peacock, London, 1855, pp. 14-17.

Secretary to a Commission for ascertaining the length of the seconds pendulum, for comparing French and English standards, etc., and in 1818 he was appointed Secretary of the Board of Longitude and Superintendent of the Nautical Almanac. In 1825 he became Medical Referee and Inspector of Calculations to the Palladium Insurance Company. In 1826 he was elected one of the eight foreign Associates of the Academy of Sciences at Paris. In February, 1829, he began to suffer from repeated attacks of asthma, and by the April following he was in a state of great weakness; he died on the Young's 10th of May, not having completed his fifty-sixth year. An excellent steel engraving of Young, by R. Ward, from a picture by Sir Thomas Lawrence, P.R.A., forms the frontispiece to his life by Dean Peacock, which, according to J. J. Champollion-Figeac, "exprime fidèlement la douceur, la grâce, les traits d'une figure toute rayonnante d'intelligence."1

death.

classical

Jean François Champollion, surnamed le Jeune, the immortal discoverer of a correct system of decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics, was born at Figeac on December 24, 1790. His family came originally from Champoléon in the Champollion's High Alps, where a branch of it still holds property. As a physical boy he made rapid progress in classical studies, and he devoted and himself at the same time to botany and mineralogy; at a very studies. early date however he showed a natural taste for oriental languages, and like Young was, at the age of thirteen, master of a fair knowledge of Hebrew, Syriac and Chaldee.* In 1805 his brother J. J. Champollion-Figeac brought him to Paris, and caused him to be admitted to the Cours de l'Ecole des Langues Orientales, and introduced him to Silvestre de Sacy. Soon after his arrival in Paris Champollion turned his attention to the study of the hieroglyphic inscription on the Rosetta Stone, but his powerful friend de Sacy advised the elder brother to warn the younger off a study which ne pouvait donner aucun résultat. In 1812 he was nominated Professor of Ancient History to the faculty of Letters at Grenoble,

Lettre au Directeur de la Revue Britannique au sujet des Recherches du Docteur Young, Paris, 1857, p. II.

2 On the subject of Champollion's studies, at Grenoble, see Chroniques Dauphinoises, par A. Champollion-Figeac, t. III. pp. 153, 156, 157-238.

B. M.

K

Champollion's hieroglyphic

and Coptic studies.

where he still carried on his oriental studies. When he arrived in Paris he found that the old Egyptologists maintained that hieroglyphics were a symbolic language, and seeking to verify this theory, he wasted a year. He made up his mind, however, to work out this question without having regard to the theories of others, and he sketched out a plan for a large work on Egypt in several volumes. The first part of this appeared at Grenoble in 1811, entitled Introduction; it was never sold, for only about thirty copies were printed, but it appeared, without the analytical table of Coptic geographical names, under the title L'Egypte sous les Pharaons, 8vo., 2 vols., 1814. About this time Young, in England, was studying the texts on the Rosetta Stone, and had actually begun to make a translation of the demotic section, making use of the results obtained by de Sacy and Akerblad, to the latter of whom great credit is due for his acuteness and insight. Whatever may be said as to Champollion's ignorance of Young's results, it is quite certain that he must have known of those of Akerblad, and we know (see p. 135) that a printed copy of Young's paper on the Rosetta Stone had been put into Champollion's hands by de Sacy. In a very short time acquainted Champollion discovered where his predecessors had broken down, and having already written De l'écriture Hiératique des Anciens Egyptiens, Grenoble, 1821, on September 17, in the following year, he read his Mémoire on the hieroglyphics and exhibited his hieroglyphic Alphabet, with its Greek and Demotic equivalents, before the Académie des Inscriptions. Champollion's paper created a great sensation, and Louis XVIII. wished a statement concerning it laid before him, and M. le Duc de Doudeauville determined that an Egyptian Museum should be formed in the Palace of the Louvre. In the same year Champollion published his Lettre à M. Dacier, relative à l'Alphabet des Hieroglyphes phonétiques, in which he showed beyond a doubt that his system was the correct one. In a series of Mémoires read at the Institut in April, May and June, 1823, he explained his system more fully, and these he afterwards published together entitled Précis du Système Hieroglyphique des Anciens Egyptiens, Paris, 2 vols., 1824. A second edition, revised and corrected, appeared in 1828. In

Champollion

with Young's labours.