Read the names of the pharaohs who built the pyramids of Egypt, decipher the Book of death, discover ancient texts from tombs, annotate the words on rosetta's stone tablets... In 1822, at the age of 32, Jean-Fran ois Champollion (1790-1832) published his research on the graphic system of ancient Egypt to the world.
This year marks the 200th anniversary of the decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts, and the surging news learned that on April 12, the French National Library showed Champoryan's research methods and fascinating Egyptian civilization with "Chambollion's Adventures: The Secret of Hieroglyphs", and it was Champollion who deciphered the meaning of ancient Egyptian scripts and hieroglyphs, giving life to a silent civilization.
Tanitamon Myth papyrus
In 1809, Egypt became known to the French because of a 23-volume Description of Egypt. It is a book by fellow scholars and draftsmen during Napoleon's invasion of the Pharaohs' land, listing Egyptian customs, landscapes, and monuments.
It is also recorded that on 15 July 1799, a captain officer of Napoleon's army found a fragment of a stele inscribed with three scripts (Greek alphabet, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic and ancient Egyptian colloquial script) near the Egyptian port city of Rosetta. The stele was first transported to Alexandria, Egypt, and French scientists were the first to begin their research. In 1801, France was defeated and surrendered, the British army wanted to confiscate all the research results, the French scientists threatened to burn them all, and finally reached a compromise, allowing the French scientists to keep the research results and the stone tablets, but the stone tablets were transported to the British Museum for preservation. This is the treasure of the British Museum today, the Rosetta Stone, and Chamboryan's research began with the rubbing of the stone tablets.
The Rosetta Stone is on the rubbing, with three scripts on it, about 1800
On September 24, 1822, at the age of 32, Champollion read out in public at the Paris Academy of Sciences "Letter on Hieroglyphics – Letter to Mr. M. Dassier", announcing the decipherment of the Ancient Egyptian script.
Portrait of Chamborion. Leon Cogniet painted
200 years later, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France has revealed its most important collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts and inventories, including 88 volumes of Champollion's notes and hand-drawings, which, for the first time on public display, offer a glimpse into Champollion's talent, let the public know about champollion's methods of collecting texts, research objects and disseminating knowledge, and see how he strives to achieve his goal of recreating a civilization with a history of more than 3,000 years and giving life to a silent ancient Egypt.
Manuscript of Champollion's treatise on Egyptian grammar
The exhibition consists of three parts from Champollion to the discovery of the Egyptian hieroglyphic language system; the search for texts in field archaeology; and the construction of a collective imagination of ancient Egypt by educational dissemination. The exhibition displays nearly 350 artifacts, most of which are from the collection of the National Library of France, and some of which are borrowed from the Louvre in Paris and the Egyptian Museum in Turin, through which these manuscripts, books, prints, photographs, paintings, papyrus, sculptures, etc., outline how Egyptian civilization was resurrected.
Chamborion, Birds in Egypt and Nubia, 1835-1845
How is the Egyptian script deciphered?
The Last Known Hieroglyphia is inscribed on the Hadrian Gate of the Philae Temple in Aswan, Egypt, dated August 24, 394.
Due to the Christianization of Egypt, only a few people used the ancient scripts were abandoned, but these scripts spread outside Egypt as images of ancient Egypt and took on different iconographic and semiotic meanings. Originally Greek, Latin, and Arab writers considered hieroglyphics to be symbols of paganism and magic.
Bronze statues of gods and goddesses in ancient Egypt.
The term "hieroglyphs" first appeared in the writings of the Renaissance Greek writer Horapollon; the 17th-century European scholar Athanasius Kircher established the relationship between copts and Egyptians based on messages conveyed from Coptic Arabic manuscripts; by the mid-18th century, French archaeologist Abbé Barthélemy had discovered what would later be called "cartouche." A rectangular (or oval) frame of hieroglyphs emblazoned with the names of ancient Egyptian kings or queens. However, the imagination of ancient Egyptian writing still exists, and some even believe that ancient Egypt is related to China. It was not until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and Chambollion that hieroglyphics proved that hieroglyphics were indeed an independent language.
Depending on the function and medium, the Egyptian script has different writing systems, the earliest recognizable characters are some hieroglyphs (birds, characters, etc.), which mostly appear on temples or monuments; the hieroglyphs used on papyrus are more administrative or literary texts, and are more simplified and popular. In the 4th century BC, Alexander the Great crusaded and Greek became the official language after the fall of Egypt. It was not until the 4th century, with the advent of Christianity, that the Egyptians gradually used Coptic, a writing system derived from ancient Egypt and derived from the Greek alphabet. After Egypt was conquered by the Arabs in 642, the Egyptians used Arabic and Coptic became the language of worship for Christians.
Stele, 1292-1190 BC, Egyptian Museum of Turin
By 1809, at the age of 19, Chambourg had become professor of history at the Grenoble Collège. In the same year, he turned his focus to ancient Egypt, believing that Coptic was a late form of ancient Egyptian, and he devoted all his efforts to learning Coptic in the hope that he would eventually retrieve the language spoken by the pharaohs. He wrote to his brother Jacques-Joseph about the comparison of Coptic and Old Egyptian that enabled him to recognize the pronunciation and meaning of the Ancient Egyptian script. Relying on what he knew about the relationship between the two, he deciphered the ancient Egyptian way of naming natural things and completed the Egyptian-Coptic Dictionary.
Shang Bolian's hand-drawn notebook with an inscription on the mummy is drawn.
Champollion believes that archaeological remains have proved that Egypt in the time of the pharaohs contained a huge civilization, and the deciphering of writing is an important step in the discovery of civilization.
From 1822 onwards, he has been researching and writing about ancient Egyptian history, secular life, and discovering the art and music of the time through the study of the Egyptian Pantheon. Between 1824 and 1826, he traveled to the museums of Cambridge, Turin, Florence, Naples, Rome, Geneva and Lyon, where he copied hundreds of inscriptions, statues, mummies, papyrus. In 1828, he led a joint Franco-Italian expedition to Egypt, where he copied and collected a large number of Ramses-era tombs and long inscriptions from Greco-Roman temples. There he saw the architecture and culture of his dreams, "whether past or modern, no nation has conceived such lofty, vast, magnificent architecture as the ancient Egyptians did." ”
Champollion and Joseph Dubwa prepare drawings for the study of the Khasol Stele in Egypt, 1815-1825
How the Egyptian script was recorded and broadcast
Champollion began to learn painting very early, and even before cracking the writing system, he used brushes to record and copy ancient Egyptian artifacts. In 1811, at the age of 21, with the help of leon-jean-joseph Dubois, he copied an illustrated papyrus document. At present, the manuscripts of Chamborian in the National Library of France include maps of archaeological work, work ideas for interpreting texts, etc., many of which are hand-drawn drawings related to Egyptian characters, and even stone tablets, statues, and sarcophagus facsimiles that simulate contours by stamping process, which not only strongly supported Champollion's research at that time, but are still the objects of archaeologists' research today.
Fragments of the Temple of Amun, collection of the Egyptian Museum of Turin
Champollion copying sheep on a fragment of the temple of Amun, 1824-1826
After Champollion, beginning in the mid-19th century, the first archaeologists to master photography promoted the development of archaeology. Compared with the past, it took about 20 years and a large number of cartographers to reproduce millions of hieroglyphs on sites such as Thebes and Karnak, with daguerreography, a few people can complete this arduous task; and because of photography, a large number of real hieroglyphs in expeditionary archaeology have replaced the rubbings and hand-drawn drawings of the past, more effectively recording information on museums and field monuments and artifacts.
At the same time, thanks to advances in printing, hieroglyphs were more easily reproduced, facilitating the spread of ancient Egyptian scholarly knowledge. Nowadays, at Egyptian archaeological sites, a variety of techniques are often used together to best restore the "sacred script" written by ancient Egyptian scribes.
Pyramid on Daguerre's serollet photo, 1839
19th-century photographs are both documentary and aesthetically valuable. The emergence of sound and audiovisual records in the 20th century has led to new advances in the collections of archaeologists, especially when dealing with oral intangible heritage. The exhibition features original recordings of Vietnamese monostring guzheng solos, recording sounds and being one of the ways to explore social representations.
In terms of publishing, hieroglyphs, like many ancient oriental scripts that have been deciphered since the 18th century, have had difficulty integrating hieroglyphs into Latin publications. The earliest publication of Egyptian papyrus from the current collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France was published in 1653, testifying to the early interest in object glyphs in the Western world. But by the time Champollion lived, there was an urgent need to create a hieroglyphic font that could reproduce thousands of symbols, but by the time he finished the design of the typeface suitable for lithography, Champollion had died. Books such as the Dictionary of Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs compiled by him were published after his death.
In 1842, thanks to the optimization of typesetting technology, the French National Printing Office produced a set of hieroglyphic characters that could be used for movable type printing, and the number of related publications increased by nearly ten times. In 1898, the Printing Bureau of the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology (IFAO) in Cairo developed more than 8,000 characters in oriental fonts as the main reference text for publications. Today, digital technology has replaced lead printing, but many of the more than 12,000 characters used still originate from Champerian's publications of that year.
Karnak Temple, 1798-1812
On March 4, 1832, at the age of 41, Chamborian died. He was the first curator of Egyptology at the Louvre Museum, the first historian, professor and academician of Egyptian art. But at the time of his death, some still doubted whether Champollion had really succeeded in deciphering hieroglyphs, until the publication of books such as Ancient Egyptian Grammar and the Egyptian Pantheon refuted these doubts and helped later researchers construct Egyptology into a methodical and efficient discipline. But Champoryan's work only revealed part of the mystery, and for 200 years, with the deepening of practice, Egyptian civilization spread through library research, museum visits, field research, digital publishing, and so on.
Balzac once said: "Champollion read hieroglyphs all his life. In fact, more than that, he made the civilization of three thousand years ago give voice. And established a method that will inspire later scholars to continue to crack.
Note: The exhibition will last until July 24, this article is compiled from the website of the National Library of France, and the pictures in the text are all from the collection of the National Library of France, except for the labels.