The Riddle of the Labyrinth (8 page)

Despite his discovery, Young remained under the powerful spell of iconicity. Like most people who sought to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphs, he could not resist the seduction of their pictorial forms, which resembled tiny flora and fauna, pots, pans, and people. Perhaps, Young reasoned, the Egyptian scribes had reserved phonetic spelling for foreign names, using logograms for everything else. Hampered by this assumption, he could progress no further.

The true decipherment of the hieroglyphs was accomplished by Jean-François Champollion. Born in France in 1790, Champollion was also a boy wonder. When he was still a teenager, after coming across an account of the Rosetta expedition in his brother's scholarly library, he vowed to decipher the hieroglyphic script himself. He set to work, though a successful solution took him until the ripe age of thirty-four.

In his late teens, Champollion wrote a book,
Egypt under the Pharaohs
, eventually published 1814. In it, he argued that the language of ancient Egypt was Coptic itself, preserved in his own time in the liturgy of the Christian Coptic Church. It was an idea that would figure significantly in his decipherment a decade and a half later. At twenty, he began teaching at the University of Grenoble. In the coming years, after having read one or two of Young's articles on the subject, he began to prepare to attack the Egyptian hieroglyphics.

To do so, Singh wrote, he studied “Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Ethiopic, Sanskrit, Zend, Pahlevi, Arabic, Syrian, Chaldean, Persian and Chinese.” It was crucial, Champollion knew, to understand the workings of languages from as many different linguistic families as possible. If the language of the hieroglyphs turned out not to be Coptic, the structure of any one of these might shed light on its real identity. (Coptic was no problem in any case: Champollion had already learned the language in his teens. He was so fluent, Singh wrote, “that he used it to record entries in his journal.”)

As Champollion studied the hieroglyphic inscriptions, he realized that most names (and not just the foreign names, as Young had supposed) were spelled out phonetically. A lovely example was found in this small cartouche:

The final glyph,
, was already known to stand for “s”—it is simply a double version of the one in the Ptolemy cartouche. The values of the first two glyphs were unknown. Here, Champollion made a remarkable conjecture. The first glyph,
, looked like a stylized sun. What if this symbol were actually pronounced like the
word
for “sun” in the Egyptian language? The Coptic word “sun” was
ra
. If the inscription were written in Coptic, then the cartouche so far would read Ra-
        
-s. That left only the second glyph,
, which other inscriptions suggested stood for the consonant cluster “ms.” The word in the cartouche, then, was Ra-ms-s, the native Egyptian name of the great pharaoh Ramses. (In accordance with Egyptian spelling conventions, which did not take great pains to represent vowels, the scribes had left out the “e.”)

Despite its highly pictorial appearance, then, Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was a mixed script. Many symbols, like
and
, worked alphabetically, representing single sounds or sound-clusters. Others, like
, worked on the rebus principle, symbolizing a small string of sounds by functioning as little puns. The puns worked, Champollion demonstrated, only if the language of the inscriptions was Coptic.

Champollion's decipherment brought home a crucial point: In most scripts, the
form
each character takes is completely arbitrary, and any script can employ characters of any form. Though they looked like pictures of real-world objects, some Egyptian hieroglyphs actually stood for
sounds
. Many nineteenth-century analysts of ancient scripts, swept along on a Romantic tide of iconography, never grasped this essential point. Though he ought to have known better, Arthur Evans was one of them.

For Evans, the problem stemmed from the fact that the Egyptian scribes often
did
use hieroglyphs to stand for whole words or concepts. Besides using phonetic characters, Egyptian hieroglyphic script contained a set of pictograms that could be appended to spelled-out words. Known as determinatives, these pictograms conveyed additional information about the word, modifying its meaning, distinguishing among multiple meanings, or identifying the larger category—human, animal, royalty—to which a thing belonged. Egyptian determinatives included
, “man” or “lord”;
, “woman” or “lady”;
, “old man”;
, “deity”; and
, “crossed roads” or “settlement.”