The Keys of Egypt: The Obsession to Decipher Egyptian Hieroglyphs

From the Renaissance through 1824, numerous Europeans strove to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. It was Jean-Francois Champolion who succeeded. This book is the best introduction to the subject I've found, containing a biography of Champolion, much on his contemporaries and rivals, and a clear explanation of how and why he was able to do what no one one else did.

A thoroughly absorbing book - I managed to read it whilst my wife was in the early stages of being induced. Come the end I was able to put it down and reflect on a first foray into the history of Egyptian Hieroglyphic decipherment. It managed to clear a couple of minor points up for me, such as the difference between hieroglyphs, demotic and hieratic which other books had simply, and somewhat erroneously, assumed I knew. And therein lay their failure and this book's success. If you're a scholar or a doctor, this isn't for you. It is for the average person on the streets who has an interest in the history of what clearly comes across as an obsession to decipher Egyptian Hieroglyphs.The bickering and snideness that Young brought to the affair set against the political background of France and England gives an air of reality rather than the somewhat dry and musty scholarship lecturers and doctors of history profess is the only true way of disemminating information. This book simply isn't about that.It begins in almost travelogue style with an account of Napoleon's venture into Eygpt and spends a delightful opening 40 or so pages irrelevantly giving a chronology of the ill-fated trip. Quite why it took 40 pages to give a tenuous link between Napoloeon and Champollion (other than the suggested revolution at Grenoble later in Champollion's life) I don't know, but it doesn't detract at all. If I wanted to be critical it does seem like the book comprises 8 separately written essays on the history of Egyptian Hieroglyphic decipherment with a bit of glue to hold it all together, but that would be being critical for the sake of it.Yes, it is not for the discerning scholar, but there are plenty of books out there to satisfy that urge. What this area of study desperately needed, and the Adkins' have provided us with, is a beginner's biography, an exciting glimpse of the reality around the man who is rightly heralded as one of France's greatest scholars. If this to be his biography then the Adkins have achieved something worth reading.

The Keys of Egypt elegantly combines an in-depth biography of Jean Francois Champollion, with a detailed chronology of the saga to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Champollion, a French language savant (Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Chaldean, Coptic), was the first person in over a thousand years to decipher and read not only the hieroglyphs, but also the ancient Egyptian hieratic and demotic scripts as well. Toiling in ill health and poverty, and suffering political persecution and professional jealously, Champollion nevertheless conquered one of the greatest challenges of his or any time. His achievement unlocked the "keys" of ancient Egypt, which in turn was the genesis of Egyptology and our modern attempts to understand a civilization whose longevity and accomplishments continue to astound. An immense amount of biographical, Napoleonic Period, and ancient information is contained in this book, and I highly recommend it.

If you are like me, you learned at some point that Napoleon's forces had located the Rosetta Stone while invading Egypt, leading to the rediscovery of how to read ancient Egyptian. The writing on the stone contained the same material in Greek, Demotic, and hieroglyphs. From comparing the three texts, scholars deciphered hieroglyphs. Sounds simple, doesn't it? Well, it really wasn't, which is where our school book learning was incomplete. And that's the appeal of this unusual book.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

How we came to be able to understand what the strange pictures of hieroglypics said is the triumph of Jean-Francois Champollion, and his story is newly and excitingly told in _The Keys of Egypt: The Obsession to Decipher Egyptian Hieroglyphs_ by Lesley and Roy Adkins. They begin their story with a useful account of the campaign of Napoleon into Egypt in 1798. The savants accompanying the soldiers brought back the records from which people tried to translate the ancient Egyptian texts, but the translations were idiosyncratic and faulty. Champollion wrote: "It is a complex system, a script at the same time figurative, symbolic, and phonetic, in the same text, phrase, I would almost say in the same word." The grueling work was conquered by Champollion's stubbornness, overcoming illness, poverty, and betrayal in a triumph that caused a sensation in the academic and popular worlds. This is a superb biography of a truly heroic scholar who made a difference, written by two archeologists; it is the first English-language story of Champollion. The details of the task of translation are well laid out, and the pressure Champollion was under makes the tale surprisingly exciting. Champollion did not just give understanding of a language; he brought us into another world which we had lost.