Champollion and Ancient Egypt

Champollion and Ancient Egypt

In 1801 a physicist named Joseph Fourier was the prefect of a departament of France called Isère (Fourier is now famous for his study of the propagation of heat in solids, used today to understand the surface properties of the planets, and for his investigation of waves and other periodic motion – a branch of mathematics known as Fourier analysis). While inspecting the schools in his province, Fourier discovered an eleven-year-old boy whose remarkable intellect and flair for oriental languages had already earned him the admiring attention of scholars. Fourier invited him home for a chat. The boy was fascinated by Fourier’s collection of Egyptian artefacts, collected during the Napoleonic expedition where he had been responsible for cataloguing the astronomical monuments of that ancient civilization.

A hieroglyphic inscription roused the boy’s sense of wonder. “But what do they mean?”, he asked. “Nobody knows”, was the reply. The boy’s name was Jean François Champollion. Fired by the mystery of the language no one could read, he became a superb linguist and passionately immersed himself in ancient Egyptian writing.

France at that time was flooded with Egyptian artifacts, stolen by Napoleon and later made available to Western scholars. The description of the expedition was published, and devoured by the young Champollion.

As an adult Champollion succeeded; fulfilling his childhood ambitions, he provided a brilliant decipherment of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. But it was not until 1828, twenty-seven years after his meeting with Fourier, that Champollion first set foot in Egypt, the land of his dreams, and sailed upstream from Cairo, following the course of the Nile, paying homage to the culture he had worked so hard to understand. It was an expedition in time, a visit to an alien civilization.

“The evening of the 16th we finally arrived at Dendera. There was magnificent moonlight and we were only an hour away from the Temples: Could we resist the temptation? I ask the coldest of your mortals! To dine and leave immediately were the orders of the moment: alone and without guides, but armed to the teeth we crossed the fields… the Temple appeared to us at last… One could well measure it but to give an idea of it would be impossible. It is the union of grace and majesty in the highest degree. We stayed these two hours in ecstasy, running through the huge rooms… and trying to read the exterior inscriptions in the moonlight. We did not return to the boat until three in the morning, only to return to the Temple at seven… What had been magnificent in the moonlight was still so when the sunlight revealed to us all the details.

We in Europe are only dwarfs and no nation, ancient or modern, has conceived the art of architecture on such a sublime, great and imposing style, as the ancient Egyptians. They ordered everything to be done for people who are a hundred feet high (Champollion). Image : Fantasy Haunted of Magic Castle Witch © Meg Jorgensen (Elena).