Cracking Ancient Codes: Egyptian Hieroglyphs - with Andrew Robinson

thank you very much I'm talking about Egyptian of course which is a later script I'm going to really focus on the decipherment and how it was done i-i'll be frank with you it'll be a somewhat in fact strongly biographical talk about how Thomas Young and Sean Paul Young worked on it and it's a real honor to be in the same place that Thomas Young was all those two centuries ago now this building is a rather unusual place called the Egyptian Hall it was in Piccadilly but nobody will remember it now because it was demolished in 1905 it was built in 1812 and it lasted you know century or so and it was inspired by gypsum mania which started really with the Napoleon's expedition to Egypt a very strange and wonderful exhibition opened in May 1821 in the Egyptian Hall and it was 2,000 visitors paid half a crown on the first day it's quite a lot of money to see it and it lasted a whole year and inside what was remarkable was the first scale model of an Egyptian tomb to be shown in London 15 meters long and two full-size reproductions of chambers in the tomb and it was from what was later called the Valley of the Kings so there was a huge crowd to see it paintings were made on site in Egypt and here are some of them the artist was Alessandro Ricci he's not very well known now but he was a medical doctor from Siena Italian and he'd saved the life of the Egyptian Pasha's son in Egypt and then he traveled extensively in Egypt and become a painter at the top of the this bas-relief is the vulture goddess Nekhbet and underneath the oval signs I think they're pretty clear here a cartouche is they're called cartouche is as you probably know and they were thought to the signs inside them were thought to be the names of goddesses and gods and pharaohs but of course nobody could read them in 1821 nobody at all the most remarkable thing I think in the exhibition was this sarcophagus made out of alabaster it's it arrived rather late from Egypt actually in August well after the opening of the exhibition but it was soon the center of attention it was almost three meters long and it's carved with hieroglyphs originally known in as the color is originally known as Egyptian blue it's actually calcium copper tetra silicate and the sarcophagus was then sold three years later it was given to the British Museum who decided not to buy it and it was given to or sold to sone the architect John Soane Sir John Soane in 1824 for 2,000 pounds and you can see it today in London in the Sohn Museum in the basement rather atmospherically lit and I do recommend it it's well worth a visit if you haven't seen it now the man who had discovered the tomb in 1817 was this man Giovanni belzoni another Italian and as you may know he's quite famous in his way he was a circus strongman turned Egyptologist rather an odd combination and he was a flamboyant showman on the very day that the exhibition opened he appeared in front of the press and the audience wrapped in mummy bandages and they were then unwrapped to reveal him now his book which is a great pictorial study of his Egyptian adventures came out in 1820 and almost a century later Howard Carter the English archaeologist was inspired by that book Belle's own his book to look for another tomb and of course he found it the tomb of Tutankhamun now according to belzoni the to me discovered which was on show in the Egyptian Hall was assumed to be or presumed to be the tomb of Sammis PSA mm is now nobody could be sure because as I've said nobody could read the hieroglyphs not even the Greeks and Romans could read them the knowledge was lost except to the Egyptians themselves and their priests so this was guesswork and the guess had come from Thomas Young who's already been mentioned now young I don't probably need to say much about perhaps I can summarize him by saying I've written a biography of young called the last man who knew everything jokingly but I must say when I worked on it I got pretty exhausted even learning how many subjects he'd got involved with he was foreign secretary of the Royal Society he was former professor of natural philosophy at ERI and he was a doctor and he was a physiologist of the eye and of course if you're a physicist you know he was a young Slits very famous and he was a linguist he invented the term indo-european and really a lot of other things including work in life insurance of all things quite well paid now he was unsure about Sammis as the name of the Pharaoh buried in the tomb he was a speculation and when the tomb was taken the exhibition was taken to Paris by bells only in 1822 before yeah it's an interesting fact that Samus was not given the name of the Pharaoh in the catalogue there was no sign of Samus and the reason for that is that the notes for the catalog and in fact the whole catalogue had been written by not Thomas Young and not belzoni but the key figure in this story jean-francois Champollion and here he is in later life now in 1822 at the time the exhibition sham polyol in France had made a startling announcement that he could read the cartouche is of some late Egyptian rulers like Alexander Cleopatra and Ptolemy but he was not yet confident of reading the earlier Egyptian rulers before the Greek period such as in quotes Samus and obviously the owner of the tomb was an early Egyptian ruler not a late one so he didn't identify it and what happened next is that seanpauley are as we'll come to in more detail later suddenly started making progress so after 1822 the decipherment took off in the 1820s and soon he was able to actually come up with the name of the ruler and it turned out of the tomb to be set off or SETI the first who had died we now know in 1279 BC and probably more famously his son was Ramses the second Ramses the great so we now know that thanks to sham Poli on now the key of course to the decipherment was the rosetta stone and i'm not showing you the familiar image of the rosetta stone yet as you can easily see this is a model from france the stone was originally discovered in 1799 by the French Army in Egypt it's now in the British Museum captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801 that is actually written in English on the side of the stone if you go and have a look it's quite hard to read but it is still visible now the copy I'm showing you is from a French town called for Jack in southwestern France and the edge of the massive stone trowel and this model is a hundred times the area of the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum and it's made out of black granite from Zimbabwe by an American conceptual artist in 1919 their dates important because that's the bicentenary of jean-paul eons birth info jack in 1790 so this was created to celebrate his by centenary there's the street in which he was born he was born on the upper level on the right in one of those rooms up there and it's now the street is called the UM Puffs seanpauley on in his honor now I'm not gonna say much about his parents because they didn't have much influence on his life his father was a bookseller but was the crucial figure and I will talk about him because he's very important is his elder brother of Jean polio Jacques Josef seanpauley ah who's quite a good scholar in his own right in later years Jacques Josef is shown here in his 20s and he was 12 years older than Jean Francois and he effectively was in loco parentis he took over and brought up the boy I think it's true it's quite a claim but without Jacques Joseph's financial and emotional support for Jean Francois and also his savoir faire he really was a practical figure who knew how to get things done I think nobody would have heard of Jean Francois today the elder brother was absolutely crucial and after the younger brother's death the older brother said quite movingly I think I was by turns his father his master and his pupil and that's certainly true from the record now just briefly Jacques Josef moved to Grenoble from for Jack in 1798 he took up a job there and then his younger brother joined him in 1801 when he was only 11 years old and he started living in the same house as his elder brother amongst a huge and growing library of books because Jacques Joseph had very strong scholarly ambitions so the young boy was living there until 1804 and that when he was 14 and then I have to say the elder brother insisted for financial reasons I suspect that he go and bored in the local lycée which had just been established the government school in Grenoble under Napoleonic law in 1804 in some ways this was a disaster because it was under military discipline and there were rather appalling stories about sort of riots and the dormitories and Jean Francois was fairly defenseless but he and he much disliked the place but he had to stay there's a letter charming letter from him here you don't have to read the details of course but this is written to his brother in 1804 to seven and that line says Lu dollfie Ethiopia gramatica and that's a Latin grammar of the Ethiopia crypt and he was requesting at this teenage early teenage these very scholarly books he wanted his brothers who provide them for his research but there's a rather nice rather piteous PS at the side here hope you can see June a pod the book clip would make Hulot I don't have any buckles for my trousers which gives you a little hint of how he was living at this time the the misery is probably not too strong a word ended in eight seven he was able to come home and live with his brother again because he was permitted to study at home the school allowed him to do that and the man who who allowed it was this man Joseph Fourier who is an honored name in an institution like this he's a mathematician and physicist of real note the Fourier series but from our point of view tonight it's not mathematics and physics that matter it's the fact that Fourier had gone with Napoleon to Egypt in 1799 or 1798 and Fourier was a key scholar probably the key scholar with Napoleon he was Secretary of the asti - they shipped and when he came back to France with Napoleon he he took up the editing of a great volume called the description though they heaped which was the government publication based on all the discoveries made by Napoleon's soldiers and scholars that came out over many years and Fourier was the the was the editor to begin with and he was helped in Grenoble and this is crucial by unofficially helped by Jacques Joseph Shung Palio and the younger brother who was helping his elder brother to help Fourier they did research for him although they weren't acknowledged but I think that it's fair to say it was through this absolutely hands-on exposure to ancient Egyptian monuments and drawings and all the things that were brought back that Jacques Joseph and Jean Francois became passionate about ancient Egypt so that's how he got introduced to it the young boy or the teenager Fourier sort of took him up as well and he introduced him to a Greek Catholic priest who proved quite crucial because he taught the boy Coptic guided him anyway then jean-francois started teaching himself and Coptic was thought to be the language of the late Egyptian period or at least related to it I don't have time to say much about Coptic but the idea was that if he could learn Coptic it might help him to understand late Egyptian inscriptions so that proved quite fruitful and Fourier also sent him to Paris in 1807 which was hugely important to study ancient languages and his professor was this man Silvestre de sassy and there's no time to speak much about him but he's an interesting character in his own right he was at the School of Oriental languages in Paris seanpauley on with his student and they admired each other up to a point but they had also terrible moments in later life where daggers really are drawn between decision seanpauley or partly for political reasons as I'll mentioned later but also I think de sus he had an ambition to use the Rosetta Stone to decipher the hieroglyphs so the student was really something of a rival and he didn't really encourage him as a result now here's a copy of the stone ah the very first ever done ever made by lithography in Cairo in 1800 by French scholars before it was captured needless to say now it can be read through the Greek translation at the bottom and as I expect everyone here knows the hieroglyphs are at the top broken badly broken here in the middle is the demotic section which is a later Egyptian script and the the Greek section is is this bit at the bottom which is also somewhat broken and the Greek section turned out to be readable in alphabetic script of course and it is an edict of King Ptolemy v epiphanies dated 196 BC and the really crucial thing about it is that the Greek states in the last line I think that the three inscriptions are equivalent in meaning not exact ons lay of each other but equivalent in meaning so the Greek was going to be obviously a clue to reading the other two and that's the importance of the rosetta stone of course now seanpauley all took up the study in 1808 he was still very young and he worked at it in various ways till 1815 working on the rosetta stone but he didn't make a breakthrough he made various contributions but nothing really got going then he abandoned it for a while and the reason is politics which is always part of his life and the pole Ian came back from Elba and 1815 landed with some soldiers came straight to Grenoble and they must have gulped loudly but they opened the the gates and Napoleon came in and these are the people welcoming Napoleon including the shampo Leon brothers Jacques shows have actually became Napoleon's secretary went with him to Paris Jean Francois was left behind to edit the government Gazette and on the very day of the Battle of Waterloo he rather unwisely wrote in the government Gazette Napoleon is our legitimate Prince so he suffered both of them suffered after Napoleon's fall pretty badly they were exiled from for Jack they lost their jobs in Grenoble and to make matters worse to Sassie who was a royalist through and through actually told Thomas young in a letter Thomas Young was in London and the SAS he roped him saying that my former student is a potential plagiarist of your work and probably a charlatan he used the word so things had got pretty bad for poor old seanpauley are now young I have to say something about young and his work and I'll try and keep it as concise as possible he published a really remarkable article in the encyclopedia britannica in 1819 simply called egypt based on his work in London over the previous four years and he shows the last line of the rosetta stone in this drawing and he said I can spot striking resemblances as he put it between the demotic symbol esteemed Tyra glyphic symbols at the top and the demotic underneath it's of course is the Greek on the third line this is the last line of the rosetta stone and if you really study it you can see other resemblances and Yung really did study that was quite clear he was obsessive from his papers in the British Library you can see that but there are a lot of signs and demotic that do not resemble hieroglyphs and he also recognized that so he speculated that there was a striking resemblance between certain corresponding hieroglyphs and the demotic signs but that it was probably a mixed script demotic it was probably imitations of the hieroglyphs mixed with letters of the alphabet to quote young but he was unsure in others he was suggesting a phonetic element in the demotic script in addition to a symbolic element but he was unsure whether the hieroglyphs also had phonetic elements as most people did including the Greeks and Romans believed they were purely symbolic without any phonetic signs so he decided to investigate that by using an idea of discusses the SAS he had actually suggested well let's look at the Greek names and the rosetta stone like Ptolemy that's the key name and see whether we can compare the our experiment Allah me with the Greek spelling now that of course is the cartouche of Ptolemy and I can't go into much detail for lack of time but the idea was that Jung had is let's compare the two and see whether we can give some fanatic values to the signs of the name toll meas as it is spelt in Greek and I think you can see fairly easily that the hieroglyphs are on the left from the name of Ptolemy then there's Jung suggested phonetic value in the middle and then today's value accepted by Egyptologists and he did a fairly good job he didn't get it quite right he then went further he took another cartouche of a late Egyptian ruler called Queen Baron Ichi and he analyzed that in the same way and then he came up with this chart in the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1819 sounds questionmark said young he was cautious based on the same principle of comparison with the Greek and Egyptology today recognized that of the signs that he'd identified six are correct three are partly correct and four are incorrect so it was a mixed picture he did even go further than that rather remarkably he compared eighty demotic words with their hieroglyphic equivalents translated with the help of the Greek and you can see here the cartouche of Ptolemy and here the cartouche of queen Baron Ichi and lots of other words so he compared the two and those 80 equivalents are still accepted today so he was really making progress but as ever with Jung he was distracted by his polymath II and after 1819 after he published this great article he doesn't make further progress he's he didn't exactly abandon ancient Egypt but he stops making progress gets involved with other things including longitude and problems like that it's only in the late 1820s Jung returns to Egypt or to the study of ancient Egypt and with it's nice to say some help from seanpauley on despite the fact they were rivals Jung becomes the decipher of demotic not the hieroglyphs of course which is seanpauley on but demotic is really Young's achievement but that's that's later now seanpauley on was having a pretty bad time still in France while Young was busy in England he'd returned from for Jack his hometown in 1817 to Grenoble but the royalist authorities in Grenoble dead set against him and they later tried to put him on trial for leading a rebellion for treason but he the government in Paris intervened and say he got off but things were really bad in eighteen seventeen to twenty one he did manage to marry he married regime blah a local woman son of a daughter of a Glover and they had a daughter's ohrid but essentially he abandoned a gypped ancient Egypt for three or four years and he thought of becoming first a teacher just to earn money and then a notary and she'd giving up entirely the study of Egypt but there is one publication from April 1821 it's a small booklet on the Egyptian script by Jean Paul II on obviously in French and unfortunately for him it does contain a real blunder because he says that there are no phonetic values in the demotic or hieroglyphic signs he says they stand for things not sounds in other words they're symbolic not phonetic and he knew he'd made a blunder pretty quickly and he tried to withdraw the booklet and I was amused because when I was writing his biography I went to the British Library which has one of the very few copies of this booklet and the French curator said I can't find it so I thought maybe sham polyols ghost has removed it and then three or four years later the curator said when my paperback came out well I think we've finally found it so it was just a bit of mislaid in the library but they're extremely rare and that's because jean paulhan was embarrassed he wanted to get rid of it and he never refers to it in his later work so in July he's forced to leave Grenoble and he goes really in despair to Paris and lives with his brother and he thought maybe that was the end of his career but in fact it turned out to be the absolutely right thing for him to do it was a great boon he lived here in the room as arene number 28 he and his brother and the family and the Asti to de france is visible in the distance the dome of it where the brother was working as a in the academy of ancient inscriptions and bel leche and there he started to read Thomas Young's work by his own admission he claimed he hadn't read the Encyclopedia Britannica article until 1821 possible but I'm not totally convinced but he certainly admitted reading it in the house in Paris and he never really admits what he got out of it there are hints but there are also things that are contradictory so great argument starts between young and jean-paul er and it's really gone on for two centuries nobody can really totally say what young contributed because seanpauley on kept quiet among about some things maybe they were his research maybe it was Young's ideas that had prompted him but he certainly does make a breakthrough in 1822 the following year although tis reminiscence of Young's and now at analytical approach with Ptolemy and Baron Ichi it involves Cleopatra another name from late Egypt not one of the early Egyptian rulers and the clue as to the fact that this was her cartouche came from an obelisk which had been brought back by belzoni are from Egypt and it was brought back to England and it's now actually you can see it still in the in Dorset in the garden of a house and it was published in 1821 in November and sham polio must have seen it soon after that in the published version and the really crucial thing about it is that the obelisk the shaft of the obelisk has - car - she's on it and on the Greek base block it's a bilingual like the rosetta stone there are two names in Greek Ptolemy and Cleopatra so it was a pretty fair guess that the second cartouche or the first was Ptolemy is and the second was Cleopatra's so sham Pauline tried the same approach of comparing the the Egyptian signs with the Greek alphabetic phonetic values and he came up with this analysis Cleopatra on the left and Tomi's on the right and I think you can see pretty quickly that there are signs in common which is how it should be if the system is correctly analyzed but the sign for T in Tommy's are sorry the sign for T here the hand sign differs from the half circle here so there is a difference there are two different signs for the same sound but seanpauley all said well that occurs in many languages it's known as homophony and Incas in English for instance was Jill spelt Gi double L or ji double L or Catherine spelt with a seal with a K so it wasn't a reasonable it wasn't an unreasonable speculation that this he got it right although there are two different signs for the same sound in some cases now he went much further and rather brilliantly looked at this cartouche that had been brought back in a drawing by a french architect who visited abu simble the temple at Abu Simbel and seanpauley all looked at this in September 1822 in Paris and he said I can read the signs on the right the two hooks they are the S from Tommy's there's no doubt about that then he said I think I read the sign on the left it is the circle with the dot it looks like the Sun and the Coptic for Sun was raw or Ray so he had he thought of the idea it started ray and ended SS and at some point the idea occurred to him that maybe this was the cartouche of an early Egyptian ruler Ramses nobody knew a damn thing about Ramses in 1822 except that he appeared in a Greek Ptolemaic historians chronicle of ancient Egypt a man called manna though a famous priest and so seanpauley own was aware of that he thought well Sean Ramsey's must have been a historical figure I'll take a chance maybe this is Rameses cartouche from Abu Simbel and he then took another step which is much more difficult to understand but the sign in the middle he said I've seen that sign in the middle with the hook sign in the rosetta stone where it is translated into Greek as Genelia and Ganassi it means give birth and the Coptic for Ganesha is is is me say M is e so maybe he speculated this is the sign for M or M s now we can see that as wishful thinking in a way but he turned out he was right this is the cartouche of Ramses and supposedly on the 14th of September 1822 Shambala on jean francois goes round his brother in the institute of france slaps the papers at noon on his desk he says dirty Amana fair I've done it a Eureka collapses on the floor and his elder brother is quite fearful he's had a stroke and even possibly died but it turns out he's just dog tired he goes home he rests and five days later he gives a really important speech which is probably the most important speech he ever gave published later as the left for a Moose Jaw dossier a month later in October and in this let for seanpauley on claims to read the alphabetic hieroglyphs as he calls them of the Greek and Roman rulers of Egypt he doesn't claim that he can read the early Egyptian names and in fact Ramses is not mentioned in the letter it's only later he starts to convince himself that he can he'd been read much more of the script there's a table of phonetic signs in the let very famous in Egyptology table day scene phonetic but you can see there are many separate symbols for one sign here the Greek Sigma for instance there are lots of hieroglyphic symbols all very different so this is the demotic here he hasn't cracked it but he's got made some progress and he signed himself very proudly in the sham Palio in phonetic egyptian which gives you some idea of his sense of humor and of course his pride in his work and this is finally him before he becomes famous this is the he's holding the tablet he seen phonetic in 1823 and it's a famous portrait now his career really takes off in a sense he becomes internationally known he's taken up by the King of France through the Duke of black ah who's a loyal friend and the King appoints him as curator of Egyptian antiquities the very first one at the Louvre and Muse in Paris in 1826 and then to his his life's dream comes true the King says I will fund you to go to Egypt as an expedition we will give half the money and the ruler of Tuscany will give the other half and you will be accompanied by Eppolito Rosselini who was the second-in-command a tuscan scholar who was a great admirer of jean-paul er well as I say his dream came true he went he landed as Alexandre in August 1828 he was boats by the Pasha of Egypt and the expedition it's a wonderful story sailed up the Nile right up to the second cataract or just short of it beyond Abu Simbel and all the way they were stopping to look at these monuments and inscriptions and seanpauley on was in his element because he was able to start reading them for the first time since antiquity nobody had been able to do it for 2,000 years and then they they turned the boat round they sailed all the way back and they stopped at other sites on the way back including Thebes and it was it was in effect of indication of his system there were many problems but it worked it was very obvious there's painting of the expedition here gives you a bit of idea of the atmosphere here is seanpauley or looking like a Bedouin with a sword and he was speaking fluent Arabic so he could have probably passed as a better and this is Rosselini dressed in in in in standing with white and red and they were close to each other as people as well as scholars there's a portrait or sorry a a little drawing of seanpauley indeed of the tomb of Ramses the fourth where they stayed for six months in the coolness to get away from the Sun and it's rather charming because it shows all the beds of the expedition including moi for himself and Rosselini is opposite and then there's a little portrait of the cat's bed and the gazelles bed and at the top is the sarcophagus of Ramses probably my I'm missing it yeah that's the so they were the sarcophagus was brooding over them as they were living in the in the tomb and sometimes seanpauley was so excited he would collapse on the floor with the sheer drama of what he was experiencing translating these inscriptions he even left some graffiti you can see it today in Karnak and he used the old family spelling sham poor lay all of his name which Napoleon rather admired he said he has ha of my name it's a good sign so there's a bit of sham Polly of we can enjoy even today he returned to Paris in 1829 at the end of the earth he'd been away for a year now his system was sort of proven but not fully and he really had to work damn hard in the years that remain to him to try and organize his papers and get some publications out but I'm afraid he didn't have long to live in 1831 he was appointed the world's first professor of Egyptology at the collège de France but his health was really deteriorating probably due to diseases he'd picked up in Egypt in late 1831 he definitely suffered a stroke and he continued to work a bit longer on his grammar Egyptian grammar with his brother his ever loyal brother and then he gave it to jock Joseph with the following words he said look after it I hope it will be my visiting card to posterity soon he could no longer speak and in March 1832 he's only 41 apparently according his family that night on the 3rd of March he let out a groan and they heard him say what they thought was in French now for the afterlife on to Egypt on to Thebes which is where he felt he really belonged now I'll finish with that which I'm sure you'll recognise the cartouche of Tutankhamun discovered by Howard Carter in a century law after seanpauley on his legacy took a while to be established as I just said long after his death people were still arguing about it in fact it took until the 1860s before it was really accepted but we can use it to read Tutankhamun today and I'll try and do that quickly for you this is a phonetic sign T UT toot that's a symbol UNK the hooked cross so that's toutes UNK and then the God's name our moon is at the top that's a fanatic symbol and then a by consonantal sign our moon and that's a phonetic column compliment for n to emphasize the N in in the by continental sign and at the bottom this is crucial these are three symbols meaning ruler of Heliopolis of upper egypt ie ruler of Thebes so there's no phonetic symbols at all at the bottom so it's a mixed script just like the demotic phonetic values and symbolic values or logograms as we call them now signs for words and so seanpauley honor got it right he said in 1824 ahead of any other scholar in the world he said hieroglyphic writing is a complex system a script all at once figurative symbolic and phonetic in one in the same text in one on the same sentence and iMeet might even venture in one and the same word and I really will finish now by just saying to me this is not I mean it's absolutely essential to Egyptologists but to me the story of the cracking of this code is fascinating for another reason because it did require a polymath Thomas Young and it did require a specialist shampo liang to crack the code without without this combination I don't think it would have been sold or at least not for a long time and the broad mind of young in eighteen fourteen to eighteen really does have certain insights which are totally invaluable to seanpauley on whether he admitted it or not a shivani all failed at that time right up to 1821 but then after 1821 he took Jung's insights probably and then his narrow focus his tunnel vision took over and that was really what took the decipherment forward so I think it's fair to say that you need the the broad vision of young and the fanatical focus of sham polyol for this revolutionary insight which sham polio alone announced in the 1820s thank you [Applause] you

Channel: The Royal Institution

Views: 52,266

Rating: 4.7544556 out of 5

Keywords: Ri, Royal Institution, Jean-François Champollion, hieroglyph, ancient language, code breaking, history of science

Id: NIxn9auks24

Length: 42min 26sec (2546 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 31 2019