The greatest museums in the world are full of ancient artifacts mined by great archaeologists, historians and conquerors of the past. Archaeological science in the modern sense has developed in Russia and Europe in the late eighteenth - early nineteenth centuries. The awakening of interest in antiquity was caused by the construction of great European empires that wanted to emphasize their greatness through the possession of objects of ancient civilizations. In turn, interest in the past required the possession of ancient languages, which needed to be deciphered and reconstructed. That is what the great French historian, philologist and founder of scientific Egyptology, Jean-Francois Champollion, became famous for.
Science
Egyptology as a scientific discipline was formed in the XlX century at the intersection of two disciplines - archeology and philology. While archeology extracts and studies artifacts of material culture, philology focuses on the objects of intangible culture, language and hieroglyphs of Egypt, which were deciphered in the first quarter of the nineteenth century by French scientists.
For a long time, the letter of Egyptian civilization remained a mystery to Europeans. However, with the publication of the book of Jean-Francois Champollion, dedicated to the translation of the so-called Rosetta stone, the veil of secrecy was opened. This moment is considered key in the formation of Egyptology as an independent direction in the humanitarian discourse.
Egyptian writing. Decryption
Despite the fact that in Egyptology there is no such thing as the Egyptian alphabet, the writing of the ancient country, however, could not be deciphered for quite some time.
Even though almost two centuries have passed since the first reading of the Egyptian text, still not all pictograms have been cataloged. Egyptian hieroglyphs are pictograms, each of which can indicate several different words. For example, the hieroglyph “sun” can mean both the luminary itself and the time of day at which the sun is visible in the sky, that is, the day.
However, there are signs that can decisively separate the ancient Egyptian script from pictography - the presence of special icons that indicate how this or that character should be pronounced.
Thus, Egyptian letters combine the signs of hieroglyphic, syllabic and ideographic writing. Such a complex scheme created certain difficulties in decoding the inscriptions.
Jean-Francois Champollion. Biography
The future genius of philology was born in the south of France, in the town of Fijac, a year after the start of the French Revolution. He was the seventh son of his wealthy and aristocratic parents, whose ancestors owned the castle on the alpine slopes.
Already at an early age, Jean-Francois showed a penchant for learning languages, which was noticed by his older brother (he supported him in this endeavor). By the age of nine, the young genius was already fluent in Latin and ancient Greek, recited ancient poets and translated their poems into French.
At the age of eight, the boy was sent to Fijac Municipal School, where he began to have difficulties with teachers, caused by the reluctance of young Jean-Francois Champollion to follow generally accepted rules. In addition, his inability to mathematics was manifested, which he regretted until the end of his life.
The adolescence of genius
At the age of fourteen, the future scientist entered a privileged lyceum, opened as part of the implementation of educational reform. Here, Jean-Francois faced even more obvious difficulties - military discipline and total control, as well as the inability to focus on the study of ancient languages.
The first time in the Lyceum, Champollion even thought about running away, which he informed his brother in personal letters, because instead of practicing his favorite subjects he had to spend time on mathematics and chemistry. Soon, however, the school leadership went towards the young talent and allowed to study languages. This meant that now the student could not study philology at night, secretly from the teachers, but devote day hours to it.
Wednesday immersion
Upon arrival in Paris, the young Jean-Francois Champollion was sadly disappointed to see the noisy cramped streets filled with crowds of poor people. However, the young man liked the intellectual environment of the capital of one of the leading European countries.
It was in the capital, while still a student, that he got the opportunity to study the Arabic and Coptic languages that were common at that time in Egypt. After only a year of stay in Paris, the future founder of Egyptology prepared for publication a work devoted to Egypt.
Life Style and Rosetta Stone
There was a legend among European scholars that there wasn’t such a Coptic manuscript in European libraries that Champollion would lose sight of. However, despite the enormous intellectual load, the young researcher was able to find time for romantic hobbies. From his letters addressed to his brother, at least two novels that happened during his stay in Paris are known.
However, from the same letters it becomes known that since 1809, the scientist has shown interest in Rosetta writing. And pretty soon, he manages to satisfy this interest, finding himself in the house of the legendary French collector de Tersanne, who had an accurate full list of Rosetta stone.
Interested in the Egyptian alphabet, Champollion immediately made several comments on the theories of reading the ancient Egyptian language that existed at that time, but at first they were not serious about his criticism.
Return to Grenoble
By the time he graduated from Paris University, Champollion was already a young scientist who had certain merits and a reputation. And it is not surprising that as soon as a new university opened in Grenoble, a young man was invited to teach in it as a professor.
Champollion immediately accepted the invitation. However, life in Grenoble was fraught with some difficulties, among which there was an extremely low salary, half as much as his Paris scholarship, and distrust of the new upstart from new colleagues.
However, soon his brother managed to find patronage with the director of the city library - Gaspard Dubois-Fontanel, who achieved the appointment of a nominal salary of more than two thousand francs for the young specialist.
Passion for hieroglyphics
In 1821, the scientist who had already taken place moved to Paris again to devote all his time and energy to deciphering the Egyptian alphabet. By that time, a book by the notorious philologist Thomas Young was already published in England , dedicated to Egyptian tokens and their translations into European languages. However, the vast majority of values, as it turned out later, turned out to be wrong.
A month after arriving in Paris, Champollion made a presentation at the Academy of Inscriptions, in which he briefly retold the logic of decoding the ancient texts written on the Rosetta stone.
It was supposed to conduct a frequency analysis of the use of various signs of the Egyptian script and compare them with text written in other languages on the same stone. Thus, while deciphering and comparing various inscriptions, Champollion was able not only to identify various hieroglyphs, the first of which was the sign of Thoth, but also to prove that alphabetic hieroglyphic writing existed in Ancient Egypt long before the Greek conquest of the country of the pyramids in 332 BC.