Egyptians had painted these puzzling pictures, but there was not a single man in all Egypt who knew what they meant. The oldest Egyptian peasant was ignorant on the subject, the most learned Egyptian scholar had not the faintest idea of their meaning. The Egyptians had forgotten how to read the writing of their forefathers. It was the writing of a dead age, of a vanished civilization.
Dr. Young threw himself enthusiastically into the task of deciphering the signs. The difficulty seemed to add a zest to his search. He pored over the copy of the writing on the Rosetta Stone day after day. There was absolutely nothing to guide him. Everything was sheer deduction at first, and then his deductions had to be tested and verified.
So difficult was his task that the discovery of a single letter was an event. Perhaps by great good fortune he would succeed in deciphering two signs in a week, then for a month he might study the copy until his brain reeled, and decipher nothing at all. It was a heart-breaking undertaking. On one occasion he announced that he had succeeded in translating a certain set of hieroglyphics into a word of seven or eight letters. It was afterwards proved that he was right in only one letter, and that the rest were hopelessly wrong.
He began on his project in 1814 and, after struggling with it for four years, the sum total of his labours amounted to the deciphering of just over ninety characters. His discovery thus averaged fewer than twenty-five signs a year. It meant that he had to concentrate all the power of his exceptional brain, and all his knowledge of languages, for a whole month to decipher two characters. In doing what he did, he accomplished an astounding feat. It is impossible to praise Young too highly for his early work on the Rosetta Stone.
At the same time that Young was wrestling with hieroglyphics in England, François Champollion was trying to solve the puzzle in France. Champollion’s interest in hieroglyphics did not spring up in a night; it was of slow growth, starting in his childhood when Egypt bulked large in the imaginations of most French boys owing to the stirring deeds of Napoleon against the Mamelukes. By the time Champollion was eleven years old, he was already taking more than an ordinary boyish interest in things Egyptian, and, as the years passed, he slowly gathered books and material bearing on the subject which he was to make peculiarly his own.
He was eager, anxious, to decipher hieroglyphics. It was the ambition of his life, the thing for which he lived, of which he dreamed. He collected every copy of the strange picture-writing that he could find in order to study it, in the hope of deciphering one more character. He was terribly handicapped by the small quantity of material on which he could work, and while his brilliant contemporary Young lay dying in England, in 1829, Champollion was leading an expedition in Egypt, gathering material for France.
Champollion found the picture-writing even more complex than any one anticipated. A single letter might be represented by seven or eight quite different signs, and a sign might represent a whole word or part of a word. A circle with lines radiating from it might represent the sun god, or it might stand for the word “day.” A sign which ordinarily stood for a letter might represent a god if a dot or some other sign came after it.
The Egyptian hieroglyphics were indeed one of the greatest puzzles of the ages. The discovery of other inscriptions helped to verify Champollion’s work, and provide proof that he was deciphering the signs accurately. It is, nevertheless, incredible that any human being could read even a sign of this dead writing correctly. That any one could do what Champollion ultimately did is almost a miracle. He laboured at his self-appointed task with so much courage and determination that he eventually succeeded in building up a hieroglyphic dictionary—a marvellous feat.
Champollion himself did not long survive Young, for he so sapped his strength over his Egyptian expedition that he fell ill and died in 1832. He was comparatively a young man, only forty-two, yet he crowded an enormous amount of work into these few years, and it may truly be said that his love of Egyptology cost him his life.
By the aid of his dictionary, which grew directly out of the finding of the Rosetta Stone, our scholars are now able to read without much trouble the sacred writings of the ancient Egyptians. Thus that fragment of black basalt in the British Museum, which is passed unnoticed by so many people, is really one of the most interesting stones in the world.