The Riddle of the Rosetta Lib/E: How an English Polymath and a French Polyglot Discovered the Meaning of Egyptian Hieroglyphs

by Jed Z. Buchwald

In 1799, a French Army officer was rebuilding the defenses of a fort on the banks of the Nile when he discovered an ancient stele fragment bearing a decree inscribed in three different scripts. So begins one of the most familiar tales in Egyptology--that of the Rosetta Stone and the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs. This book draws on fresh archival evidence to provide a major new account of how the English polymath Thomas Young and the French philologist Jean-François Champollion vied to be the first to solve the riddle of the Rosetta. Jed Buchwald and Diane Greco Josefowicz bring to life a bygone age of intellectual adventure. Much more than a decoding exercise centered on a single artifact, the race to decipher the Rosetta Stone reflected broader disputes about language, historical evidence, biblical truth, and the value of classical learning. The authors paint compelling portraits of Young and Champollion, two gifted intellects with altogether different motivations. Young disdained Egyptian culture and saw Egyptian writing as a means to greater knowledge about Greco-Roman antiquity. Champollion, swept up in the political chaos of Restoration France and fiercely opposed to the scholars aligned with throne and altar, admired ancient Egypt and was prepared to upend conventional wisdom to solve the mystery of the hieroglyphs.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Egypt, Linguistics, Language, Historical

Audio CD

First published September 15, 2020

Reviews

[Mark Hodges · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm giving this 3 stars because it was such a task to read. This is not a book for the casual reader who is curious about the Rosetta Stone, as it delves way too deep into the scholarly methods employed by Young and Champollion. The text reads more like a thesis paper on their efforts, rather than an overview for the average person who might pick up this book to learn more about the artifact and its secrets. For that, I am disappointed, because I feel like a great story is hovering underneath all of the tedious and overwrought language and jargon that only a college professor could appreciate. I wanted to enjoy this book, but I ended up forcing myself to finish it, and that is never a pleasant experience.

[Lynn Stegner · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book because I find the Rosetta Stone fascinating. After 170 pages, I've given up. The premise is great: understand the background of the two prime translators to understand how they went about deciphering the Stone. But when the authors spend pages - not sentences or paragraphs - describing the educational background and living conditions of relatives and acquaintances and why education policy regarding how ancient civilizations and languages were taught has changed, I get the sense that they did an incredible amount of research into Chompollion and Young's backgrounds and wanted to make sure we knew that by incorporating every single bit of it in their book. It reads like a modern PhD thesis where the candidate has to generate x pages to be approved but the selected topic is too narrow and so anything remotely related is dumped on the poor reader.

I'm so disappointed because I won't get the answer to my question and I suspect it's in there somewhere.

[Jim Richardson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a chore to read, primarily due to the depth of the character studies presented. The book does not give the reader a translation of the Rosetta Stone inscriptions, which is very disappointing. The writing is good - in fact it is so good that I was compelled to finish the book. The book is very deep. I was constantly looking up words in my dictionary just to make sure I was understanding what the authors were saying. I wish I could rate. It higher, but it is just too obtuse to deserve more than three stars.

[Anna C · Rating 3 out of 5]

That was a slog- rather like the laborious Rosetta decipherment...

[DAJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Buchwald and Josefowicz specialize in the history of ideas, as shown by their previous book The Zodiac of Paris, about how artifacts from ancient Egypt became focal points of the ideological struggles in post-revolutionary France. Unlike that story, the story of the decipherment of hieroglyphs has been told many times by other authors. This book benefits from Buchwald and Josefowicz's talent for scouring 19th-century primary sources. But their focus on the beliefs and intellectual backgrounds of the two protagonists, Young and Champollion, means the story gets bogged down in details and digressions, like Young's early studies of vision or Champollion's search for the Roman town of Uxellodunum. While it succeeds as an illustration of intellectual life in Europe during the Age of Revolution, it succeeds less well as a story.

However, that primary-source research cannot be discounted. The story of Champollion's work has long suffered from uncertainties about the timing of his insights that seem to date back to Hermine Hartleben's 1906 biography, or to the Champollion family lore on which she drew. Buchwald and Josefowicz delved into the scholars' unpublished notes and drafts, and are thus more clearly able to follow the timeline of their thought processes. I am personally indebted to their efforts; I'm the Wikipedia editor who researched and rewrote the article about the decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts, shortly before this book was published. After I got this book, I was able to correct and clarify some small points in the article, and sound a more cautious note about the most dramatic episode in the story.

With their thorough research, Buchwald and Josefowicz may have the last word on Young and Champollion for a good long while. Jason Thompson's history of Egyptology notes that Champollion is over-covered compared with other Egyptologists, and I hope now that historians will turn their efforts to those lesser-known characters. (The most obvious one after Champollion's death is Karl Richard Lepsius, a titanic figure who still has no English-language biography.)

If you're looking for a description of the decipherment that makes for a better story, I recommend John Ray's The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of Ancient Egypt, which is eccentric but extensive, and Andrew Robinson's biography of Champollion, Cracking the Egyptian Code, which doesn't use all the sources Buchwald and Josefowicz had access to, but still treats the points of uncertainty with reasonable caution.