On 14 September 1822 the French scholar Jean-François Champollion burst into his brother’s room, thrust a bundle of notes at him, exclaimed “je tiens mon affaire, vois!”—which crudely interprets as “I’ve bought it!”—and collapsed on the ground in a useless faint. As he defined in a well-known letter to the French Academy, whose members had nervous on the topic for many years, he had cracked the code of the traditional Egyptian hieroglyphs: monuments, temples, palaces and tombs, silent for nearly two millennia, have been about to talk once more.
The kernel of the British Museum’s new main exhibition Hieroglyphs: Unlocking Historic Egypt, is the Rosetta Stone, one of many world’s most well-known museum objects and infrequently a sore disappointment to guests. Its significance was first noticed in 1799 by a younger French soldier as a wall was demolished to bolster fortifications. The textual content may be very boring certainly, however because it was repeated in three languages—historic Egyptian, demotic Egyptian and Greek—the black basalt grew to become the code breaker’s key.
An exhibition marking 200 years because the deciphering of hieroglyphs may have been as dry as one of many mummy bandage displays, however is definitely a story of loot, bitter scholarly rivalry, intercourse and magic (Arab students, scrupulous recorders of hieroglyphs, have been satisfied they held alchemical formulae). Conservators will work throughout the exhibition on a large black sa
rcophagus, believed for hundreds of years to be a magic bathtub curing the pains of affection; the British in Egypt later constructed a venereal illness hospital on the spot the place it was discovered.
Champollion was a baby prodigy who grew as much as communicate a dozen languages together with historic Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Latin and Coptic. He recorded that he spoke to himself in Coptic, which is descended from the spoken language of historic Egypt. He’s the undoubted star of the hieroglyphs story, however the British Museum offers again credit score to an English polymath, Thomas Younger, dubbed “the final man who knew every part”. Younger and Champollion have been each heading in the right direction, knew of each other, printed some earlier work and infrequently exchanged notes. However to the victor the spoils, Champollion bought there first. He grew to become a media star, touring and giving lectures together with reside translations from monuments in Egypt, earlier than dying in Paris in 1832 aged 41, three years after Younger.
The exhibition will embody loans from many worldwide museums and scholarly establishments—however none from Egypt. The peppery former Egyptian antiquities minister Zahi Hawass has used the exhibition as a possibility to demand the return of the Rosetta Stone; the story of the stone is just not over but.
• Hieroglyphs: Unlocking Historic Egypt, British Museum, London, 13 October-19 February 2023