‘I have turned over in my hand the titles of years whose history was totally forgotten; the names of gods who have not had altars these fifteen centuries, and I have gathered the tiniest pieces of papyrus, scarcely drawing breath for fear of reducing them to powder, the last and only memory of a king who during his life maybe found himself all pent up in the immense palace of Karnak.’
Jean-François Champollion, letter to his elder brother Jacques Joseph Champollion-Figerac, 6 November 1824
Until, in 1822, the brilliant philologist Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832) worked out how to decipher hieroglyphs, the words carved on the Rosetta Stone, and in many other ancient Egyptian inscriptions, could not be accurately read – and much of our knowledge about life in ancient Egypt was based on speculation and conjecture. But it was not his work alone that led to this momentous discovery, for the painstaking analysis carried out before him by the equally brilliant English polymath, Thomas Young (1773-1829), helped to prepare the way for Champollion’s revelations.
Linguistics, genetic links, and a long-lost ‘emperor’