Keys of Egypt [Paperback]

Lesley Adkins (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0006531458 | ISBN-13: 978-0006531456 | Publication Date: September 3, 2001

A vivid and superbly written account of the unravelling of one of the great intellectual puzzles, set against the backdop of Europe in the Napoleonic era. When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, his troops were astonished to discover ancient temples, tombs and statues, all covered with hieroglyphs -- the last remnants of an unreadable script and a language lost in time. On their return Egyptomania spread rapidly and the quest to decipher hieroglyphs began in earnest. Jean-Francois Champollion was obsessed with ancient languages from a very young age, and once he heard of the unreadable ancient Egyptian text he had found the challenge to which he would dedicate his life: the decipherment of hieroglyphs. Despite poverty he made gradual progress, although he had to fight against jealous enemies, both professional and political, every step of the way -- a dangerous task when in post-Revolutionary France a slip of the tongue could mean ruin, exile or even death. Failure threatened, as he was only one of many attempting to read the hieroglyphs, and his main rival, the English Thomas Young, claimed that decipherment was imminent, but Champollion refused to be distracted and finally, in 1822, he made the decisive breakthrough: he was the first person able to read the ancient Egyptian language in well over a thousand years.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Jean-François Champollion's biography is neatly interwoven with Napoleonic history and the functions of Egyptian hieroglyphs in The Keys of Egypt. A gifted bookseller's son born in Revolutionary France, Champollion was to become "gripped by energetic enthusiasm" for Egypt. By the age of 12, he was studying several ancient languages, and, amid a "wave of Egyptomania," he would beat rivals to discover the key to deciphering hieroglyphs. If this was a race, it was a marathon. The breakthrough came after "20 years of obsessive hard work," not through the quick-fix solution often thought to have been provided by the Rosetta stone. The Keys of Egypt details Champollion's life and work, which were hampered by politics, poverty, and an almost hypochondriacal series of health problems. Its sources include letters and journals, the authors having undertaken researches in major libraries and museums. Chapters on Champollion's travels in Italy and Egypt include a good smattering of excerpts from his writings. Although no bibliography is given, there is a helpful passage on various levels of further reading. Highly instructive and fast-paced, The Keys of Egypt is perhaps less dramatic than it might be in portraying troubled times and groundbreaking discovery. It is, however, a clearly expressed and wide-ranging book explaining the complexity of hieroglyphic interpretation and revealing the man whose achievements "meant the discovery of a whole new civilization." --Karen Tiley, Amazon.co.uk --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Set against a background of academic intrigue and international rivalry, with colorful personalities vying to be the first to unveil the meaning behind ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the story of the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone has all the ingredients of a dramatic scientific quest. Disappointingly, the Adkinses, though experienced writers and consultants on archaeology, don't make the grade in this bland, lackluster account. Instead of approaching the subject matter with new questions and fresh analysis, the authors' predictable narrative adds little to our knowledge of either the French polyglot Jean-Fran ois Champollion (1790-1832), the genius who deciphered the stone, or of the decipherment process itself. The authors focus primarily on the life and education of Champollion, his extraordinary linguistic skills and his competition with Englishman Thomas Young, who was also seeking to decipher hieroglyphs. They maintain, rather inaccurately, that Champollion has not received due recognition, which they feel has instead gone to Young. Their description of the French occupation of Egypt at the time that the Rosetta Stone was discovered is superficial and fails to take into account some of the more recent scholarship on the subject. The authors, in fact, never indicate what sources they utilized for this study. There is a solid core of readers interested in ancient Egypt and hieroglyphs who will grab this book, but they will be disappointed. More satisfied will be the novices turned on to ancient Egypt by the promotion around Abrams's Valley of the Golden Mummies. Savvy booksellers will piggyback the Adkinses' book onto that one. Illus. not seen by PW. (Oct. 15)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Harper Collins Pb (September 3, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0006531458
• ISBN-13: 978-0006531456
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,650,814 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hieroglyphs Are "Figurative, Symbolic and Phoenetic", November 2, 2000

By 

Donald Mitchell "Jesus Loves You!" (Thanks for Providing My Reviews over 109,000 Helpful Votes Globally) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Keys of Egypt: The Obsession to Decipher Egyptian Hieroglyphs (Hardcover)

If you are like me, you learned at some point that Napoleon's forces had located the Rosetta Stone while invading Egypt, leading to the rediscovery of how to read ancient Egyptian. The writing on the stone contained the same material in Greek, Demotic, and hieroglyphs. From comparing the three texts, scholars deciphered hieroglyphs. Sounds simple, doesn't it? Well, it really wasn't, which is where our school book learning was incomplete. And that's the appeal of this unusual book.

Why do I say the book is unusual? Well, most books about scholarly discoveries focus on the work itself. While this one certainly contains information about how the hieroglyphs were translated, the main focus is on what it was like to be a French scholar in a high visibility area from the time after the French Revolution through the Restoration. The story is a fascinating one of constant intrigue, danger, poverty, and overwhelming odds overcome. This book would qualify as an exciting novel if written that way.

Jean-Francois Champollion was the key translator who finally succeeded in 1822, 23 years after the Rosetta Stone was discovered. He was the son of an impoverished book seller at 16 when the stone was found. His main competitor was an English physician, Thomas Young, who was to turn out to be an implacable foe who denigrated and challenged Champollion's work.

The work would have gone on much more rapidly, but there was a shortage of materials available to Champollion to work on. He also had the difficult task of getting an education and then earning his living as a teacher, and often had to put off working on the hieroglyphs for long periods of time. When the Restoration came, he and his brother were exiled to the small town they started in. But they succeeded in regaining official support for their careers, and were able to continue.

Despite the challenges, Champollion (with a lot of help from his friends, and especially his older brother) was eventually able to get recognition for his accomplishments and support from Charles X to go to Italy to study texts and later Egypt to translate the monuments and texts there. In the brief period of time before his death in 1832, he added tremendously to our knowledge of ancient Egypt and its culture.

The key problem was that the same hieroglyph (such as the picture of a duck) can represent an object (the duck), a concept ("son of"), and a sound ("sa"). One of the key breaks came in finding cartouches of foreign names that were easier to decipher because they used the phoenetic versions. Having had success there, with access to more material it was easy to notice cartouches that seemed to represent the names of well-known Egyptian Pharaohs such as Ramses (described as "Rameses" in the book). Cleopatra's name was an early translation breakthrough. Soon, these cartouches provided clues to the multiple ways that hieroglyphs can be used. Numerical analysis showed that the number of hieroglyphs on the Rosetta stone did not match very well to the number of words or letters in the Greek text. That suggested that something more complex was going on than using a straight-forward alphabet from hierglyphs. Champollion soon made quick progress from there. He had an amazing talent for languages, having earlier produced a Coptic dictionary.

Champollion also uncovered that hieroglyphs were formal writing, Hieratic was cursive handwriting, Demotic dated from 650 B.C., and Coptic began in 250 A.D. So the dating of the materials studied could be determined in part by the languages used.

After you finish enjoying this interesting book, I suggest that you think about how languages divide us. Most of us read only in our native language. This means that works in other languages first have to be translated before we can enjoy them. Many works are never so translated. I urge you to take another language that you know and read something in that language. That experience allows you to enjoy the other culture much more than you can with a translation. If your language skills are not sufficient to do this, I suggest that you read something that has been translated by two different translators in separate editions. Compare them to see how much translations can vary. Although my examples focus on languages, you should also realize that such differences in understanding occur in one language. So pay close attention and check your assumptions when you read and listen to someone speak. For example, be open to what is not being said and is not being written, but is present. Don't miss the subtleties that may reveal most of the meaning to you!

Look, listen, and learn.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Savant of Ra, November 17, 2000

By 

Standing In Motion - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Keys of Egypt: The Obsession to Decipher Egyptian Hieroglyphs (Hardcover)

The Keys of Egypt elegantly combines an in-depth biography of Jean Francois Champollion, with a detailed chronology of the saga to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Champollion, a French language savant (Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Chaldean, Coptic), was the first person in over a thousand years to decipher and read not only the hieroglyphs, but also the ancient Egyptian hieratic and demotic scripts as well. Toiling in ill health and poverty, and suffering political persecution and professional jealously, Champollion nevertheless conquered one of the greatest challenges of his or any time. His achievement unlocked the "keys" of ancient Egypt, which in turn was the genesis of Egyptology and our modern attempts to understand a civilization whose longevity and accomplishments continue to astound. An immense amount of biographical, Napoleonic Period, and ancient information is contained in this book, and I highly recommend it.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Rosetta stone's importance overinflated, February 23, 2002

By 

Leon A Le Leu (Deakin West, A.C.T. Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Keys of Egypt: The Obsession to Decipher Egyptian Hieroglyphs (Hardcover)

I found this a very readable history of a tumultuous life. Even though Champollion only lived to 41 he knew at least three heads of state and, as a Republican, was alternately in favour and out of favour - sometimes losing his job when out of favour.

Maybe there is, as suggested by another reviewer, insufficient information about the actual processes of decipherment. This probably would have required a book several times this size.

One of the myths the book debunks is that the Rosetta stone was THE key to the decipherment. The Adkins comment: "The Rosetta stone still remains a powerful popular symbol, even though its inscriptions failed to fulfil the hopes and expectations they aroused. Other inscriptions and papyri were far more important in providing clues to decipherment."

The popular view seems to be that Champollion had access to the Rosetta stone and quickly proceeded with his decipherment. In fact, for most of the 20 years it took, he seems not to have had access to the stone, which was then, as now, in London, and made far more use of sources in Italy and, finally, in Egypt itself.

What an incredible character is brought to life in these pages. Hardly the dry scholar usually depicted but a living, breathing, individual who had to go through incredible difficulties to finally achieve victory. Even then he continued to be hounded by his jealous rivals.

I have read many popular books on Egyptology. This would have to be the best so far.