The Linguist and the Emperor: Napoleon and Champollion's Quest to Decipher the Rosetta Stone (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "FIGEAC. 1792. At the height of that violent phenomenon known as the Great Fear, violent bands roam the French countryside..." (more)
Key Phrases: Alexander the Great, General Bonaparte, Abu Simbel (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This florid adventure tale, presented in colorful episodes that read as if drawn from a Hollywood film treatment, interweaves Napoleon's obsessive empire building with Jean François Champollion's determined mission to crack the code of hieroglyphics. The story hinges on the long, drawn-out Napoleonic campaign in Egypt (17981801), during which the Rosetta stone, which enabled Champollion's breakthrough, was discovered. Meyerson, an Ellis Fellow at Columbia and the author of a previous book on despots, conjures two fanatic visionaries, lingering on Napoleon's insecurities and cruelties and on Champollion's dogged devotion, flashes of passionate intuition and periodic exhaustion. Beginning with an account of Champollion's obscure childhood and experience of the revolutionary Terror, and tracing the prodigy linguist's early interest in ancient languages in the context of narrow-minded lyce life, the book renders Champollion's adult career as one long struggle to justify his theories. The Napoleonic campaign in Egypt is mined for its colorful generals and scenes of thirst-crazed soldiers, while the history of Egypt and how its ancient language came to be lost is skimmed, with an emphasis on sensuous detail. Overwritten and festooned with continuous anticipations of the various fates and destinies of each of its personages, repeatedly casting Egypt as a mysterious muse or virgin, this romance treats neither history nor linguistics with any degree of seriousness. B&w photos and illus.
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From Booklist

During Napoleon's forays into Egypt, the study of this ancient civilization became formalized as a serious field, for word of Napoleon's discoveries of artifacts covered with mysterious writing sparked a number of efforts to decipher the hieroglyphs. One scholar thus engaged was the brilliant Jean-Francois Champollion, who spent countless hours poring over every available bit of evidence to become the first person in more than 1,000 years who could reasonably claim to understand the ancient writing. Meyerson provides a good deal of biographical information on the little-understood Champollion, chronicling his studies and discoveries and relating them to Egypt's storied history. Meyerson explains much about contemporary French history and the relevant episodes of Egyptian history; nonetheless, there are still instances when he assumes his readers will be familiar with the basics. For that reason, this is probably not a book for the casual reader. Audiences with more than just a passing interest, however, will find this an interesting account of one of the most significant contributors to the study of Egypt. Gavin Quinn
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books; 1 edition (March 2, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345450671
• ISBN-13: 978-0345450678
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,486,896 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Croc wrestling and incest on the Nile, July 4, 2004

By	Robert Albon "I'm Just The Translator" (Tokyo, Japan) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

No story about ancient Egypt would be complete without some mention of the embalming process used to make mummies, so details of that process, such as removing the brains through the nose or the maintenance of the mummy's embalmed (...) separate from his body (apparently it is reattached in the afterworld) are expected.

Some mention of incestuous relationships, especially between royal siblings of the Ptolemy dynasty, is to be expected as well. However, M seems to have attempted to catalog every manner of sexual perversion imaginable in this work of 'meticulous history', such as fetishism (Egyptian priest executed for abusing himself with queen's hair), prison sex, necrophilia (apparently no beautiful woman's corpse was safe in ancient Egypt), rape of captured French soldiers by Bedouin nomads, catamites, costume play (Napoleon dressed as maid, Pharaoh Snefru dressed his harem in nothing but fishnet), cliterectomy, brother-sister incest, mother/sister-daughter/niece-brother/uncle incestuous m?nage ? trois, bestiality, temple prostitutes, etc.

M's tabloid-like coverage continues in sordid detail, such as listing Josephine's lovers (aside from Napoleon): her first husband, an unnamed prisoner, the dandy Hippolyte Charles; and Napoleon's lovers (aside from Josephine): an 18-year-old Austrian archduchess, Mme George, the Polish beauty Countess Walewska, several unnamed Egyptian women, several unnamed Abyssinian slave women, the French lieutenant's wife, Pauline Four?s.

It is hard to see what bearing much of this has on the story at hand, other than to titillate the reader. But don't run out and buy it expecting anything hardcore: there is little detail and M can't even bring himself to say (...). Instead M uses prudish euphemisms such as member or phallus. This really cannot be called linguistics, history, or erotica-it's just gossip.

No taboo is untouched, no matter how detached from the dramatic events which are supposedly the actual topics of the story: cannibalism, a pharaoh feeding his children to dogs, a Roman feeding slave boys to lamprey eels, French soldiers wrestling crocodiles on the Nile, Napoleon having sick prostitutes sewn in sacks and thrown in the Nile, Frederick the Great reassigns a man convicted of bestiality with a horse to a cavalry unit, Marie Antoinette squatting to "pee" in her favorite plum-colored shoes before she is guillotined.

Well, all this might have made for amusing comic relief had there been deep, meaningful discussion of Champollion's linguistic exploits, which, I believe, is the primary reason anyone would purchase this book. However, the discussion of the actual deciphering of the hieroglyphs is much sketchier than I had hoped for.

The brief discussion does provide a succinct outline of Champollion's breakthrough, which started with the deciphering of the readings of proper names, which were set off from the rest of a text by a cartouche, such as Ptolemy, Cleopatra, Alexander the Great, Berenice, Ramesses, etc, and was followed by the discovery that particles and other frequently occurring words were similar in sound to Coptic or were similar in orthographic form to special characters derived from the hieroglyphs and used in written Coptic, a Greek script, to represent sounds not found in Greek. This was enough to disprove previous mistaken assumptions about ancient Egyptian based on Horapollo's Hieroglyphica and establish Champollion as the scholar who finally deciphered the Hieroglyphs.

This book makes for an amusing read, but too much space is taken up with Meyerson's erudite bric-a-brac which might better have been spent on Egyptology and details of the story of how Champollion deciphered of the hieroglyphs.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Do Not Waste Your Time, June 21, 2006

By	Bob Rothman "Rocks" (Falmouth, Virginia United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Linguist and the Emperor: Napoleon and Champollion's Quest to Decipher the Rosetta Stone (Paperback)

The story of the Champolion must be fascinating and someday I would like to read about it. I hoped that this book would be such a story, instead it turned out to be a confused mishmash of barely related stories with a bare minimum of information about Champollion and his quest. This must be the shotiest book I have ever read, below even amateur efforts. Avoid at all costs.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Keys of Egypt, May 18, 2004

By A Customer

What a shame this is disappointing. For anyone wanting a good, well-written modern biography of Champollion, with lots of background on hieroglyphs, they should go for The Keys of Egypt by Lesley & Roy Adkins.