CHAPTER IV

COLLECTIONS OF THE FRENCH. MR. DROVETTI. MR. CHAMPOLLION’S DISCOVERIES.

Although the discovery of the general import of the hieroglyphics has by no means excited any great sensation in this country, yet the activity of the various collectors resident in Egypt seems to have been in some measure stimulated by it. Important additions have been made, or are about to be made, to the Egyptian department of the British Museum; and in France, the magnificent liberality of the Government, together with the insatiable curiosity of some affluent individuals, has held out ample encouragement to the commercial antiquarian.

I thought myself extremely fortunate, in my return from the short excursion to Rome and Naples, that I made in the autumn of 1821, to have discovered at Leghorn, among a multitude of Egyptian antiquities, belonging to Mr. Drovetti, the French consul at Alexandria, which had long lain warehoused there, a stone containing an enchorial and a Greek inscription, which was known to have existed formerly at Menouf, but which had been lost and almost forgotten by European travellers in Egypt, and I believe by Mr. Drovetti himself; for I am informed that it is not mentioned in the catalogue of his Museum, which has been sent to Paris and elsewhere. Although both the inscriptions appeared to be almost illegible, yet I did not despair of being able, in a proper light, and with sufficient patience, to decipher the greater part; and I should have been tempted to remain a few days at Leghorn, in order to make the experiment, if I could have obtained permission from the merchants, to whose care the collection was entrusted. The more, however, that I considered the importance of the only supplement to the pillar of Rosetta, that then appeared to be in existence, the more anxiety I felt to make some effort, to secure it from oblivion or destruction; and with more simplicity, perhaps, than good policy, when I returned to Pisa in the evening, I wrote a letter to MM. Mompurgo, of which I shall here insert a translation.

“_Gentlemen_,

“Having fully reflected on the singular importance of the Greek inscription, which I mentioned to you this morning, and the irreparable misfortune that would be incurred, in case that the pillar containing it should ever be lost by shipwreck, I have determined to make you a proposal, which I hope you will not find any impropriety in accepting.

“I am very desirous of sending an experienced artist from Florence, in order to make two impressions in plaster, and two tracings on paper, of this stone; upon condition, that they be considered as the property of Mr. Drovetti, and remain in your possession, until you have received his answer to the inquiry, whether he will permit them to be sent to London, either for myself or for the British Museum, and what price he would expect to receive for them. And in case that he should not think proper to fix such a price on them, as we might agree to pay, I am willing to consent, that they should remain in his collection, upon condition, however, that if this collection should ever be reembarked, for conveyance by sea, they should be kept at Leghorn, until the original stone should have arrived safely at the place of its destination, in order to avoid the chance of wholly losing this literary treasure by shipwreck.

“Whatever may be Mr. Drovetti’s decision, I trust that this application, from one who flatters himself that he is the only person living, that can fully appreciate the value of the object in question, will at least not be disagreeable to him. I will beg of you to send me an early answer, directed to Schneiderff’s Hotel at Florence.

T. Y. Sec. R. S. Lond.

_Pisa, 5th Sept. 1821._”

MM. Mompurgo readily agreed to my proposal, and I engaged a distinguished artist of Florence to undertake the performance of my plan; but I believe he was accidentally prevented from fulfilling his engagement. It appears, however, that his labour, as far as I was concerned, would have been wholly lost; for Mr. Drovetti’s cupidity seems to have been roused by the discovery of an unknown treasure, and he has given me to understand, that nothing should induce him to separate it from the remainder of his extensive and truly valuable collection, of which he thinks it so well calculated to enhance the price; and he refuses to allow any kind of copy of it to be taken.

But, as it often happens to those who are too eager to monopolize, he has now outstood his market, and the pearl of great price, which six months ago I would have purchased for much more than its value, is now become scarcely worth my acceptance. I was principally anxious to obtain from it a collateral confirmation of my interpretation of the enchorial inscription of Rosetta; but having fortunately acquired materials, from other sources, which are amply sufficient for this purpose, I can wait, with great patience, for any little extension, which my enchorial vocabulary might receive from this source. I had inferred from a note, that had been sent me several years before, respecting the stone of Menouf, by Mr. Jomard, that the first words of the Greek inscription must have been ΒΑΣΙΛΕΙ ΠΤΟΛΕΜΑΙΩΙ ΝΕΩΙ ΔΙΟΝΥΣΩΙ, but this was all that the gentleman, who described it, had even attempted to copy.

The first circumstance, that repressed my eagerness to obtain a copy of Drovetti’s inscriptions, was the arrival of Mr. Casati at Paris, with a parcel of manuscripts, among which Mr. Champollion discovered one that considerably resembled, in its preamble, the enchorial text of the pillar of Rosetta: and the value of this discovery was afterwards almost miraculously multiplied, by the existence of a Greek translation of the same manuscript, which has been brought to London by Mr. Grey.

Having had occasion, in the month of September last, to accompany some friends in a short visit to Paris, I was very agreeably surprised with several literary and scientific novelties of uncommon interest, and all of them such as either had originated, or might have originated, from my own pursuits. I had first the pleasure of hearing, at a meeting of the Academy of Sciences, an optical paper read by Mr. Fresnel; who, though he appears to have rediscovered, by his own efforts, the laws of the interference of light, and though he has applied them, by some very refined calculations, to cases which I had almost despaired of being able to explain by them, has, on all occasions, and particularly in a very luminous statement of the theory, lately inserted in a translation of Thomson’s Chemistry, acknowledged, with the most scrupulous justice, and the most liberal candour, the indisputable priority of my investigations. In the course of the same week, I was invited to sit next to Mr. Champollion junior, while he was reading, to the Academy of Belles Lettres, a Memoir on the Analysis of the Inscription of Rosetta: he, also, had been partly anticipated in his results by what had been done in this country: though I could not help fancying, that he had not so completely forgiven the injury, as his countryman Mr. Fresnel appeared to have done. But Mr. Fresnel is the friend of Arago, and nothing more requires to be said of his character and sentiments.

I must, however, at once beg to be understood, that I fully and sincerely acquit Mr. Champollion of any intentions actually dishonourable: and if I have hinted, that I have received an impression of something like a want of liberality in his conduct, I have only thrown out this intimation, as an apology for being obliged to plead my own cause, and not as having any right to complain of his silence, or as having any desire or occasion to profit by his indulgence: at the same time I am far from wishing to renounce his friendship, or to forego the pleasure and advantage of his future correspondence.

At the beginning of my Egyptian researches, I had accidentally received a letter from Mr. Champollion, which accompanied a copy of his work on the state of Egypt under the Pharaohs, sent as a present to the Royal Society: and as he requested some particular information respecting several parts of the enchorial inscription of Rosetta, which were imperfectly represented in the engraved copies, I readily answered his inquiries from a reference to the original monument in the British Museum: and a short time afterwards I sent him a copy of my conjectural translation of the inscriptions, as it was inserted in the Archaeologia.

Of Mr. Champollion’s _Egypte sous les Pharaons_, the two volumes, that have hitherto appeared, relate only to the geography of ancient Egypt, and especially to the determination of the old Egyptian names of places, as compared with the Greek and the Arabic, by the assistance of Coptic manuscripts, and other intermediate documents. The work exhibits considerable research, and some ingenuity: the author had devoted his life to one very extensive pursuit, and he proposed to illustrate every part of his subject, by the most minute investigation of every circumstance, that could be brought to bear upon it. The undertaking, commenced on so large a scale, appears to have proceeded but slowly; nor is it probable that the life of any man would be sufficient for its complete execution.

With regard to the enchorial Inscription, Mr. Champollion appeared to me to have done at that time but little. A few of the references, that he made to it, seemed to depend entirely upon Mr. Akerblad’s investigations, although, as I have formerly had occasion to remark, it was _tacitly_ that he adopted Mr. Akerblad’s conclusions. I imagine, however, that he even now retains some erroneous prepossessions, which he had imbibed from Mr. Akerblad, although, very possibly, without recollecting their exact origin; in particular respecting the adoption of some Greek epithets, without translation, into the enchorial inscription: this question, however, I trust is now set at rest, by means of some later discoveries.

Mr. Champollion continued to reside at Grenoble, where he had some employment in the public library, till the beginning of 1821. I had not a convenient opportunity of sending him any of my later papers; and it was not till after he had left Grenoble, that he read the Article EGYPT of the Supplement of the Encyclopaedia, into which their contents were condensed. He had been devoting himself, in the mean time, to the uninterrupted study of the enchorial inscription, and he appears to have discovered, before he came to Paris, the original identity of these characters with the imperfect imitations of the more distinct hieroglyphics. Whether he made this discovery before I had printed my letters in the Museum Criticum, I have no means of ascertaining: I have never asked him the question, nor is it of much consequence, either to the world at large or to ourselves. It may not be strictly just, to say, that a man has no right to claim any discovery as his own, till he has printed and published it: but the rule is at least a very useful one. It is always easy to publish such an account of a discovery, as to establish the right of originality, without affording much facility to the pursuits of a competitor: although it is generally true, that not only honesty, but even liberality, is the best policy.

Passing by, however, what I had already done, by far the most important to me was what I had not done, and there was enough of this to satisfy me, that Mr. Champollion was at least capable of doing many things, with respect to which his claim of actual priority might appear more than doubtful.

He had found, in the first place, among the multitude of Egyptian papyri, which he had taken the trouble to copy at length, with the permission of their various possessors, one in particular, of which a series of the chapters were pretty obviously numbered in the enchorial character, the series extending, with a few interruptions, from 1 to 20. He had already applied this discovery to the illustration of some parts of the pillar of Rosetta: and I have since derived at least equal advantage from it, in the examination of the enchorial papyrus of Casati.

He had also discovered a fragment of a pillar formerly in the possession of the Duc de Choiseul, which exhibited the character for a month, followed by several various groups, together with different numbers, evidently indicative of days; so that to the names of the three months, which I had discovered, he was enabled to add at least four more, though without completely ascertaining to which of the months these new symbols belonged.

Mr. Champollion had ascertained, in the third place, the analogy of one of the manuscripts, purchased of Casati, to the enchorial inscription of Rosetta, and he had obtained from it, without difficulty, the mode of writing the name Cleopatra in that character. He did not, however, then mention to me the important consequences which he had derived from this discovery; these, it seems, were the subject of a short paper read to the Academy the succeeding Friday; and it will be proper to extract a more particular account of them, from his Letter to Mr. Dacier, since printed; in which I did certainly expect to find the chronology of my own researches a little mere distinctly stated.

“The hieroglyphical text of the inscription of Rosetta,” he observes, (p. 6), “exhibited, on account of its fractures, _only the name of Ptolemy_. The obelisc found in the Isle of Philae, and lately removed to London, contains also the hieroglyphical name of _one of the Ptolemies_, expressed by the same characters that occur in the inscription of Rosetta, surrounded by a ring or border, and it is followed by a second border, which must necessarily contain the proper name of a woman, and of a queen of the family of the Lagidae, since this group is terminated by the hieroglyphics expressive of the _feminine_ gender; characters which are found at the end of the names of all the Egyptian goddesses without exception. The obelisc was fixed, it is said, to a basis bearing a Greek inscription, which is a petition of the priests of Isis at Philae, addressed to King Ptolemy, to Cleopatra his sister, and to Cleopatra his wife. Now, if this obelisc, and the hieroglyphical inscription engraved on it, were the result of this petition, which in fact adverts to the consecration of a monument of the kind, the border, with the feminine proper name, can only be that of one of the Cleopatras. This name, and that of Ptolemy, which in the Greek have several letters in common, were capable of being employed for a comparison of the hieroglyphical characters composing them; and if the similar characters in these names expressed in both the same sounds, it followed that their nature must be entirely phonetic.”

This course of investigation appears, indeed, to be so simple and so natural, that the reader must naturally be inclined to forget that any preliminary steps were required: and to take it for granted, either that it had long been known and admitted, that the rings on the pillar of Rosetta contained the name of Ptolemy, and that the semicircle and the oval constituted the female termination, or that Mr. Champollion himself had been the author of these discoveries.

It had, however, been one of the greatest difficulties attending the translation of the hieroglyphics of Rosetta, to explain how the groups within the rings, which varied considerably in different parts of the pillar, and which occurred in several places where there was no corresponding name in the Greek, while they were not to be found in others where they ought to have appeared, could possibly represent the name of Ptolemy; and it was not without considerable labour that I had been able to overcome this difficulty. The interpretation of the female termination had never, I believe, been suspected by any but myself: nor had the name of a single god or goddess, out of more than five hundred that I have collected, been clearly pointed out by any person.

But, however Mr. Champollion may have arrived at his conclusions, I admit them, with the greatest pleasure and gratitude, not by any means as superseding my system, but as fully confirming and extending it. And here I am compelled to advert to a note of Mr. Champollion’s, which I fear will be thought to go a little beyond a _tacit adoption_ of my opinions, and to approach very near to an unintentional misrepresentation. “It must, without doubt, (p. 15,) have been by the form of this symbol, which has some resemblance to the figure of a basket, that Dr. Young was led to recognise the name of Berenice in the border that actually contains it. But he was of opinion that the hieroglyphics constituting proper names were employed as expressing whole syllables, that they were therefore a sort of _rebuses_, and that the first character of the name of Berenice, for example, represented the syllable BIR, which means a _basket_ in the Egyptian language. This mistaken supposition has vitiated, in great measure, the phonetic analysis which he has attempted of the names of _Ptolemy_ and _Berenice_, in which, notwithstanding, he has recognised the phonetic values of four of the characters: these are the P, one of the forms of the T, one of the forms of the M, and the I; but the whole of his syllabic alphabet, established from these two names only, was completely inapplicable to the great number of proper names phonetically expressed on the various monuments of Egypt ... Encyclopaedia Britannica, Supplement, IV. Pt. i. Edinb. Dec. 1819.”

Now, if Mr. Champollion had attended to my expressions, he must have perceived that it was _not_ by any _resemblance_ of an imaginary nature that I was “led to recognise the name of Berenice;” but by external evidence only. “The appellation SOTERES,” I have observed, Art. 57, “as a dual, is well marked in the inscription of Rosetta, and the character, thus determined, explains a long name in the temple at Edfou ... 58. The wife of Ptolemy Soter, and mother of Philadelphus, was BERENICE, whose name is found on a ceiling at KARNAK, in the phrase, “Ptolemy and ... Berenice, the _saviour gods_.” In this name we appear to have another specimen of syllabic _and alphabetical_ writing combined, in a manner not extremely unlike the ludicrous mixtures of words and things with which children are sometimes amused; for however Warburton’s indignation might be excited by such a comparison, it is perfectly true that, occasionally, “the sublime differs from the ridiculous by a single step only.” ... I have then proceeded to state, as conjectural _inferences_, the syllabic analogies: but instead of _four_ letters which Mr. Champollion is pleased to allow me, I have marked, in a subsequent chapter of this Essay, _nine_, which I have actually specified in different parts of my paper in the Supplement: and to these he has certainly added _three_ new ones; or _four_, if he chooses to reckon the E as a fourth. I allow that I suspected the B, the L, and the S, to be sometimes used syllabically: but the analogy of these characters with the enchorial alphabet was so well marked, that my attempt to refine upon it could not easily have embarrassed any one in making the application. Mr. Champollion has never been led, in any one instance, from the Egyptian name of an object, to infer the phonetic interpretation, that is, the alphabetical power of its symbol: but the letters having once been ascertained, he has ransacked his memory or his dictionary for some name that he thought capable of being applied to the symbol: and not always, as it appears to me, in the most natural manner: I should prefer, for instance, the word HRERI, a flower, as making the R, to the name of pomegranate, which, it seems, was sometimes called ROMAN or ERMAN. I must also observe that my intention, in placing the Coptic names in my vocabulary of hieroglyphics, was to assist in tracing any such analogies that might suggest themselves: and in the instance of AM or EM, N. 123, the reading approaches very near to one of the letters, added by Mr. Champollion to my alphabet.

With respect to the diversity of characters representing the same letter, it will be observed that I have marked _three_ forms of the M, _three_ of the N, with a fourth that was suggested to me by Mr. Bankes, _two_ of the P or PH, and _two_ of the S. Of these last, I cannot omit to observe, that Mr. Champollion has devoted at least a page of his letter (p. 13, 14) to the demonstration of the identity of _these same_ forms: and that it would not have been unnatural to refer, in a single line of that page, to the assertion of the same identity, which I had made in the article EGYPT, No. 102. “The bent line is often exchanged in the manuscripts for the divided staff, and both are represented in the running hand by a figure like a 9 or a 4.” The remainder of the forms, assigned to the letters, are all due to Mr. Champollion’s ingenious and successful investigations.

It so happens, that in the lithographical sketch of the obelisc of Philae, which had been put into my hands by its adventurous and liberal possessor, the artist has expressed the first letter of the name of Cleopatra by a T instead of a K, and as I had not leisure at the time to enter into a very minute comparison of the name with other authorities, I suffered myself to be discouraged with respect to the application of my alphabet to its analysis, and contented myself with observing, that if the steps of the formation of an alphabet were not exactly such as I had pointed out, they must at least have been very nearly of the same nature. In return, I was complimented for my candour, while I ought, perhaps, to have been reproved for my timidity. If, however, I may judge from my late correspondence with Mr. Champollion, he does not appear to be altogether so averse to the admission of syllabic characters on some occasions, as his note upon my “false point of departure” appears to imply: and I think he will find, in the evidence now first made public, respecting the enchorial character, some additional grounds for enforcing the opinion. I shall insert a specimen of one variety of each of the names which he has succeeded in deciphering: observing only, that his alphabet could scarcely have agreed so well with the various combinations of these names, as it appears to do, if it had not been in great measure correct: and that I also fully agree with Mr. Champollion in his interpretation of the phrase of the Pamfilian obelisc, which he translates, WHO HAS RECEIVED THE KINGDOM FROM VESPASIAN HIS FATHER: the same phrase occurring on the pillar of Rosetta, as well as on the obelisc of Philae, where it had served to correct my later opinion respecting the symbol for FATHER. It is here evident that the expression cannot relate, as Mr. St. Martin imagines it must have done in the inscriptions of Rosetta, to the immediate installation of a son by _the hands_ of his father; but that the right of inheritance only was implied by it. I am not however convinced, by the coherence of this passage, that the greater part of the obelisc was ever intended by the sculptor to convey a connected meaning; and at any rate the explanation confirms the opinion, that I had expressed, respecting the Roman origin of the workmanship. There are a few of the busts, now placed in the magical gallery of the Vatican, which appeared to me, on the contrary, to have been brought from Egypt with their genuine and ancient inscriptions, and to have had their features newly formed, and more highly polished, by Roman artists of the age of Adrian, in whose villa at Tivoli they were principally found.

Mr. Champollion has lately had the goodness to communicate to me, by letter, some suggestions, which, I conclude, he is on the point of making public, and I therefore take the liberty of mentioning them, as far as I think them at all admissible, though, perhaps, a little prematurely. He is disposed to refer the name, which I consider as that of the father of Amasis, to SESOSTRIS, as synonymous with RAMESSES, which he thinks the characters are probably intended to express phonetically. Now I readily allow, that where this name is written fully and accurately, as it is repeatedly found in Mr. Bankes’s great catalogue of Abydos, it may without much violence be read nearly as Mr. Champollion proposes, “the approved by Phthah, Ramesses,” or “the counterpart of Phthah, Ramesses;” the first part of the group undergoing several synonymous variations, while the end remains unchanged; although, if this reading were established, I should refer the first name to Amenophis or MEMNON, who was the son of Ramesses, or of Armesses called Miamun; and to whom the tomb of my Amasis is said to be attributed in the Greek and Latin inscriptions which are found in it; who is also said to have built the palace of Abydos, on which my Amasis evidently appears as the founder; who is more easily understood than Amasis to be prior to the Psammetichus mentioned at Ebsambul; and, who is more likely than Amasis to have been at Berýtus, or Nahr el Kelb, where Mr. Wyse, as I am informed by Sir William Gell, has distinctly observed this name, accompanied by the nail-headed characters. All these reasons are more than sufficient to counterbalance the single assertion of Pliny; and we should be obliged to change my Psammis, according to his place in Mr. Bankes’s table of kings, into the Armais of Manetho; though the _vocal_ Memnon of the numerous inscriptions would be converted by this comparison into Queen Rathotis, or we should be obliged to leave out three of Manetho’s list, to bring him up to the Amenophis who is called the Trojan Memnon by that author. All this is, indeed, a little alluring, and several suppositions might be introduced to overcome the difficulties: but unfortunately the fundamental supposition appears to be liable to an insurmountable objection; that the circle, which Mr. Champollion considers as equivalent to the RE or RA of Ramesses, is also the first character of each of the seventeen names immediately preceding it, and indeed of every other in the catalogue, that remains unmutilated at the beginning.

I am therefore sorry to say that I cannot hitherto congratulate Mr. Champollion on the success of his attempts to carry his system of phonetic characters into the very remotest antiquity of Egypt: he appears, however, to have a better prospect of elucidating some of the Persian names, having, as he informs me, been able to identify that of XERXES, both in the hieroglyphics, and in the nail-headed characters, by means of a vase of alabaster, on which both are found together. This is, indeed, a wonderful opening for literary enterprise; and I am even inclined to hope, from Mr. Champollion’s latest communications, that he will find some means of overcoming the difficulties that I have stated respecting the Pharaohs, for he assures me, that he has identified the names of no less than THIRTY of them, and that they accord with the traditions of Manetho, and, as far as he can judge, with the notes that I had sent him of an attempt that I had formerly made to assign temporary names to the kings enumerated at Abydos, in which those of all the later ones began with the syllable RE. He will easily believe that I wish for a satisfactory answer to my own objections: and, in fact, the further that he advances by the exertion of his own talents and ingenuity, the more easily he will be able to admit, without any exorbitant sacrifice of his fame, the claim that I have advanced to a priority with respect to the first elements of all his researches; and I cannot help thinking that he will ultimately feel it most for his own substantial honour and reputation, to be more anxious to admit the just claims of others than they can be to advance them.