Hero Of The Hieroglyphs

Andrew Robinson traces the life of the French archaeologist Jean-François Champollion, who deciphered the tantalising inscriptions of Ancient Egypt

- Andrew Robinson

On 1 May 1821, a very alluring exhibition opened in London’s Piccadilly at the exotic Egyptian Hall, built in 1812 and inspired by the Egyptomania created by French archaeological discoveries in Egypt under Napoleon Bonaparte. A reviewer in The Times called it a ‘singular combination and skilful arrangement of objects so new and in themselves so striking’. It ran for a year.

On display was the interior of an Egyptian tomb in Thebes (modern Luxor), discovered in 1817, from what would soon come to be called (by Jean-François Champollion) the Valley of the Kings. Actually, it was a one-sixth scale model, over 15 metres (50 feet) in length, complemented by a full-sized reproduction of two of the tomb’s most impressive chambers.

The bas-reliefs and polychrome wall decoration, showing gods, goddesses, animals, the life of the pharaoh and manifold coloured hieroglyphs, had been re-created from wax moulds taken of the original reliefs, and from paintings made on the spot by the tomb’s Italian discoverer, Giovanni Belzoni, and his compatriot, Alessandro Ricci, a physician-turned-artist who would go on to work extensively with Champollion in Egypt from 1828 to 1829.

But perhaps the most startling object from the tomb arrived late from Egypt, and was temporarily deposited in the British Museum. This was a creamy-white calcite (Egyptian alabaster) sarcophagus carved outside and inside with hieroglyphs originally inlaid with ‘Egyptian blue’, that is, calcium copper tetrasilicate. Unlike the rest of Belzoni’s exhibition, it can still be seen as a key attraction in Sir John Soane’s Museum, not far from the British Museum, following its purchase by Soane in 1824.