Cosmos - Carl Sagan [156]
The evening of the 16th we finally arrived at Dendera. There was magnificent moonlight and we were only an hour away from the Temples: Could we resist the temptation? I ask the coldest of you mortals! To dine and leave immediately were the orders of the moment: alone and without guides, but armed to the teeth we crossed the fields … the Temple appeared to us at last … One could well measure it but to give an idea of it would be impossible. It is the union of grace and majesty in the highest degree. We stayed there two hours in ecstasy, running through the huge rooms … and trying to read the exterior inscriptions in the moonlight. We did not return to the boat until three in the morning, only to return to the Temple at seven … What had been magnificent in the moonlight was still so when the sunlight revealed to us all the details … We in Europe are only dwarfs and no nation, ancient or modern, has conceived the art of architecture on such a sublime, great, and imposing style, as the ancient Egyptians. They ordered everything to be done for people who are a hundred feet high.
On the walls and columns of Karnak, at Dendera, everywhere in Egypt, Champollion delighted to find that he could read the inscriptions almost effortlessly. Many before him had tried and failed to decipher the lovely hieroglyphics, a word that means “sacred carvings.” Some scholars had believed them to be a kind of picture code, rich in murky metaphor, mostly about eyeballs and wavy lines, beetles, bumblebees and birds—especially birds. Confusion was rampant. There were those who deduced that the Egyptians were colonists from ancient China. There were those who concluded the opposite. Enormous folio volumes of spurious translations were published. One interpreter glanced at the Rosetta stone, whose hieroglyphic inscription was then still undeciphered, and instantly announced its meaning. He said that the quick decipherment enabled him “to avoid the systematic errors which invariably arise from prolonged reflection.” You get better results, he argued, by not thinking too much. As with the search for extraterrestrial life today, the unbridled speculation of amateurs had frightened many professionals out of the field.
Champollion resisted the idea of hieroglyphs as pictorial metaphors. Instead, with the aid of a brilliant insight by the English physicist Thomas Young, he proceeded something like this: The Rosetta stone had been uncovered in 1799 by a French soldier working on the fortifications of the Nile Delta town of Rashid, which the Europeans, largely ignorant of Arabic, called Rosetta. It was a slab from an ancient temple, displaying what seemed clearly to be the same message in three different writings: in hieroglyphics at top, in a kind of cursive hieroglyphic called demotic in the middle, and, the key to the enterprise, in Greek at the bottom. Champollion, who was fluent in ancient Greek, read that the stone had been inscribed to commemorate the coronation of Ptolemy V Epiphanes, in the spring of the year 196 B.C. On this occasion the king released political prisoners, remitted taxes, endowed temples, forgave rebels, increased military preparedness and, in short, did all the things that modern rulers do when they wish to stay in office.
The Greek text mentions Ptolemy many times. In roughly the same positions in the hieroglyphic text is a set of symbols surrounded by an oval or cartouche. This, Champollion reasoned, very probably also denotes Ptolemy. If so, the writing could not be fundamentally pictographic or metaphorical; rather, most of the symbols must stand for letters or syllables. Champollion also had the presence of mind to count up the number of Greek words and the number