We open our mouth wide and make a noise like a steam engine and the
sound is written down "H."
It took the human race hundreds of thousands of years to discover this
and the credit for it goes to the Egyptians.
Of course they did not use the letters which have been used to print
this book.
They had a system of their own.
It was much prettier than ours but not quite so simple.
It consisted of little figures and images of things around the house and
around the farm, of knives and plows and birds and pots and pans. These
little figures their scribes scratched and painted upon the wall of the
temples, upon the coffins of their dead kings and upon the dried leaves
of the papyrus plant which has given its name to our "paper."
But when the Romans entered this vast library they showed neither
enthusiasm nor interest.
They possessed a system of writing of their own which they thought
vastly superior.
[Illustration: THE KEY OF STONE]
They did not know that the Greeks (from whom they had learned their
alphabet) had in turn obtained theirs from the Phoenicians who had again
borrowed with great success from the old Egyptians. They did not know
and they did not care. In their schools the Roman alphabet was taught
exclusively and what was good enough for the Roman children was good
enough for everybody else.
You will understand that the Egyptian language did not long survive the
indifference and the opposition of the Roman governors. It was
forgotten. It died just as the languages of most of our Indian tribes
have become a thing of the past.
The Arabs and the Turks who succeeded the Romans as the rulers of Egypt
abhorred all writing that was not connected with their holy book,
the Koran.
At last in the middle of the sixteenth century a few western visitors
came to Egypt and showed a mild interest in these strange pictures.
But there was no one to explain their meaning and these first Europeans
were as wise as the Romans and the Turks had been before them.
Now it happened, late in the eighteenth century that a certain French
general by the name of Buonaparte visited Egypt. He did not go there to
study ancient history. He wanted to use the country as a starting point
for a military expedition against the British colonies in India. This
expedition failed completely but it helped solve the mysterious problem
of the ancient Egyptian writing.
Among the soldiers of Napoleon Buonaparte there was a young officer by
the name of Broussard. He was stationed at the fortress of St. Julien on
the western mouth of the Nile which is called the Rosetta river.
Broussard liked to rummage among the ruins of the lower Nile and one day
he found a stone which greatly puzzled him.
Like everything else in that neighborhood, it was covered with picture
writing.
But this slab of black basalt was different from anything that had ever
been discovered.
It carried three inscriptions and one of these (oh joy!) was in Greek.
The Greek language was known.
As it was almost certain that the Egyptian part contained a translation
of the Greek (or vice versa), the key to ancient Egyptian seemed to have
been discovered.
But it took more than thirty years of very hard work before the key had
been made to fit the lock.
Then the mysterious door was opened and the ancient treasure house of
Egypt was forced to surrender its secrets.
The man who gave his life to the task of deciphering this language was
Jean Francois Champollion--usually called Champollion Junior to
distinguish him from his older brother who was also a very learned man.
Champollion Junior was a baby when the French revolution broke out and
therefore he escaped serving in the armies of the General Buonaparte.
While his countrymen were marching from one glorious victory to another
(and back again as such Imperial armies are apt to do) Champollion
studied the language of the Copts, the native Christians of Egypt. At
the age of nineteen he was appointed a professor of History at one of
the smaller French universities and there he began his great work of
translating the pictures of the old Egyptian language.
For this purpose he used the famous black stone of Rosetta which
Broussard had discovered among the ruins near the mouth of the Nile.
The original stone was still in Egypt. Napoleon had been forced to
vacate the country in a hurry and he had left this curiosity behind.
When the English retook Alexandria in the year 1801 they found the stone
and carried it to London, where you may see it this very day in the
British Museum. The Inscriptions however had been copied and had been
taken to France, where they were used by Champollion.
The Greek text was quite clear. It contained the story of Ptolemy V and
his wife Cleopatra, the grandmother of that other Cleopatra about whom
Shakespeare wrote. The other two inscriptions, however, refused to
surrender their secrets.
One of them was in hieroglyphics, the name we give to the oldest known
Egyptian writing. The word Hieroglyphic is Greek and means "sacred
carving." It is a very good name for it fully describes the purpose and
nature of this script. The priests who had invented this art did not
want the common people to become too familiar with the deep mysteries of
preserving speech. They made writing a sacred business.
They surrounded it with much mystery and decreed that the carving of
hieroglyphics be regarded as a sacred art and forbade the people to
practice it for such a common purpose as business or commerce.
They could enforce this rule with success so long as the country was
inhabited by simple farmers who lived at home and grew everything they
needed upon their own fields. But gradually Egypt became a land of
traders and these traders needed a means of communication beyond the
spoken word. So they boldly took the little figures of the priests and
simplified them for their own purposes. Thereafter they wrote their
business letters in the new script which became known as the "popular
language" and which we call by its Greek name, the "Demotic language."
The Rosetta stone carried both the sacred and the popular translations
of the Greek text and upon these two Champollion centered his attack. He
collected every piece of Egyptian script which he could get and together
with the Rosetta stone he compared and studied them until after twenty
years of patient drudgery he understood the meaning of fourteen
little figures.
That means that he spent more than a whole year to decipher each single
picture.
Finally he went to Egypt and in the year 1823 he printed the first
scientific book upon the subject of the ancient hieroglyphics.
Nine years later he died from overwork, as a true martyr to the great
task which he had set himself as a boy.
His work, however, lived after him.
Others continued his studies and today Egyptologists can read
hieroglyphics as easily as we can read the printed pages of our
newspapers.
Fourteen pictures in twenty years seems very slow work. But let me tell
you something of Champollion's difficulties. Then you will understand,
and understanding, you will admire his courage.
The old Egyptians did not use a simple sign language. They had passed
beyond that stage.
Of course, you know what sign language is.
Every Indian story has a chapter about queer messages, written in the
form of little pictures. Hardly a boy but at some stage or other of his
life, as a buffalo hunter or an Indian fighter, has invented a sign
language of his own, and all Boy Scouts are familiar with it. But
Egyptian was something quite different and I must try and make this
clear to you with a few pictures. Suppose that you were Champollion and
that you were reading an old papyrus which told the story of a farmer
who lived somewhere along the banks of the river Nile.
Suddenly you came across a picture of a man with a saw.
[Illustration: saw]
"Very well," you said, "that means, of course, that the farmer went out
and cut a tree down." Most likely you had guessed correctly.
Next you took another page of hieroglyphics.
They told the story of a queen who had lived to be eighty-two years old.
Right in the middle of the text the same picture occurred. That was very
puzzling, to say the least. Queens do not go about cutting down trees.
They let other people do it for them. A young queen may saw wood for the
sake of exercise, but a queen of eighty-two stays at home with her cat
and her spinning wheel. Yet, the picture was there. The ancient priest
who drew it must have placed it there for a definite purpose.
What could he have meant?
That was the riddle which Champollion finally solved.
He discovered that the Egyptians were the first people to use what we
call "phonetic writing."
Like most other words which express a scientific idea, the word
"phonetic" is of Greek origin. It means the "science of the sound which
is made by our speech." You have seen the Greek word "phone," which
means the voice, before. It occurs in our word "telephone," the machine
which carries the voice to a distant point.
Ancient Egyptian was "phonetic" and it set man free from the narrow
limits of that sign language which in some primitive form had been used
ever since the cave-dweller began to scratch pictures of wild animals
upon the walls of his home.
Now let us return for a moment to the little fellow with his saw who
suddenly appeared in the story of the old queen. Evidently he had
something to do with a saw.
A "saw" is either a tool which you find in a carpenter shop or it means
the past tense of the verb "to see."
This is what had happened to the word during the course of many
centuries.
First of all it had meant a man with a saw.
Then it came to mean the sound which we reproduce by the three modern
letters, s, a and w. In the end the original meaning of carpentering was
lost entirely and the picture indicated the past tense of "to see."
A modern English sentence done into the images of ancient Egypt will
show you what I mean.
[Illustration: eye bee leaf eye saw giraffe]
The [Illustration: eye] means either these two round objects in your
head which allow you to see, or it means "I," the person who is talking
or writing.
A [Illustration: bee] is either an animal which gathers honey and pricks
you in the finger when you try to catch it, or it represents to verb "to
be," which is pronounced the same way and which means to "exist." Again
it may be the first part of a verb like "be-come" or "be-have." In this
case the bee is followed by a [Illustration: leaf] which represents the
sound which we find in the word "leave" or "leaf." Put your "bee" and
your "leaf" together and you have the two sounds which make the verb
"bee-leave" or "believe" as we write it nowadays.
The "eye" you know all about.
Finally you get a picture which looks like a giraffe. [Illustration:
Giraffe] It is a giraffe, and it is part of the old sign language, which
has been continued wherever it seemed most convenient.