Jean-françois champollion

When British and Ottoman forces defeated the remnants of Napoleon’s army in Egypt, General Menou, the Frenchman in charge of Alexandria, was ordered to surrender his personal collection of looted antiquities. ‘Never has the world been so pillaged!’ he moaned unironically. The item which provoked such self-pity was the Rosetta Stone, whose extraordinary value Menou had identified – and publicised in an academic article – two years earlier. When two British officers were sent to collect the stone, Menou challenged one of them to a duel, though he seems to have been talked out of this. The stone was strapped to an artillery cart and began its journey to London, where it resides today as one of the star attractions of the British Museum.

The Rosetta Stone is the icon of decipherment. As one of the most popular objects in the British Museum, its irregular shape and the once white-on-black of its three scripts — hieroglyphic, demotic, Greek — are distinctive enough to sell countless socks, keyrings and nail files in the museum shop. The stone’s marketable popularity testifies both to the allure of hieroglyphs, including a persistent orientalising idea of their ‘mystery’, and the seemingly miraculous achievement of code-breaking. The latter is most associated with the two men of The Riddle of the Rosetta’s subtitle: the ‘English polymath’ Thomas Young (1773-1829) and the ‘French polyglot’ Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832).