This book sheds new light on the work of Jean-François Champollion by uncovering a constellation of epistemological, political, and material conditions that made his decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs possible. Champollion’s success in understanding hieroglyphs, first published in his Lettre à M. Dacier in 1822, is emblematic for the triumphant achievements of comparative philology during the 19th Century. In its attempt to understand humanity as part of a grand history of progress, Champollion’s conception of ancient Egypt belongs to the universalistic aspirations of European modernity. Yet precisely because of its success, his project also reveals the costs it entailed: after examining and welcoming acquisitions for the emerging Egyptian collections in Europe, Champollion travelled to the Nile Valley in 1828/29, where he was shocked by the damage that had been done to its ancient cultural sites. The letter he wrote to the Egyptian viceroy Mehmet Ali Pasha in 1829 demands that excavations in Egypt be regulated, denounces European looting, and represents perhaps the first document to make a case for the international protection of cultural goods in the name of humanity.
Author(s): Markus Messling
Series: Socio-Historical Studies of the Social and Human Sciences
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 199
City: Cham
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Figures
1: Other Narratives of a Grand History
Bibliography
2: Philology and Nationalism
Paris, or: The Primacy of France’s Intellectual Achievements
Memphis/Thebes: France as Antiquity’s Heir
Another Eden, or: In Search of the Origins of Humankind
Europe, or: Overcoming Particularism in the Garden of Science
Bibliography
Untitled
3: Knowledge and Method: The Parisian Legacy
Times of Transition
In the Tradition of the Ideologists: Writing and History
A Philological Archaeology
On the Origins of Writing: From Image to Sound?
Bibliography
4: Civilisational Genealogies: Where Does Europe Come From?
Ethnographic Classification
Ethiopia, or: The Formation of Historical-Philosophical Theses (Origins, Ancestry, ‘Races’)
A Family Tree of Languages?
The Brackets That Make the Difference, or: Egypt and the Indo-European Challenge
Bibliography
5: Scientific Recognition: Showdown in Rome
A Diplomatic Affair: The Tournament of Decipherers
The Demystification of the Hieroglyphs and Cultural Disillusionment
The Survival of the Concept of the Hieroglyph in Modernism—From Baudelairian Symbolism to Psychoanalysis
Seyffarth’s Tragic Model
Bibliography
6: History of Materials: Predatory Exploitation on the Nile and the Idea of Protecting Cultural Goods
Dendur as a Signature of Modernity: Back from New York
Of Consul Generals, Horse Dealers, and Muscle Men
Colonial Theft of Culture and the Dimensions of Egyptomania
Universality and the Logic of Restitution
Champollion’s Attitude towards Egyptian Cultural Goods
Bibliography
7: Note to the Attention of the Viceroy for the Conservation of the Monuments of Egypt
Bibliography
Bibliography
Index
