HOST: (Low, intimate tone) The air in this room is heavy. It smells of stale tobacco, candle wax, and the sharp, metallic tang of anxiety. I’m standing in a cramped study on the Rue Mazarine, Paris. It is September 14th, 1822. Outside, the city is bustling with the restoration of the monarchy, but inside... inside, time has stopped for thousands of years.
(Pause)
HOST: Sitting across from me, buried behind a fortress of books and lithographs, is a man who hasn't slept properly in weeks. His skin is sallow, his eyes burning with a feverish intensity. This is Jean-François Champollion. And if history is correct, in the next few minutes, he is going to change the world.
CHAMPOLLION: (Fast-paced, breathless, murmuring to himself) No, no, no. Young is wrong. He must be wrong. If the script is purely symbolic, then how... how do they write a name?
HOST: Monsieur Champollion? You mentioned Thomas Young. The British polymath?
CHAMPOLLION: (Sharp, dismissive) Young? Young is a dabbler! A tourist in the land of the Pharaohs! He looks at the Rosetta Stone and sees a parlor game. He thinks the hieroglyphs are... mute pictures. Pretty symbols for the ignorant masses, only capable of sound when spelling out the names of foreign invaders like "Ptolemy" or "Cleopatra."
HOST: And you believe otherwise?
CHAMPOLLION: (Intense, leaning in) I believe, Monsieur, that a civilization capable of building the Pyramids did not spend three thousand years drawing silent pictures! They had a voice! A language! I can hear it in the Coptic liturgy I hear at Saint-Roch. The language of the Copts *is* the language of the Pharaohs, barely breathing under a Greek alphabet. I just... (Frustrated sigh) I need the key to unlock the old script.
HOST: You have the Rosetta Stone copies there. The black basalt...
CHAMPOLLION: The Stone is a torment! I have stared at these lithographs until they float behind my eyelids. We know the Greek text at the bottom. We know the Demotic in the middle. But the top... the hieroglyphs. I have the name "Ptolemy." P-T-O-L-M-E-S. Young found that. I grant him that. But he stopped there! He thinks it only works for Greek names.
HOST: (Narrating) He is shuffling through a new stack of papers now. Sketches. They look fresh, covered in dust from the road.
CHAMPOLLION: These... these arrived today. From my friend Nicolas Huyot. He has just returned from Abu Simbel. Deep in Nubia. These aren't Greek inscriptions, Monsieur. These are old. Pre-conquest. Pure Egyptian.
HOST: What are you looking for?
CHAMPOLLION: (Distracted, focusing) A cartouche. The oval loops that contain royal names. If Young is right, these should be unreadable. Symbolic nonsense. But if I am right... if the alphabet is a *soul* and not just a mask...
HOST: (Whispering) He’s tracing a symbol with a trembling finger. A small circle with a dot in the center.
CHAMPOLLION: Look. Here. This sign. The sun disk. In Coptic, the sun is *Re*.
HOST: *Re*.
CHAMPOLLION: And at the end... these two hooked lines. We know them from the Rosetta Stone. They are 'S'. So we have *Re*... something... *S-S*.
HOST: Re-?-S-S.
CHAMPOLLION: The middle sign. It looks like... a fox skin? No, a tripod? Wait. I have seen this in the Rosetta texts. It corresponds to the Greek word for "Birthday." Birth. To be born.
HOST: (Tense) What is the word for "birth" in Coptic, Jean-François?
CHAMPOLLION: (Voice dropping to a whisper) *Mise*. The verb is *Mise*.
HOST: So if that sign is 'M'...
CHAMPOLLION: (Building speed) *Re*... *Mes*... *Ses*. Rameses?
HOST: (Quietly) Rameses.
CHAMPOLLION: (Louder, manic) Rameses! The Great Sun! It is not Greek! It is a Pharaonic name! Written in sounds!
HOST: He’s grabbing another sheet. He’s shaking.
CHAMPOLLION: Verify. I must verify. Here! Another cartouche. An Ibis bird. The Ibis is the symbol of the god Thoth. *Thoth*. And the tripod again... *Mes*. And the 'S'.
HOST: Thoth-mes-s.
CHAMPOLLION: Thutmose! The conqueror! (Laughing, bordering on hysteria) Do you see? Do you see what this means?
HOST: It means the hieroglyphs are phonetic.
CHAMPOLLION: It means they are everything! They are an alphabet, but also ideograms, and symbols, all at once, in the same text, in the same phrase, in the same word! It is not a riddle. It is a spoken language! I can read it. I can read the walls of the temples!
HOST: (Narrating) He is standing up now. He looks unsteady. The rush of blood to his head is visible. He’s grabbing his notes, clutching them to his chest like a newborn child.
CHAMPOLLION: I must tell Jacques. He is at the Institute. I must...
HOST: Jean-François, take a breath. You look—
CHAMPOLLION: (Shouting) There is no time for breath! The silence is broken! Do you hear them? Ramses is speaking!
HOST: He’s running for the door. He’s not even wearing his coat.
CHAMPOLLION: (Fading out, shouting down the hallway) Jacques! Jacques! Je tiens mon affaire! I have it! I have it!
HOST: (Quietly) And just like that, he is gone. Running down the Rue Mazarine to collapse at his brother's feet. He won't wake up for five days. But when he does... the history of humanity will be twice as long as it was this morning.
(Pause)
HOST: This is Elias Thorne, from the year 1822. Signing off.
Backgrounder Notes
As an expert researcher and library scientist, I have reviewed the text and identified the following key facts and concepts. These backgrounders provide the necessary context to understand the historical and linguistic significance of Jean-François Champollion’s breakthrough.
1. Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832)
Champollion was a French philologist and orientalist who is widely considered the "Father of Egyptology." His obsessive study of ancient languages and his eventual decipherment of the Rosetta Stone's hieroglyphs allowed historians to finally read the records of ancient Egyptian civilization.
2. Thomas Young (1773–1829)
An English polymath often referred to as "The Last Man Who Knew Everything," Young made significant contributions to physics (specifically the wave theory of light) and linguistics. He was Champollion's primary rival, having correctly identified that some hieroglyphs in the Rosetta Stone represented sounds, though he wrongly believed this only applied to foreign names like "Ptolemy."
3. The Rosetta Stone
Discovered by Napoleon’s army in 1799, this granodiorite stele features a royal decree issued in 196 BCE. Because the decree is written in three different scripts—Ancient Hieroglyphic, Demotic, and Ancient Greek—it provided the essential "key" for scholars to compare known Greek words with unknown Egyptian symbols.
4. Coptic Language
Coptic is the final stage of the ancient Egyptian language, written primarily using the Greek alphabet with a few additional letters. Champollion’s mastery of Coptic was the "secret weapon" of his success, as it allowed him to reconstruct the sounds of the ancient spoken language of the Pharaohs.
5. Demotic Script
Demotic was the cursive Egyptian script used for everyday purposes, such as legal documents and business, rather than the formal, "sacred" carvings found on monuments. On the Rosetta Stone, it occupies the middle section between the formal hieroglyphs at the top and the Greek text at the bottom.
6. Cartouche
A cartouche is an oval frame drawn around a set of hieroglyphs, indicating that the enclosed text is a royal name. These served as the starting point for decipherment because they allowed scholars to isolate specific groups of symbols and map them to known historical figures.
7. Phonetic vs. Ideographic Writing
Before Champollion, most scholars believed hieroglyphs were purely "ideographic" (symbols representing ideas or objects). Champollion’s breakthrough was proving they were also "phonetic" (symbols representing sounds), functioning as a complex hybrid system of both sounds and concepts.
8. Abu Simbel
Abu Simbel is a massive temple complex in southern Egypt (ancient Nubia) commissioned by Ramesses II. The sketches sent to Champollion from this site were crucial because they contained "pure" Egyptian names that predated Greek influence, proving his phonetic theory applied to all of Egyptian history, not just the later Greek-ruled period.
9. "Je tiens mon affaire!"
This famous French phrase translates to "I’ve got it!" or "I have the business!" These are traditionally recorded as the last words Champollion spoke to his brother, Jacques-Joseph, before collapsing from exhaustion and a possible mild stroke triggered by the intensity of his discovery.
