eBook The Keys of Egypt: The Obsession to Decipher Egyptian Hieroglyphs epub

My son loves it. His Uncle recommended it

This book is interesting but I was looking for actual keys to deciphering Egyptian Hieroglyphics not about those who went in search for clues to crack the code. All in all, it is still a good book.
Sarah

There's a difference between writing a biography of Jean-François Champollion and writing the story of the decipherment of hieroglyphs. Although Champollion was more responsible for the decipherment than anyone else, a lot of people contributed before he made his first breakthrough and after he was dead, so the latter type of book will focus more on those people, whereas a biography will cover aspects of Champollion's life that weren't closely related to his passion for ancient Egypt. Adkins and Adkins write a hybrid of both types of book. As a result, they underemphasize the contributions made by scholars other than Champollion and his rival Thomas Young, while at the same time treating Champollion's life in a somewhat cursory way. They're also a bit biased toward Champollion, who, for all his brilliance and determination, did have serious faults.

It's a decent book for those looking for a readable telling of this story. However, for general books on the decipherment process, The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of Ancient Egypt is broader-ranging, and for biographies of Champollion, Cracking the Egyptian Code is much more thorough.

If you are like me, you learned at some point that Napoleon's forces had located the Rosetta Stone while invading Egypt, leading to the rediscovery of how to read ancient Egyptian. The writing on the stone contained the same material in Greek, Demotic, and hieroglyphs. From comparing the three texts, scholars deciphered hieroglyphs. Sounds simple, doesn't it? Well, it really wasn't, which is where our school book learning was incomplete. And that's the appeal of this unusual book.
Why do I say the book is unusual? Well, most books about scholarly discoveries focus on the work itself. While this one certainly contains information about how the hieroglyphs were translated, the main focus is on what it was like to be a French scholar in a high visibility area from the time after the French Revolution through the Restoration. The story is a fascinating one of constant intrigue, danger, poverty, and overwhelming odds overcome. This book would qualify as an exciting novel if written that way.
Jean-Francois Champollion was the key translator who finally succeeded in 1822, 23 years after the Rosetta Stone was discovered. He was the son of an impoverished book seller at 16 when the stone was found. His main competitor was an English physician, Thomas Young, who was to turn out to be an implacable foe who denigrated and challenged Champollion's work.
The work would have gone on much more rapidly, but there was a shortage of materials available to Champollion to work on. He also had the difficult task of getting an education and then earning his living as a teacher, and often had to put off working on the hieroglyphs for long periods of time. When the Restoration came, he and his brother were exiled to the small town they started in. But they succeeded in regaining official support for their careers, and were able to continue.
Despite the challenges, Champollion (with a lot of help from his friends, and especially his older brother) was eventually able to get recognition for his accomplishments and support from Charles X to go to Italy to study texts and later Egypt to translate the monuments and texts there. In the brief period of time before his death in 1832, he added tremendously to our knowledge of ancient Egypt and its culture.
The key problem was that the same hieroglyph (such as the picture of a duck) can represent an object (the duck), a concept ("son of"), and a sound ("sa"). One of the key breaks came in finding cartouches of foreign names that were easier to decipher because they used the phoenetic versions. Having had success there, with access to more material it was easy to notice cartouches that seemed to represent the names of well-known Egyptian Pharaohs such as Ramses (described as "Rameses" in the book). Cleopatra's name was an early translation breakthrough. Soon, these cartouches provided clues to the multiple ways that hieroglyphs can be used. Numerical analysis showed that the number of hieroglyphs on the Rosetta stone did not match very well to the number of words or letters in the Greek text. That suggested that something more complex was going on than using a straight-forward alphabet from hierglyphs. Champollion soon made quick progress from there. He had an amazing talent for languages, having earlier produced a Coptic dictionary.
Champollion also uncovered that hieroglyphs were formal writing, Hieratic was cursive handwriting, Demotic dated from 650 B.C., and Coptic began in 250 A.D. So the dating of the materials studied could be determined in part by the languages used.
After you finish enjoying this interesting book, I suggest that you think about how languages divide us. Most of us read only in our native language. This means that works in other languages first have to be translated before we can enjoy them. Many works are never so translated. I urge you to take another language that you know and read something in that language. That experience allows you to enjoy the other culture much more than you can with a translation. If your language skills are not sufficient to do this, I suggest that you read something that has been translated by two different translators in separate editions. Compare them to see how much translations can vary. Although my examples focus on languages, you should also realize that such differences in understanding occur in one language. So pay close attention and check your assumptions when you read and listen to someone speak. For example, be open to what is not being said and is not being written, but is present. Don't miss the subtleties that may reveal most of the meaning to you!
Look, listen, and learn.

A thoroughly absorbing book - I managed to read it whilst my wife was in the early stages of being induced. Come the end I was able to put it down and reflect on a first foray into the history of Egyptian Hieroglyphic decipherment. It managed to clear a couple of minor points up for me, such as the difference between hieroglyphs, demotic and hieratic which other books had simply, and somewhat erroneously, assumed I knew. And therein lay their failure and this book's success. If you're a scholar or a doctor, this isn't for you. It is for the average person on the streets who has an interest in the history of what clearly comes across as an obsession to decipher Egyptian Hieroglyphs.
The bickering and snideness that Young brought to the affair set against the political background of France and England gives an air of reality rather than the somewhat dry and musty scholarship lecturers and doctors of history profess is the only true way of disemminating information. This book simply isn't about that.
It begins in almost travelogue style with an account of Napoleon's venture into Eygpt and spends a delightful opening 40 or so pages irrelevantly giving a chronology of the ill-fated trip. Quite why it took 40 pages to give a tenuous link between Napoloeon and Champollion (other than the suggested revolution at Grenoble later in Champollion's life) I don't know, but it doesn't detract at all. If I wanted to be critical it does seem like the book comprises 8 separately written essays on the history of Egyptian Hieroglyphic decipherment with a bit of glue to hold it all together, but that would be being critical for the sake of it.
Yes, it is not for the discerning scholar, but there are plenty of books out there to satisfy that urge. What this area of study desperately needed, and the Adkins' have provided us with, is a beginner's biography, an exciting glimpse of the reality around the man who is rightly heralded as one of France's greatest scholars. If this to be his biography then the Adkins have achieved something worth reading.