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The deciphering of the Rosetta stone was one of the great intellectual triumphs of all time, unlocking the secrets of thousands of years of Egypt’s ancient civilization. Yet in the past two centuries, the circumstances surrounding this bravura feat of translation have become shrouded in myth and mystery. Now in his spellbinding new book, Daniel Meyerson recounts the extraordinary true story of how the lives of two geniuses converged in a breakthrough that revolutionized our understanding of the past.
The emperor Napoleon and the linguist Jean-Francois Champollion were both blessed with the temperament of artists and damned with ferocious impatience—and both of them were obsessed with Egypt. In fact, it was Napoleon’s dazzling, disastrous Egyptian campaign that caught the attention of the young Champollion and forever changed his life. From the instant Champollion learned of Napoleon’s discovery of a stone inscribed with three sets of characters—Greek, Coptic, and hieroglyphic—he could not rest. He vowed to be the first to crack the mystery of what became known as the Rosetta stone.
In Daniel Meyerson’s sweeping narrative, the haunting story of the Rosetta stone—its discovery in a doomed battle, the intrigue to secure it, the agonizing race to unlock its secrets, and the pain it seemed to inflict on all who touched it—reads like the most engrossing fiction. Napoleon, despite his power and glory, suffered repeated betrayals . . . by his Empress Josephine, on the battlefield, and by history itself. Champollion, though he triumphed intellectually, ultimately endured his own terrible tragedy. As background and counterpoint to the stories of the brilliant linguist and the visionary emperor, Meyerson interweaves the ancient tales of love, intrigue, brutal death, and
miraculous rebirth that were hidden for centuries on the walls of Egyptian tombs—stories that Champollion finally made accessible to the world.
Blending history, politics, intellectual passion, and a deep understanding of the human heart, The Linguist and the Emperor is a stunning tapestry of breakthrough and ambition, grandeur and vanity, power and pain. Carrying on the tradition of The Professor and the Madman and Longitude, Meyerson has fashioned a masterpiece of meticulous history and astonishing storytelling.
- Sales Rank: #2708730 in Books
- Published on: 2004-03-02
- Released on: 2004-03-02
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.55" h x 1.00" w x 5.84" l, .90 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 288 pages
From Publishers Weekly
This florid adventure tale, presented in colorful episodes that read as if drawn from a Hollywood film treatment, interweaves Napoleon's obsessive empire building with Jean François Champollion's determined mission to crack the code of hieroglyphics. The story hinges on the long, drawn-out Napoleonic campaign in Egypt (17981801), during which the Rosetta stone, which enabled Champollion's breakthrough, was discovered. Meyerson, an Ellis Fellow at Columbia and the author of a previous book on despots, conjures two fanatic visionaries, lingering on Napoleon's insecurities and cruelties and on Champollion's dogged devotion, flashes of passionate intuition and periodic exhaustion. Beginning with an account of Champollion's obscure childhood and experience of the revolutionary Terror, and tracing the prodigy linguist's early interest in ancient languages in the context of narrow-minded lyce life, the book renders Champollion's adult career as one long struggle to justify his theories. The Napoleonic campaign in Egypt is mined for its colorful generals and scenes of thirst-crazed soldiers, while the history of Egypt and how its ancient language came to be lost is skimmed, with an emphasis on sensuous detail. Overwritten and festooned with continuous anticipations of the various fates and destinies of each of its personages, repeatedly casting Egypt as a mysterious muse or virgin, this romance treats neither history nor linguistics with any degree of seriousness. B&w photos and illus.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
During Napoleon's forays into Egypt, the study of this ancient civilization became formalized as a serious field, for word of Napoleon's discoveries of artifacts covered with mysterious writing sparked a number of efforts to decipher the hieroglyphs. One scholar thus engaged was the brilliant Jean-Francois Champollion, who spent countless hours poring over every available bit of evidence to become the first person in more than 1,000 years who could reasonably claim to understand the ancient writing. Meyerson provides a good deal of biographical information on the little-understood Champollion, chronicling his studies and discoveries and relating them to Egypt's storied history. Meyerson explains much about contemporary French history and the relevant episodes of Egyptian history; nonetheless, there are still instances when he assumes his readers will be familiar with the basics. For that reason, this is probably not a book for the casual reader. Audiences with more than just a passing interest, however, will find this an interesting account of one of the most significant contributors to the study of Egypt. Gavin Quinn
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“[A] page turner . . . entertaining history that’s told with gusto and goes down like a pleasant aperitif.”
–The Washington Post Book World
“COMPELLING . . . A PASSIONATE LINGUISTIC LOVE AFFAIR.”
–Time
“[Meyerson] has inhaled his rich material. It is as if his normal respiration were in cursive, demotic, or hieratic scripts, and acrophonic principles–as if he had always been able to read obelisks and coffins.”
–Harper’s
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Most helpful customer reviews
25 of 27 people found the following review helpful.
Croc wrestling and incest on the Nile
By Robert Albon
No story about ancient Egypt would be complete without some mention of the embalming process used to make mummies, so details of that process, such as removing the brains through the nose or the maintenance of the mummy's embalmed (...) separate from his body (apparently it is reattached in the afterworld) are expected.
Some mention of incestuous relationships, especially between royal siblings of the Ptolemy dynasty, is to be expected as well. However, M seems to have attempted to catalog every manner of sexual perversion imaginable in this work of 'meticulous history', such as fetishism (Egyptian priest executed for abusing himself with queen's hair), prison sex, necrophilia (apparently no beautiful woman's corpse was safe in ancient Egypt), rape of captured French soldiers by Bedouin nomads, catamites, costume play (Napoleon dressed as maid, Pharaoh Snefru dressed his harem in nothing but fishnet), cliterectomy, brother-sister incest, mother/sister-daughter/niece-brother/uncle incestuous m?nage ? trois, bestiality, temple prostitutes, etc.
M's tabloid-like coverage continues in sordid detail, such as listing Josephine's lovers (aside from Napoleon): her first husband, an unnamed prisoner, the dandy Hippolyte Charles; and Napoleon's lovers (aside from Josephine): an 18-year-old Austrian archduchess, Mme George, the Polish beauty Countess Walewska, several unnamed Egyptian women, several unnamed Abyssinian slave women, the French lieutenant's wife, Pauline Four?s.
It is hard to see what bearing much of this has on the story at hand, other than to titillate the reader. But don't run out and buy it expecting anything hardcore: there is little detail and M can't even bring himself to say (...). Instead M uses prudish euphemisms such as member or phallus. This really cannot be called linguistics, history, or erotica-it's just gossip.
No taboo is untouched, no matter how detached from the dramatic events which are supposedly the actual topics of the story: cannibalism, a pharaoh feeding his children to dogs, a Roman feeding slave boys to lamprey eels, French soldiers wrestling crocodiles on the Nile, Napoleon having sick prostitutes sewn in sacks and thrown in the Nile, Frederick the Great reassigns a man convicted of bestiality with a horse to a cavalry unit, Marie Antoinette squatting to "pee" in her favorite plum-colored shoes before she is guillotined.
Well, all this might have made for amusing comic relief had there been deep, meaningful discussion of Champollion's linguistic exploits, which, I believe, is the primary reason anyone would purchase this book. However, the discussion of the actual deciphering of the hieroglyphs is much sketchier than I had hoped for.
The brief discussion does provide a succinct outline of Champollion's breakthrough, which started with the deciphering of the readings of proper names, which were set off from the rest of a text by a cartouche, such as Ptolemy, Cleopatra, Alexander the Great, Berenice, Ramesses, etc, and was followed by the discovery that particles and other frequently occurring words were similar in sound to Coptic or were similar in orthographic form to special characters derived from the hieroglyphs and used in written Coptic, a Greek script, to represent sounds not found in Greek. This was enough to disprove previous mistaken assumptions about ancient Egyptian based on Horapollo's Hieroglyphica and establish Champollion as the scholar who finally deciphered the Hieroglyphs.
This book makes for an amusing read, but too much space is taken up with Meyerson's erudite bric-a-brac which might better have been spent on Egyptology and details of the story of how Champollion deciphered of the hieroglyphs.
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Keys of Egypt
By A Customer
What a shame this is disappointing. For anyone wanting a good, well-written modern biography of Champollion, with lots of background on hieroglyphs, they should go for The Keys of Egypt by Lesley & Roy Adkins.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Artistically competent. Not supposed to be laden with info.
By Páll
All this complaining is quite unnecessary. It is a decent book, very light and easy to read. People who expect this to be like every other book they have read apparently become very resentful when they find out that that isn't what this book is trying to achieve. To be honest, it's nothing spectacular. The writing style is the main attraction of this book and it is okay, but it doesn't accomplish anything brilliant. If you are using this book for information, don't. That's not why it was written. It is a very musical and romantic look at Egypt from many different time periods, but it focuses mainly on the late 18th - early 19th century events surrounding Champollion, Napoleon, and the Stone. It meanders a bunch, but that's kind of the point. It is an art book, not a scholarly paper, and in that regard it is competent, decently entertaining, and worth reading, if only for its quick pace and ease of comprehension. There is nothing significantly wrong with this book, so if the idea intrigues you l, check it out... maybe at the library.
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