THE LINGUIST AND THE EMPEROR

A sadly missed opportunity: a tepid account of code-breaking that might have made a fine, lean tale of scholarly detection.

Jean-François Champollion was the kind of kid who, at the age of seven, knew that he would grow up to decipher the then-unreadable Egyptian hieroglyphs that European adventurers and soldiers were busily carting off to museums and markets back home. Tutored by a linguistically gifted priest who was then on the run from the French Revolution, Champollion mastered one language after another, arguing the merits of classical Persian and Greek thinkers before indifferent country schoolmasters. Napoleon was, well, Napoleon, certain from an early age that it was his destiny to conquer the world and perhaps—shades of Raiders of the Lost Ark—to rule with the aid of knowledge hidden away in the tombs of the pharaohs. “They will sit and talk about Egypt the way two men talk who have loved the same woman,” writes Meyerson (Ellis Fellow/Columbia Univ.; Blood and Splendor, not reviewed), apparently possessed by the muse of Danielle Steel. “But not yet”—for Champollion has to get out of grade school, Napoleon into the saddle. In time, though, Napoleon’s grenadiers hauled away the Rosetta Stone, a stele that glossed hieroglyphs with Greek phrases, and Champollion set about figuring out what they meant. The process Champollion used is one of the shining moments of linguistic deduction, one that has inspired subsequent generations of students of dead languages from Minoan to Tocharian to Mayan. Meyerson prefers sentiment to science, though (“These letters are not written in Coptic or Arabic or Latin or Greek, but in the language—where can he have learned it, poring over old, musty papyri night and day as he does?—the language of love”), and anyone seeking insight into Champollion’s method, and the significance of his discoveries, will want to go elsewhere—and fast.

Tone-deaf and uninteresting. The hieroglyphs, though, are nicely drawn.