How a Chance Encounter Led to the Decoding of Egyptian Hieroglyphs

It was July 19, 1799 — at the height of the Napoleonic Wars — and the French were fortifying a castle in the Egyptian coastal town of Rasheed, when an inscribed stone of great archaeological significance was discovered by chance, buried in the sand.

There were three different types of writing engraved on it, and one of them was ancient Egyptian writing—hieroglyphs. French scientist Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832) is the man most acclaimed for his efforts to decipher the secrets of ancient writing, a feat he announced in 1822.

But the story really began with the discovery of the stone, thanks to the intuition of a young officer named Bouchard, who had arrived with Bonaparte’s military campaign in Egypt (1798-1801).

Bouchard realized the importance of his discovery, but his role was largely forgotten for 200 years.

France remembers Bouchard

Ahmed Youssef, director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies in Paris, is the author of the first French historical study of Pierre-François Bouchard, who was born in Orgelet, in southeastern France, in 1771.

He told the BBC in February that the recent publication “Captain Bouchard, the Unknown Discoverer of the Rosetta Stone” was a significant event in both Egypt and France, coinciding with the bicentenary of Champollion’s discovery and Bouchard’s own death.

Bouchard was remembered this year through a lecture given by the prestigious Sorbonne University and a project to build a giant monument in Orgelet —”a model of the Rosetta Stone, 20 times larger than the original, to welcome people to the city” .

There will also be a documentary about Bouchard, in partnership with French channels, which will be shown later this year.

Who was Bouchard?

French history doesn’t have much to say about Bouchard, beyond a few sentences scattered here and there in texts about the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, before going into detailed discussions of Champollion’s role.

Youssef notes that young Bouchard, the son of a carpenter from an austere countryside, lived a life of hunger and poverty.

“But he wasn’t afraid of tomorrow, enduring the difficulties of the present to achieve his goals in the future,” says Youssef.

Bouchard joined the army in 1793, when he was just 22 years old, and was posted to Paris as a grenadier sergeant.

He would see many of the horrors of war in Europe, but perhaps he did not expect to fight in the far East, in the lands that provided the setting for the stories of “The Arabian Nights.”

In August 1794 Bouchard joined the Second Balloon Division and was assigned to the new National Airship School southwest of Paris. A close friendship with the famous director of the school, Nicolas Jacques Conté, would take them both to Egypt.

France was considering the use of airships in military operations and, according to Youssef, “Conté was responsible for forming a committee of specialized scientists, to which Bouchard was incorporated”.

Both were injured during a scientific experiment, and Bouchard almost lost an eye, but fate “saved him and took him to Egypt”.

Bouchard had entered the prestigious School of Science and Art on 21 November 1796, two years before his trip to Egypt, and had already received training in fortification techniques.

Youssef states in his study of Bouchard that “his excellence in this field is what made him a pioneer. Through fortifications he made history in Egypt, from the day he took over the fortification of the Citadel of Qaitbay in the city Rasheed.”

Generals and scientists in Egypt

Bonaparte’s military campaign to occupy Egypt in 1798 involved the largest naval force in history at the time, but he also took with him 167 scientists and artists (among them Bouchard and Conté), including some of the most prominent French scholars in the world of science. , art and literature. He was following in the footsteps of his idol, Alexander the Great, in search of an empire in the East.

The work of Bonaparte scholars ended up presenting Egypt for the first time to the world in a scientific way in an encyclopedia, called “Description de l’Égypte” (“Description of Egypt”, in free translation) – whose first edition was also completed in 1822, as well as the book “Voyages dans la basse et la haute Egypte pendant les campagnes de Bonaparte” (“A Journey Through Upper and Lower Egypt During Bonaparte’s Campaigns”), by Vivant Denon.

And, of course, the Rosetta Stone. Bouchard was chosen as a member of a commission led by Conté, and a few months later he would embark on a historic meeting when he was sent to Rosetta – or Rasheed in Arabic.

A stone in the sand

In June 1799, Bouchard was assigned to the Corps of Engineers in the town of Rasheed, under General Menou, who had converted to Islam and married a woman named Zubaydah, the daughter of one of the town’s nobles. Now known as Abdallah de Menou, the general drew on the city’s wealth to consolidate his popularity among the people, as well as his authority in the army.

On the night of 19 July 1799, Bouchard was commissioned to build defensive fortifications on the west bank of the Nile at Rasheed. He ordered his men to remove the ruins of the foundations of an ancient Egyptian fortress, the Citadel of Qaitbay, which dates back to the 15th century. 27 cm thick.

This stone slab immediately caught Bouchard’s attention, with its three contrasting texts. It had probably been looted from an ancient Egyptian monument to be used as a building material, and he had ordered it excavated with great care. Bouchard’s superior, Lancre, hastily wrote to the Scientific Academy in Cairo informing them of the “precious” discovery. Bouchard was convinced that he had laid his hand on a “priceless treasure”.

“General Menou was very busy with his wedding celebrations,” says Youssef. “And he was surprised when Bouchard brought him, on his wedding night, a stone that men of his had found while working in the castle.”

Menou made three important decisions: transferring the stone to the Egyptian Scientific Academy in Cairo; assign Bouchard to personally escort the stone with his soldiers along the banks of the Nile; and asking Bouchard, Lancre, and others to make an “impression” of the inscriptions on the stone.

In his study, entitled “Champollion, a life of light” (in free translation), the French historian Jean Lacouture says that, on July 19, 1799, “the citizen Michel Ang Lancre announced at the Egyptian Scientific Academy the discovery of texts in Rasheed that can be of great significance”.

“Less than two months after this announcement, on September 15th, the 37th edition of the newspaper Corriere d’Egypte published a telegram dated August 19th which filled the hearts of all those interested in solving the mystery of the hieroglyphs with hope, including many probably Champollion’s older brother,” adds Lacouture.

The text of the telegram read: “A stone of marvelous black granite was found amidst the consolidation work of the ancient Citadel of Rasheed on the west bank of the Nile… 36 inches (91 cm) high, 28 inches (71 cm) wide. wide and 9 to 10 inches (23 to 25 cm) thick, on one side only, finely polished, three different texts are engraved in three series of parallel lines”.

Youssef says this report confirmed that the French knew this stone provided “a great opportunity to study hieroglyphs, and perhaps it is an opportunity to find the key to their riddle”.

The importance of the discovery did not go unnoticed by the British either.

Bouchard, the star of the Parisian press

Le Redictor was the first newspaper to mention Bouchard as the stone’s discoverer in its issue of 24 September 1799 – and, although it also quoted General Menou and others, it claimed that the discovery resulted “from the acumen of a hero, Lieutenant Bouchard”.

On January 17, 1800, Le Journal de Paris devoted a report to the Rosetta Stone, “arousing great curiosity in public opinion and furnishing details of Bouchard’s discovery”.

But while he was gaining fame in Paris, Bouchard was in a fort in northeast Egypt under siege by the Ottomans, who were trying to regain control of the country from the French.

Bouchard was captured, and the Ottomans imprisoned him for 40 days in what is now Syria.

“What was going through his head in this dark prison?” Youssef wonders.

“Did he know that as he groaned from the bitter cold in the Ottoman prisons of Damascus in the December winter all of Paris was talking about him? Did he realize that in the scientific institutes everyone was waiting for his return?”

Bouchard would be released and welcomed back by Conté and Menou, before being promoted to captain and sent to Rasheed, where the stone had been found some months earlier.

But he would be captured once more – this time, by the British – when French troops surrendered on 9 April 1801. He would then return to France, arriving in Marseille on 30 July of that year.

The surrender of the army and the loss of the stone

Perhaps it was the Parisian fuss over the discovery that cost the French their reward.

“It was clear that the shipment of the stone to the Egyptian Scientific Academy, and the commotion of the press to highlight its scientific value, were among the first reasons for France to lose the stone, because the British made it a non-negotiable condition for allowing the army to French to return to France”, says Youssef.

French historian Richard Lebeau says, in the introduction to Champollion’s “My Journey to Egypt”, that after the surrender in 1801, French scientists refused to give the British the fruit of their work and even threatened to destroy everything.

Lebeau quotes naturalist Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire: “If it weren’t for us, the French, it would be difficult for anyone to understand this stone. In order not to allow this injustice to happen, we will destroy all the documents in our possession, we will leave them in the desert sands from Libya and throw them into the depths of the sea”.

The text adds: “We will burn all these riches, instead of handing them over to you, as you wish. But you should know that history will not forget, and will not forgive you for this heinous crime that is comparable to the burning of the Library of Alexandria”.

But the British insisted on keeping the Rosetta Stone and all Egyptian antiquities that were in French possession, as stipulated in the Treaty of Alexandria on August 30, 1801.

Despite resistance from the Egyptian scientific assembly, they took the stone to the British Museum in London, where it has remained ever since.

French researchers who could not travel to London were forced to rely on copies of the stone.

At the end of October 1801, a copy made by the Egyptian Scientific Academy arrived in France, which Champollion would later use to decode the mystery of hieroglyphic writing and achieve a lasting fame that Bouchard would never enjoy.

When Champollion made his great announcement to the world on September 27, 1822 in a famous missive called “Letter to Mr. Dassier”, he had never seen the original Rosetta Stone.

Too bad a certain military officer wasn’t around to hear it.

“Bouchard continued to take up arms in the other Napoleonic wars, without ever receiving a generous reward…” writes Youssef. “He would die poor in military service at Jevi in ​​the Ardennes on 5 August 1822.”