The British Museum, London. Closes 19 February 2023, then tours to selected UK venues
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STEPPING from the British Museum鈥檚 bright main atrium into a darkened space, I am confronted by a huge array of cubes. One face of each cube shows a hieroglyph, which you can rotate to find its meaning. I can see all sorts of symbols, from scarabs, owls and hawks to abstract patterns.
It is fun to explore, but also bewildering, with no obvious link between the symbol and its translation. A snake over an outstretched hand means 鈥渢o say鈥�, while a vulture translates to the letter 鈥渁鈥�.
The exhibition pays tribute to the enduring appeal of these strange symbols and to the extraordinary feat of their decipherment. Its first section looks at the middle ages, when, for many people, hieroglyphs were imbued with magic and held secret knowledge about the nature of reality.
Take 鈥淭he Enchanted Basin鈥�, a black granite sarcophagus covered in hieroglyphs and discovered in Cairo about 1000 years ago. At the time, it was thought that bathing in this 鈥渂asin鈥� would cure you of lovesickness. Personally, I find the idea of taking a bath in what is effectively a coffin pretty unsettling, so I move on.
The belief that hieroglyphs held magical knowledge understandably drove people to try to crack the code. In the 1660s, Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher attempted to translate the symbols. Most of his readings were fantasy, but it was fun to discover that he was nicknamed 鈥渇ather of the owls鈥� because hieroglyphs are full of images of these birds. We now know the symbol represents the sound of the letter 鈥渕鈥�.
The transition between this part of the exhibition and the next is marked by one of the world鈥檚 most famous objects, the Rosetta Stone. Rediscovered in 1799 in Egypt鈥檚 northern port of Rashid (known to Europeans as Rosetta), it bears an ancient decree written in three scripts: Demotic, hieroglyphic and ancient Greek. It is amazing to see an object so famous that it now has a second life as a linguistic clich茅. The discovery of this stone allowed a direct comparison with known languages. But translation still wasn鈥檛 easy.
The next part of the exhibition charts the 20-year race to decipherment. We see the work of two key scholars, Thomas Young from England and Jean-Fran莽ois Champollion of France, often in original letters and notes.
It is a complex story and I am not convinced visitors will grasp the finer points. What is clear is that Young made a grave error in assuming that phonetic, sound-based writing is a post-Egyptian artefact, underestimating the sophistication of ancient Egyptian civilisation. Champollion cracked the hieroglyph code largely because he realised that some symbols represented sounds and others ideas, explaining why some abstract symbols are linked to letters and others to whole words.
So far, I am interested, but not captivated. There are a lot of scraps of papyrus and labels 鈥� but frankly there is only so much of that I can focus on. I do enjoy listening to the music in the background, a recording of a hymn sung in Coptic, which creates an ethereal atmosphere and gives us a hint of the soundscape of ancient Egypt. Hieroglyphs gradually evolved into a language called Demotic and then into Coptic, which began to be used in Egypt from around AD 300.
But, for me, the exhibition comes alive in its final section, a smorgasbord of ancient Egyptian artefacts that were only understood once hieroglyphs had been cracked.
The most impressive is a huge 鈥渂ook of the dead鈥�, a 4-metre-long papyrus consisting of magical spells and ritual descriptions that belonged to Nedjmet, an ancient Egyptian noblewoman. Its colours, scripts and mythical creatures are so special that I stand in front of it for a full 10 minutes trying to take it all in. It looks almost new 鈥� it could be 50 years old, but 30 centuries have passed since it was created.
Back in the bright atrium, I can鈥檛 help reflecting on how often we underestimate people we don鈥檛 understand, both in our own time or millennia ago. As Young鈥檚 mistake shows, for him, the past really was another country.
