Hieroglyphs: Unlocking Ancient Egypt – exhibition review

In 1799, French soldiers marching through the ruins of the Egyptian town of Rashid made a remarkable discovery, said Francesca Peacock in The Daily Telegraph. It was the dark slab of granite-like rock now known as the Rosetta Stone: a large tablet inscribed in 196BC with three versions of the same text in Greek, demotic script (a form of ancient Egyptian cursive writing) – and hieroglyphs.

The beautiful semi-pictorial script of the Pharaohs and their monuments had fascinated scholars for centuries, but there had been no means of reading them. Some believed hieroglyphs were not a written form of language, but a series of “magical symbols”.

From France to the British Museum

Following Napoleon’s retreat from Egypt, the stone passed into British guardianship. It was in 1822 that a French Egyptologist called Jean-François Champollion finally deciphered it; supposedly, he rushed into his brother’s room, shouted “Look! I’ve got it!”, then collapsed on the floor.

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Now, 200 years on from his eureka moment, the British Museum, where the stone famously resides, has mounted an “expansive” exhibition that investigates the “19th century fascination with hieroglyphs within a wider context”. It brings together many “wonderful examples of the decoded language itself”, including vividly decorated sheets of papyrus, elegantly inscribed tablets and the Rosetta Stone itself, borrowed from elsewhere in the museum. These shed much light on quotidian life in Ancient Egypt, bearing everything from “protective spells to safeguard children, divorce documents and love poems, and even erotic drawings and jokes”.

‘Spine-tinglingly’ inscriptions

“This is a dense and demanding show,” said Laura Freeman in The Times. “Don’t go expecting King Tut’s loot or Valley of the Kings bling.” Yet the subtle treasures on display are “spine-tinglingly” fascinating all the same. We see many inscriptions, some “shallow as scratches, others roughly gouged”; even if you can’t make head nor tail of them, they are frequently “ravishing” as relief sculpture.

One particularly beautiful object is a fragment of a papyrus scroll found in the tomb of Queen Nedjmet and known as The Book of the Dead (c.1069BC). This ornate funerary text is “alive with blue baboons, spotted cows and a pair of lions with bumblebee tails”, some of which are believed to be depictions of Thoth, god of writing. There are even a few moments of light relief: one small amulet, for instance, bears an image of “a man with a phallus so huge he can wrap it round his neck”.

Learning about the Rosetta Stone

The show becomes “drier” when it broaches the subject of the Rosetta Stone and its eventual decipherment, said Caroline McGinn on Time Out. Yet this is not to suggest it is boring. We learn, for instance, about the different languages of Ancient Egypt and their respective scripts, and the ways in which they fell out of circulation: they were “obliterated by years of conquest and plunder”, at the hands of Caesar Augustus and later invaders.

The exhibition is also “aware of its troubled context”: there have been calls to repatriate the stone in recent years. However, “that cry seems a bit half-hearted in this case”: there are at least 28 other surviving stones bearing the same inscription, most of which remain in Egypt. Overall, this “nuanced and never dumbed-down” exhibition does a fine job of explaining just why the Rosetta Stone is so important. It is a “thoughtful and scholarly” event that “requires and repays close attention”.

British Museum, London WC1. Until 19 February; britishmuseum.org