Leaves of Myself: Whitman's Egypt in "Song of Myself"

Abstract

LTHOUGH THE MYSTERIOUS RELIGION, culture, and language of Ck the ancient Egyptians had for centuries been the subjects of speculation and of scholarly research, the critically incisive linguistic discoveries about hieroglyphics, and a popular cultural enthusiasm for Egyptology, were particularly nineteenth-century phenomena. In I798, when a slab of basalt was unearthed by a French soldier digging near the town of Rashid, some thirty miles south of Alexandria, workmen discovered that the stone was apparently carved in three different languages, arranged sequentially.' Not until i8i8, however, did Thomas Young decipher some particular names in hieroglyphic characters on the black slab, known as the Rosetta Stone; the three scripts were eventually identified as Greek, formal Egyptian hieroglyphics, and a cursive form of Egyptian known as demotic characters. By I82I the celebrated French scholar Champollion had established that the Egyptian signs were alphabetic and hence capable of being deciphered; at the time of his death in I83I Champollion had just completed his decisive Grammar of Egyptian Hieroglyphics, the proofs of which he corrected on his death-bed. (Walt Whitman, in his I855 article on the treasures of the Egyptian Museum in New York, cites the legend of Champollion's handing those proofs to his publisher shortly before his death and saying: Preserve these, they are my visiting-card to posterity. In A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads, in i888, the older Whitman even identifies his own life-investment in Leaves of Grass with Champollion's attitude toward his life's work.)2 Indeed, because such work on hieroglyphics