“The Curious Mixture of Signs” That Is Hieroglyphics

Abstract

“The Curious Mixture of Signs” That Is Hieroglyphics* COLIN WELLS In the early pages of Wuthering Heights, Lockwood , the narrator, gets snowed in at the remote farmhouse from which Emily Bronte’s only novel takes its title. Exploring the place, he comes across a cache of dilapidated and mildewed books. On the shelf where the books rest, he sees writing scratched into the paint: “This writing, however, was nothing but a name repeated in all kinds of characters, large and small—CATHERINE EARNSHAW, here and there varied to CATHERINE HEATHCLIFF, and then again to CATHERINE LINTON.” When he examines the books more closely, Lockwood notices that the margins have been filled with scribbled notes that, he realizes, amount to a sort of diary. “An immediate interest kindled within me for the unknown Catherine, and I began forthwith to decipher her faded hieroglyphics.” Of course, we’re not meant to think that Catherine’s diary was actually written in hieroglyphics, just that her writing resembled the ancient Egyptian script in being old and hard to read as well as mysterious and highly alluring. Such writing seems to hold out the promise of unlocking ancient, hidden secrets. It certainly does so in Wuthering Heights, since this is how Lockwood begins to uncover the story of revenge and timeless love that has captivated readers ever since (and which, despite numerous film versions, continues somehow to elude movie audiences). *Andrew Robinson, Cracking the Egyptian Code: The Revolutionary Life of Jean-François Champollion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 272 pages. $29.95 cloth. arion 20.3 winter 2013 Characteristically, Emily Bronte chose the perfect metaphor here and deployed it with breathtaking, seemingly casual precision . When Wuthering Heights came out in 1847, the decipherment of hieroglyphics was fresh and very much alive in popular imagination. The big breakthrough had come only a quarter-century earlier, in 1822, and important progress was still being made and widely followed by a very interested public . The Heathcliffesque genius who figured out hieroglyphics, Jean-François Champollion, had died at the age of 41 just a decade and a half before the novel, in 1832. More specifically, though, Bronte’s use of the metaphor is precise not only because it picks up on the repetition of names, which in fact played a central role in the decipherment, but also because the key to understanding the script was Champollion’s 1822 insight that it did, indeed, embrace “all kinds of characters”— what Champollion’s fellow Egytpologist Karl Richard Lepsius, in 1837, called “the curious mixture of signs of a totally different nature that comprise one and the same alphabet.” Not to mention that, from the beginning of nineteenth century, the romance of ancient Egypt had kindled the interest of Europeans like nothing else. In his recent biography of Champollion, journalist and author Andrew Robinson does full justice to all aspects of this story for the general reader. It’s a narrative with great visual appeal, and one of the book’s strengths lies in its generous graphics, with plentiful, well-chosen black-and-white illustrations interwoven with the text and two fine selections of color plates. In addition, the examples of the hieroglyphic signs themselves, which appear frequently in the text, are cleanly and crisply reproduced. And for the most part, Robinson finds just the right level of detail in laying out the many complexities of the Egyptians’ baffling script clearly and understandably , while offering an enthralling yet judicious portrait of the first person since late antiquity who truly grasped it. The book’s graphic excellence may have something to do with its publishing history, since the British edition was published by Thames & Hudson, who also published several of “the curious mixture of signs” 162 Robinson’s other books on related subjects. Robinson, a former literary editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement , has carved out a niche for himself with well-illustrated books of popular synthesis on the history of writing systems and the modern decipherment (or lack thereof) of some early ones. His previous books include The Story of Writing and Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World’s Undeciphered Scripts, as well as The Man Who...