Overview
- Includes unpublished material of Champollion’s hand from the Bibliothèque nationale de France
- Marks the bicentenary of Champollion’s decipherment of the hieroglyphs
- Offers epistemological, political, and material insight into Champollion’s work
Part of the book series: Socio-Historical Studies of the Social and Human Sciences (SHSSHS)
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Table of contents (7 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book sheds new light on the work of Jean-François Champollion by uncovering a constellation of epistemological, political, and material conditions that made his decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs possible. Champollion’s success in understanding hieroglyphs, first published in his Lettre à M. Dacier in 1822, is emblematic for the triumphant achievements of comparative philology during the 19th Century. In its attempt to understand humanity as part of a grand history of progress, Champollion’s conception of ancient Egypt belongs to the universalistic aspirations of European modernity. Yet precisely because of its success, his project also reveals the costs it entailed: after examining and welcoming acquisitions for the emerging Egyptian collections in Europe, Champollion travelled to the Nile Valley in 1828/29, where he was shocked by the damage that had been done to its ancient cultural sites. The letter he wrote to the Egyptian viceroy Mehmet Ali Pasha in 1829 demands thatexcavations in Egypt be regulated, denounces European looting, and represents perhaps the first document to make a case for the international protection of cultural goods in the name of humanity.
Reviews
“A brilliantly written book that not only contributes to the history of global philologies, but also to the Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment backgrounds of today’s politics of restitution.”
Marcel Lepper, Historische Zeitschrift für die Philologien
“One guesses the kind of erudite weighty tome this could have become—and is all the more impressed by the author’s elegant skill in exploiting limited space.”
Helmut Mayer, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Philology and the Appropriation of the World
Book Subtitle: Champollion’s Hieroglyphs
Authors: Markus Messling
Series Title: Socio-Historical Studies of the Social and Human Sciences
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12894-3
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-12893-6Published: 12 April 2023
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-12896-7Published: 12 April 2024
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-12894-3Published: 11 April 2023
Series ISSN: 2946-4919
Series E-ISSN: 2946-4927
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XX, 187
Number of Illustrations: 27 b/w illustrations
Topics: Sociology of Education, Middle Eastern Literature, Imperialism and Colonialism, Sociology of Culture