Abstract
Champollion augmented the history of progress learned from the Enlightenment tradition with a late-Enlightenment historicisation that seeks to understand the particular in order to produce an encyclopaedic understanding of civilisation and its steps. Between 1807 and 1809, surrounded by the superbly rich collection of documents in the Bibliothèque Impériale, the young Champollion made a series of notes that allow us to see how he thereby translates the eighteenth century will to classify and order the world into a web of historical relationships. This chapter offers a first analysis of these largely unknown papers. Enclosed in a folding sheet labeled ‘Afrique’ one finds a collection of manuscripts that approach Egypt via chronicles of rulers and toponymic lists, ethnographic miniatures, sketches on religion and political geography, and lists of languages and ‘races’. These elements are now drawn up into a dynamic that thinks in genetic dimensions (in its full sense): In search of explanations for the origin of ancient Egyptian civilisation, Champollion radically historicises Egypt itself via its prehistoricity in the Ethiopian highlands. This raises questions about the ancestry, ‘race’ and cultural dependence of Egypt, which Champollion tries to bring in line with the idea of a civilisational translatio imperii (from Memphis via Athens to Rome/Paris).
This chapter is a translation of chapter 3.1 from Markus Messling, Gebeugter Geist: Rassismus und Erkenntnis in der modernen europäischen Philologie (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016), in the series ‘Philologien: Theorie—Praxis—Geschichte’. The author and publisher thank Wallstein publishers for generously granting the rights for the translation and its insertion into this book.
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Notes
- 1.
Assmann (1997) has elucidated the connection between these aspects.
- 2.
See Chap. 2 of this book.
- 3.
See Louca (2006: 95–97). See the detailed description in Buchwald and Josefowicz (2020: 119–138) for an intellectual history about how Coptic was discussed within the philological discourse before Champollion; see also ibid. (149–156) for the direct influence of Åkerblad’s philological works, as well as the teaching by Silvestre de Sacy and Tommaso Valperga di Caluso.
- 4.
Champollion would de facto even assume an alphabetic identity of Coptic with ancient Egyptian—and with hieroglyphs: ‘He continued to be under the misapprehension that all ancient Egyptian texts represented exclusively alphabetic characters, which in due course would have been replaced by Coptic letters, without any essential change in the spirit and construction of the ancient language’ (Hartleben 1906–I: 80). This assumption was to constrain Champollion’s understanding of hieroglyphs for quite some time to come.
- 5.
- 6.
See Hartleben (1906–I: 96f.).
- 7.
In an inspiring book, Anouar Louca has thus spoken of Champollion’s idea in terms of a ‘romantic’ project based on a poetic and spiritual a priori (see Louca 2006: 99–116); I am sympathetic to the attempt to distinguish a ‘romantic’ Champollion who is in search of meaning from a later, imperial interpretation of his project. Nevertheless, one cannot fail to recognise Champollion’s origin in a rationalist universalism of the late Enlightenment that bears an imperial dimension. This tradition shaped Champollion’s thought, even as it was increasingly, and especially through his journey to Egypt, broken apart through conflicts with new knowledge (see again Chap. 3 ‘Times of Transition’ in this book). My aim in this chapter is to show how this civilisational universalism comes to be challenged by genealogical models of philology and what Champollion concludes from this challenge.
- 8.
See Goyon ([1822] 1989: 72 f.).
- 9.
See Sheehan (2005).
- 10.
For an account of how one must imagine the Bibliothèque Impériale in Champollion’s days, as the institution that absorbed the systematic theft of manuscripts initiated by Napoleon Bonaparte in Europe, see Hartleben (1906–I: 78f.).
- 11.
The indication ‘Afrique’ is written in a size that is noticeably larger than all of the subsequent notes and thus appears at first glance to differ from the rest of the file. Hence it is tempting to assume it was written by someone else, reflecting a later attempt to order the documents. However, several of the letters—especially r, q, and the final e—show clear signs of Champollion’s handwriting. Further evidence for the argument that Champollion gave this title to the collection of documents is the continuous numbering of the folios in Champollion’s hand, beginning with the first page. That said, the page range of ‘1–42’ does not, in fact, reflect the number of documents in the collection, of which there are many more. We should not, however, forget that we are dealing with collections of material that were often expanded without fastidious attention to archival precision.
- 12.
Unfortunately, these subheadings have been lost in the negative photograph shown here (see Fig. 4.10), but the microfilm of NAF 20364 that I have shows them in clearly legible form.
- 13.
On the universal history of the Enlightenment, which developed in a triadic structure in the history of signs from hieroglyphic origins (Egypt) to symbolic writing (China) to the alphabet (Europe), see Messling (2011).
- 14.
Champollion had also spent time learning Chinese during the years he studied in Paris, because of the thesis in vogue that the civilisations of China and the Pharaohs shared a common origin, or even that the latter developed from the former. In his inaugural address at the Collège de France, which was also an overview of how his discipline had developed, Champollion himself once again points to this phenomenon; see Champollion ([1836] 1984: xj).
- 15.
‘Histoire ancienne—Peuples Ethiopiens’: fol. 35/verso.
- 16.
‘Histoire ancienne—Peuples Ethiopiens’, Prolégomènes: fol. 35.
- 17.
Ibid., fol. 35/verso.
- 18.
Ibid.
- 19.
Ibid, fol. 36.
- 20.
‘Histoire ancienne—Peuples Ethiopiens’, II. Population: fol. 36/verso.
- 21.
The word ‘pris’ in the original is difficult to read: ‘Les Ethiopiens parlaient une langue analogue à celle des Egyptiens; les Ethiopiens actuels parlent un dialecte de l’arabe, mêlé d’un grand nombre de mots pris des langues africaines parlées dans le voisinage.’ It could also be ‘prêtés’ or ‘loués’. ‘Ethiopie’, fol. 22/verso.
- 22.
See also the remarks in Buchwald and Josefowicz (2020: 147), especially footnote 40.
- 23.
Well into the nineteenth century, scholars working on the relationships between languages would posit a connection between Etruscan and various Near Eastern languages, especially the Semitic languages (see Heems 2010).
- 24.
Jones (1786: 40).
- 25.
- 26.
On this point, see footnote 10 in Olender (1989: 109).
- 27.
‘Histoire des Egyptiens’, fol. 28.
- 28.
See Olender (1989).
- 29.
Hartleben (1906–I: 106–107).
- 30.
Diop presented this thesis in 1951 at the Sorbonne in Paris, where it was initially rejected. It was the basis of the book Nations nègres et culture (1955), which made Diop famous. In 1960, Diop was finally awarded a doctorate for a revised version of the work. The far-reaching significance of his book, and of the discourse on identity politics that it spurred, are nowhere more vivid than in Aimé Césaire’s brief polemic in his Discours sur le colonialisme (Césaire [1955] 2004: 41 f.). Diop explicitly buttressed his claims for the Antériorité des civilisations nègres, to cite the title of his magnificent 1967 book, with arguments based on race. The book’s core thesis is summed up by his student Théophile Obenga as follows: ‘Essentially, the Pharaonic heritage belongs, from the origins to the end of the indigenous dynasties, entirely to the Black African [négro-africain] cultural universe, via the habitat, the “race” and the language of the ancient Egyptians that was the source of Pharaonic civilisation’ (Obenga 1988: 8; see also Obenga 1996: especially chapters 3.2 and 3.3, which summarise the discussion of Diop’s thesis in Egyptology and anthropology from the 1970s until today). Diop later also sought to support his argument with the thesis that the Bantu language family was related to ancient Egyptian, although this claim appeared only posthumously (Diop 1988). The question of Egypt’s Black African origins has recently been taken up again in the ‘Black Athena’ debate launched by Martin Bernal (1987/1991/2006) (on this debate, see Lefkowitz and Rogers 1996; Bernal 2001).
- 31.
- 32.
Champollion ([1836] 1984: xx).
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Messling, M. (2023). Civilisational Genealogies: Where Does Europe Come From?. In: Philology and the Appropriation of the World . Socio-Historical Studies of the Social and Human Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12894-3_4
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