Field Notes of an Early French Egyptologist, 1762-82
This impressive collection of six volumes of manuscript notes and essays attempts to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs that the author, Jean-Baptiste Adanson, had sketched and analyzed during his travels to Egypt between 1762 and 1782. The brother of the well-known naturalist and traveler Michel Adanson (1727–1806), Jean-Baptiste was educated in the “Chambre des enfants de langue,” which formed part of the Oriental annex of the Collège Louis-le-Grand. There he learned Latin, Arabic, and Turkish and became skilled in draftsmanship, painting, and calligraphy. He was formally named as an interpreter for the French in Aleppo by 1754, and served as a foreign consul in Tripoli, Alexandria, Cairo, and Tunis, until his death.
Although his efforts to decode hieroglyphs ultimately proved futile—Champollion’s successful decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs would not be achieved until 1822–23—these materials nonetheless shed considerable light on French scholarly interest in Egyptology well before Napoleon’s historic Egyptian campaign during the late 1790s. Among these archival treasures are 61 pen-and-ink-wash drawings, as well as informal sketches, written analyses, and tables. The Adanson collection comprises four separate manuscripts: (1–2) “Concerning Hieroglyphs,” with 41 full-page drawings, offers a general view of details of ancient Egyptian statues and monuments bearing hieroglyphic inscriptions in and around the city of Alexandria, and 331 symbolic figures copied from an “ancient manuscript” from Thebes; (3) “Concerning Amulets and Others” presents a further 19 illustrations; and (4) “Concerning the Symbolic Figures of the Ancient Egyptians,” is mostly concerned with the major deity Horus’s representations though various hieroglyphs.
The first of these notebooks opens with seven pages of manuscript notes in French on the history of the ancient Egyptians and their écriture symbolique and an accompanying alphabet of hieroglyphs and corresponding translations—sometimes into French, sometimes into Arabic. These derive from a text with a fascinating, if complicated, provenance: what Adanson professes to be a Coptic translation into Arabic of an ancient Greek manuscript on Egyptian hieroglyphs. Perhaps the most interesting drawing in the Adanson Collection is the obelisk of Cleopatra, the 69-foot-tall, 200-ton red-granite “Cleopatra’s Needle,” which was later removed to New York City and erected in Central Park in 1881. Adanson’s drawing may count among the earliest extant representations of that obelisk.
Adanson had apparently planned to gather this vast assortment of manuscript notes, commentaries, alphabets, and images into a volume for publication. The project never came to fruition, however, and his notes and essays remained in his family’s possession until the mid-twentieth century. Purchased by Johns Hopkins in 1998, numerous other examples of Adanson’s drawings and paintings are preserved in the Cabinet des Estampes of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.
—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens
Bibliography
Ernest-Théodore Hamy, “Un égyptologue oublié, Jean-Baptiste Adanson (1732–1804),” Comptes rendues des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 43:6 (1899), 738–46; Jennifer Kimpton, “The Egyptian Manuscripts of Jean-Baptiste Adanson at the Johns Hopkins University: Hieroglyphs and Antiquities through the Eyes of an Eighteenth Century Dragoman,” PhD diss., The Johns Hopkins University, 2008.
