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Antoine Galland (1763–1851)
Antoine Galland (17631851) was a publisher and printer during the French Revolution and First Empire. As a printer he joined the Commission des Sciences et des Arts, a body of technical experts (''savants'') sent to Egypt in 1798 to aid the work of the French expeditionary force in its successful invasion. He was therefore in Cairo when the newly discovered Rosetta Stone arrived in the city. With two other experts (Jean-Joseph Marcel and Nicolas-Jacques Conté) he was called on to make lithographic copies from the stone. These copies, the first seen in Europe, were used by Silvestre de Sacy and Johan David Åkerblad in their early attempts to decipher the hieroglyphic and demotic scripts. On his return to France Galland in 1802 first published a two-volume memoir of the expedition. Works *''Tableau de l'Égypte pendant le séjour de l'armée française''. Paris: Galland, an XIII 804 __NOTOC__ Year 804 ( DCCCIV) was a leap year starting on Monday (link will display the full ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
French Revolution
The French Revolution ( ) was a period of radical political and societal change in France that began with the Estates General of 1789 and ended with the formation of the French Consulate in November 1799. Many of its ideas are considered fundamental principles of liberal democracy, while phrases like '' liberté, égalité, fraternité'' reappeared in other revolts, such as the 1917 Russian Revolution, and inspired campaigns for the abolition of slavery and universal suffrage. The values and institutions it created dominate French politics to this day. Its causes are generally agreed to be a combination of social, political and economic factors, which the ''Ancien Régime'' proved unable to manage. In May 1789, widespread social distress led to the convocation of the Estates General, which was converted into a National Assembly in June. Continuing unrest culminated in the Storming of the Bastille on 14 July, which led to a series of radical measures by the Assemb ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
First French Empire
The First French Empire, officially the French Republic, then the French Empire (; Latin: ) after 1809, also known as Napoleonic France, was the empire ruled by Napoleon Bonaparte, who established French hegemony over much of continental Europe at the beginning of the 19th century. It lasted from 18 May 1804 to 11 April 1814 and again briefly from 20 March 1815 to 7 July 1815. Although France had already established a colonial empire overseas since the early 17th century, the French state had remained a kingdom under the Bourbons and a republic after the French Revolution. Historians refer to Napoleon's regime as the ''First Empire'' to distinguish it from the restorationist '' Second Empire'' (1852–1870) ruled by his nephew Napoleon III. The First French Empire is considered by some to be a " Republican empire." On 18 May 1804, Napoleon was granted the title Emperor of the French (', ) by the French and was crowned on 2 December 1804, signifying the end of the Fr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Commission Des Sciences Et Des Arts
The Commission des Sciences et des Arts (''Commission of the Sciences and Arts'') was a French scientific and artistic institute. Established on 16 March 1798, it consisted of 167 members, of which all but 16 joined Napoleon Bonaparte's conquest of Egypt and produced the ''Description de l'Égypte'' (published in 37 Books from 1809 to around 1829). More than half were engineers and technicians, including 21 mathematicians, 3 astronomers, 17 civil engineers, 13 naturalists and mining engineers, geographers, 3 gunpowder engineers, 4 architects, 8 artists, 10 mechanical artists, 1 sculptor, 15 interpreters, 10 men of letters, 22 printers in Latin, Greek and Arabic characters. Bonaparte organised his scientific 'corps' like an army, dividing its members into 5 categories and assigning to each member a military rank and a defined military role (supply, billeting) beyond his scientific function. Members Some members, like Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Monge, or Vivant Denon, are universally ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Egypt
Egypt ( ar, مصر , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a transcontinental country spanning the northeast corner of Africa and southwest corner of Asia via a land bridge formed by the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, the Gaza Strip of Palestine and Israel to the northeast, the Red Sea to the east, Sudan to the south, and Libya to the west. The Gulf of Aqaba in the northeast separates Egypt from Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Cairo is the capital and largest city of Egypt, while Alexandria, the second-largest city, is an important industrial and tourist hub at the Mediterranean coast. At approximately 100 million inhabitants, Egypt is the 14th-most populated country in the world. Egypt has one of the longest histories of any country, tracing its heritage along the Nile Delta back to the 6th–4th millennia BCE. Considered a cradle of civilisation, Ancient Egypt saw some of the earliest developments of writing, agr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cairo
Cairo ( ; ar, القاهرة, al-Qāhirah, ) is the capital of Egypt and its largest city, home to 10 million people. It is also part of the largest urban agglomeration in Africa, the Arab world and the Middle East: The Greater Cairo metropolitan area, with a population of 21.9 million, is the 12th-largest in the world by population. Cairo is associated with ancient Egypt, as the Giza pyramid complex and the ancient cities of Memphis and Heliopolis are located in its geographical area. Located near the Nile Delta, the city first developed as Fustat, a settlement founded after the Muslim conquest of Egypt in 640 next to an existing ancient Roman fortress, Babylon. Under the Fatimid dynasty a new city, ''al-Qāhirah'', was founded nearby in 969. It later superseded Fustat as the main urban centre during the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods (12th–16th centuries). Cairo has long been a centre of the region's political and cultural life, and is titled "the city of a thousa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rosetta Stone
The Rosetta Stone is a stele composed of granodiorite inscribed with three versions of a decree issued in Memphis, Egypt, in 196 BC during the Ptolemaic dynasty on behalf of King Ptolemy V Epiphanes. The top and middle texts are in Ancient Egyptian using hieroglyphic and Demotic scripts respectively, while the bottom is in Ancient Greek. The decree has only minor differences between the three versions, making the Rosetta Stone key to deciphering the Egyptian scripts. The stone was carved during the Hellenistic period and is believed to have originally been displayed within a temple, possibly at Sais. It was probably moved in late antiquity or during the Mamluk period, and was eventually used as building material in the construction of Fort Julien near the town of Rashid ( Rosetta) in the Nile Delta. It was found there in July 1799 by French officer Pierre-François Bouchard during the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt. It was the first Ancient Egyptian bilingual text rec ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jean-Joseph Marcel
Jean-Joseph Marcel (24 November 1776 – 11 March 1854) was a French printer and engineer. He was also a ''savant'' who accompanied Napoleon's 1798 campaign in Egypt as a member of the Commission des Sciences et des Arts, a corps of 167 technical experts. Early years Marcel was born in Paris, France. Rosetta Stone During the French Campaign in Egypt, the Rosetta Stone was discovered and transported to Cairo for examination by scholars.Adkins, Lesley and Roy, The Keys to Egypt: The Obsession to Decipher Egyptian Hieroglyphs. p.35 Harper Collins. 2000. Jean-Joseph Marcel, who was also a gifted linguist, is credited as the first person to recognise that the middle text of the Rosetta Stone, originally guessed to be Syriac, was in fact the Egyptian demotic script, rarely used for stone inscriptions and therefore seldom seen by scholars at that time.Parkinson, Richard. ''The Rosetta Stone: British Museum Objects in Focus''. p.27 The British Museum Press. 2005. It was Marce ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nicolas-Jacques Conté
Nicolas-Jacques Conté (4 August 1755 – 6 December 1805) was a French painter, balloonist, army officer, and inventor of the modern pencil. He was born at Saint-Céneri-près-Sées (now Aunou-sur-Orne) in Normandy and distinguished himself for his mechanical genius, which was of great avail to the French army in Egypt. Napoleon called him “a universal man with taste, understanding and genius capable of creating the arts of France in the middle of the Arabian Desert”. Aeronautics One of his early interests while still at Sées was in the newly developing science of aeronautics. He made at least one hot-air balloon, which he flew in the public square. He contributed to the improvement of the production of hydrogen gas, as well as the treatment of the gas bag of the balloon itself. In Egypt, Conté was called on to exercise his expertise in ballooning and was asked to prepare an ascent for the celebration of the French New Year on 22 September 1798. He was not suffi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Silvestre De Sacy
Antoine Isaac, Baron Silvestre de Sacy (; 21 September 175821 February 1838), was a French nobleman, linguist and orientalist. His son, Ustazade Silvestre de Sacy, became a journalist. Life and works Early life Silvestre de Sacy was born in Paris to a notary named Jacques Abraham Silvestre, a Jansenist. He was born into an ardently Catholic bourgeois family. The surname extension of "de Sacy" was added by the younger son after the name of Louis-Isaac Lemaistre de Sacy, a famous Jansenist cleric who lived in the 17th century. Sacy's father died when he was seven years old, and he was educated on his own by his mother. Philological studies In 1781 he was appointed councillor in the '' cour des monnaies'', and was promoted in 1791 to be a commissary-general in the same department. Having successively studied Semitic languages, he began to make a name as an orientalist, and between 1787 and 1791 deciphered the Pahlavi inscriptions of the Sassanid kings. In 1792 he retired from pub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Johan David Åkerblad
Johan David Åkerblad (6 May 1763, Stockholm – 7 February 1819, Rome) was a Swedish diplomat and orientalist. Career In 1778 he began his studies of classical and oriental languages at the University of Uppsala. In 1782 he defended his graduate thesis before Professor Eric Michael Fant. From 1783, he improved his language skills at the Swedish royal chancery in Constantinople. From 1784 onwards he was a diplomat in Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and North Africa. From 1800 he conducted research at the University of Göttingen, and at other places of learning in Paris, The Hague, and Rome. He focused on the study of ancient Egyptian. He also gathered material for a dictionary of Coptic language. Rosetta stone research While in Paris, he was a student of Silvestre de Sacy. Sacy's investigation of the Rosetta Stone resulted in his being able to read five names, such as "''Alexandros''". This was reported by him in 1802. Åkerblad took on his work, and his major contr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Egyptian Hieroglyphs
Egyptian hieroglyphs (, ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt, used for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with some 1,000 distinct characters.There were about 1,000 graphemes in the Old Kingdom period, reduced to around 750 to 850 in the classical language of the Middle Kingdom, but inflated to the order of some 5,000 signs in the Ptolemaic period. Antonio Loprieno, ''Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction'' (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), p. 12. Cursive hieroglyphs were used for religious literature on papyrus and wood. The later hieratic and demotic Egyptian scripts were derived from hieroglyphic writing, as was the Proto-Sinaitic script that later evolved into the Phoenician alphabet. Through the Phoenician alphabet's major child systems (the Greek and Aramaic scripts), the Egyptian hieroglyphic script is ancestral to the majority of scripts in modern use, most prominently the Latin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Demotic Script
Demotic (from grc, δημοτικός ''dēmotikós'', 'popular') is the ancient Egyptian script derived from northern forms of hieratic used in the Nile Delta, and the stage of the Egyptian language written in this script, following Late Egyptian and preceding Coptic. The term was first used by the Greek historian Herodotus to distinguish it from hieratic and hieroglyphic scripts. By convention, the word "Demotic" is capitalized in order to distinguish it from demotic Greek. Script The Demotic script was referred to by the Egyptians as ', "document writing," which the second-century scholar Clement of Alexandria called , "letter-writing," while early Western scholars, notably Thomas Young, formerly referred to it as " Enchorial Egyptian." The script was used for more than a thousand years, and during that time a number of developmental stages occurred. It is written and read from right to left, while earlier hieroglyphs could be written from top to bottom, left to right, or ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
