Chapter 297: The Dead Speak Again

On the island of Philae, in the Nile near Aswan, on the twenty-fourth of August, 394, A priest named Esmet-Akhom cut a figure of a god into the temple wall, And beside it a few lines in the sacred signs. They are the last. No more Hieroglyphs were ever written by anyone who could read them. The fall Of the oldest writing on earth was silent. The temples were closed, the priests died, And for fourteen hundred years no one living could read a word Of the stones of Egypt: the kings' names, the prayers for the dead, the pride Of the pharaohs, the hymns to the gods. The scholars of Europe inferred That the signs were symbols of a hidden wisdom, not a language: An owl meant this mystery, a reed meant that. They were wrong for centuries. Then Napoleon's army, in 1799, at Rashid, which the French called Rosetta, the anguish Of a fort being rebuilt, the soldiers' spades, the entries Of history: a slab of dark granodiorite in the wall, with three scripts on it: Hieroglyphs at the top; the later Egyptian cursive, Demotic, in the middle; Greek at the bottom. A decree of the priests of Memphis, 196 BC, for the young king, the fit Of the Ptolemies' praise. And the Greek could be read. The riddle Was handed over in its own key. The British took the stone in 1801, When the French surrendered in Egypt, and it went to London, to the British Museum, Where it is still, and where Egypt has asked for it back. The sun Of that question has not set. Hold it. And the race to read it: a museum Is not a mind. An English physician, Thomas Young, who also proved light was a wave, Saw that the oval rings, the cartouches, held kings' names, and read *Ptolemy*. And a young Frenchman from Figeac, Jean-François Champollion, who gave His whole life to it from boyhood, had learned Coptic: the tongue, the homily Of the Egyptian Christians, still sung in their churches, written in Greek letters, The last living descendant of the language of the pharaohs. He was sure The hieroglyphs would speak Coptic, if he could unlock the fetters. And on the fourteenth of September, 1822, with copies, the pure Lines of cartouches from the temple at Abu Simbel, he read A name: *Ra*, the sun, the sign of the sun; then *ms*, as in Coptic *mise*, to be born; And *s*: *Ra-mes-ses*. Born of Ra. The dead King's name, read for the first time in fourteen hundred years. The torn Veil. The signs were sounds and meanings both, a script like any other, Not a hidden wisdom: a language, with grammar, spoken by people. He ran, the story goes, to his brother's office, and cried, brother, *I've got it!*, and fainted, and lay for five days. The steeple Of a thousand years of misreading fell. Within months he had the system. He went to Egypt once, and read the walls of the temples as he walked, And died in 1832 at forty-one. And the dead of Egypt, the wisdom And the ordinary, came back: the letters home, the accounts, the talked Of grievances of workmen at Deir el-Medina who went on strike Against a pharaoh for late wages, the love songs, the recipes, the names. The dead speak again. That is what this book does too, alike In its smaller way: it reads the names of the dead from the frames Of the registers, and says them aloud on their days. And here is the thread That runs through this book's own calendar: the days of Horus, In the years that have them, outside the months; the first five are named for the gods who were said To have been born on the five days added to the Egyptian year: Osiris, Horus, Set, Isis, Nephthys. We know those names, and their days, Because a young man learned a church language from monks and old books, and read a stone. Every time a Gaian year ends with the days of Horus, the praise Goes also to Champollion, and to Esmet-Akhom, alone On Philae, carving the last line, not knowing it was the last. Write yours. Someone may read it in fourteen hundred years. The dead speak when the living learn their tongue. Hold fast To the old languages. They are the doors. And the stone, with its tears Of three scripts, in a glass case far from the river: give it home, Or say why not, honestly. The question belongs to the living descendants. The Coptic hymn still sung in Cairo was the key. The tome Of the dead was unlocked by the living. Keep singing. Those are the attendants.