Exhibitions in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France always appear well-groomed, scholarly and paper-like sobriety.
As is to be expected in a library, the exhibits are mostly manuscripts and printed works; in the best case scenario, a few sculptures or costumes contribute a welcome dash of color and three-dimensionality.
"L'aventure Champollion.
Dans le secret des hiéroglyphes” formally corresponds to this tried and trusted model, but subverts it in terms of content with sudden outliers, piquant digressions, poetic digressions.
As expected, the opening credits address the premise of the deciphering of the hieroglyphs by Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) exactly two hundred years ago.
France's Egyptian expedition between 1798 and 1801 had ended in defeat against Anglo-Ottoman forces, but reaped an unparalleled scientific harvest.
The result is presented to the visitor in the form of the monumental "Description de l'Égypte", a twenty-three-volume summary of everything that was worthy of description in the land of the pharaohs at the time, from the inhabitants to the insects, from the monuments to the carpenter's tools.
In the same room there are stelae and statues brought to France by said expedition, the transcript of the dictation of Napoleon's memoirs on the campaign,
which the young general himself had initially led - but also the manuscript of a history of the company by an Arabic-speaking participant nicknamed "Niqūlā al-Turk" (Nicholas the Turk).
A little-known document that illustrates the show's approach of taking a few steps to the side where possible, thus changing perspective.
The expedition brought about an Egyptomania in France, which is evidenced in the exhibition, among other things, by an imperial coffee service with views of Egyptian monuments and landscapes, framed by fantasy hieroglyphs.
The young Champollion fell into the study of ancient cultures and above all languages with skin and hair.
During his school years he self-taught Ethiopian, Chaldean, Hebrew and his favorite idiom, Coptic - among many others.
But no civilization was as close to his heart as that of Egypt.
The deciphering of the famous Rosetta Stone, which the British confiscated in 1801 after the French defeat, occupied him even as an adolescent.
The first part of the exhibition focuses on Egyptian writing as such.
He demonstrates the hieroglyphic writing on the soles of a mummy's shoes, the hieratic - an everyday cursive version of the above - in a bakery's ledger, and the demotic, derived from hieratic, in a letter.
Superseded by Greek letters, used for the last time in AD 394, the Egyptian characters were regarded as part of a magical or allegorical alphabet well into modern times.
It is thanks in particular to his profound knowledge of the Coptic language - which derives directly from New Egyptian, although it uses Greek characters - that Champollion was able to decipher the writing of the pharaohs and their subjects.
A lengthy process based on intuition, systematic experimentation and not least the breaking of traditional thought patterns: Contrary to an assumption shared by Champollion's predecessors and contemporaries, the Egyptian characters are not purely ideographic, but stand partly for sounds or sound sequences, partly for words or concepts - as long as they do not assign the preceding (or following) characters to a concept class as silent descriptive characters.
A complex system whose logic Champollion deciphered even if he died prematurely,
The other two parts of the show deal with the recording of Egyptian texts, from the collection of papyri or the copying or photographing of painted or sculpted writings to the printing of the more than eight thousand known signs, as well as the imparting of the knowledge acquired: from Champollion's lectures at the Collège de France and his posthumous writings to the survival of the "father of Egyptology" as an inspiration for novels and works of popular culture.
Here, too, the transversal approach stimulates – when, for example, the statue of a scribe, a letter from Suleyman the Magnificent and the antiquated manuscript of an Aeschylus translation by Paul Claudel illustrate the book form of the scroll, or when the concept of “non-textual labeling systems” (or “ signet"),