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Jomard and Champollion: A Rivalry at the Birth of Egyptology

2022; Springer International Publishing; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-031-15606-9_10

2634-6702

Tamar Sarfatti,

Historical and Literary Analyses

The chapter describes the scholarly debates and academic politics that accompanied the birth of Egyptology, prominent among them, the debate about ancient chronology and the ongoing effort to decipher the hieroglyphs. Edmé-François Jomard was struggling—in vain—to maintain a dominant place for himself and for the Description of Egypt in the increasingly contested field of knowledge about ancient Egypt. Struggles over a place in the Academy and over Egyptian collections and the paradigmatic shift that followed Champollion’s decipherment of the hieroglyphs were the arenas where these scholarly and personal rivalries played out. Champollion’s scholarship offered Egyptology a new and different foundation that replaced the on-site observations and recordings on which the Description of Egypt was based, but it mostly brought to light the limits of Jomard’s antiquarian approach and rendered it obsolete.