‘To Copy Millions of Hieroglyphs…’

The great diversity of techniques to copy hieroglyphs preserved in Champollion’s archives witnesses how crucial the question of accuracy and efficiency in drawing non-Latin and undeciphered scripts was for the orientalist scholars before the invention of photography. The paper will focus on the materiality of these copies and how they were used by Champollion. In conclusion, a colors’ analysis overrun in 2021 in one of the volume of the drawings by Nestor L’Hôte provides further details on the material brought in Egypt during the 1828/1829 French-Toscan Expedition

Arabic · Orientalism · Scripting language · Classical Studies and Philology · Diverse Cultural and Historical Studies · Historical and Literary Studies