The Almanac of Collapsing Records

I've Got It — Paris, 1822

A copying room of the Institut de France, Paris, on the rue Mazarine side of the quarter, desks set under tall windows

14 September 1822 — a Saturday morning in Paris, three years before the printed announcement, the copying desks of the Institut stacked with squeezes and tracings of Egyptian inscriptions that no living person can read, and a scholar's rooms on the rue Mazarine a few streets away

For fourteen centuries the stones said nothing, and then on a Saturday morning they said a name. This breach reads the COPYIST AT THE NEXT DESK in Paris, 1822: a room of hired hands paid to trace signs they cannot read, ink drying on paper, hieroglyphs copied stroke for stroke as pure ornament — and a man arriving at a run from the rue Mazarine with a folder of cartouches, announcing he can read them, and dropping where he stands. The witness is read only from the neighbouring desk: the exhaustion and the collapse held in the background, never dwelt on, the moment itself all astonishment. The fragment is the subject's own: the day a locked thing opened in front of them and the world was permanently larger afterward — and the memory beneath it of the moment something they had stared at without understanding suddenly made sense, and could never be unseen again.

From the record

by 1822 the Rosetta Stone's Greek text had been read for twenty years while its Egyptian signs remained unread, and copies, casts and paper squeezes of Egyptian inscriptions circulated among Paris scholars
hieroglyphs were widely assumed to be purely symbolic, and copyists reproduced them stroke by stroke without any reading of them
cartouches — oval rings enclosing royal names — were copied and compared as the most promising point of entry into the script
on 14 September 1822 Champollion carried a folder of copied inscriptions the short distance from his rooms on the rue Mazarine to the Institut, announcing that he could read them, and collapsed from exhaustion; he was bedridden for several days afterward
the finding was read publicly to the Académie des Inscriptions on 27 September 1822 in the Lettre à M. Dacier
Paris copying desks of the period worked in iron-gall ink with quill and steel nibs, tracing from squeezes of damp paper pressed onto stone

The era door

a tall panelled door of grey-painted oak, the lower panel scuffed pale by generations of shoes, a brass thumb-latch worn smooth and cold

PARIS — 14 SEPTEMBER 1822

Walk this day yourself — free

A guided walk with Wallace — you are placed inside the record as a witness, and you carry a memory of your own back out. Free, ~20 minutes.

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