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3 800 €

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Auguste BAILLET

Ensemble inédit de travaux d'épigraphie égyptienne : pierre de Rosette, décret d'Alexandrie, décret de Canope, décret de Memphis, tablettes de Tell el-Amarna, Livre des Morts

circa 1870-1900, 14,3x23,5cm, en feuillets.

Unpublished set of Egyptian epigraphic works: Rosetta Stone, Decree of Alexandria, Decree of Canopus, Decree of Memphis, Tell el-Amarna tablets, Book of the Dead

circa 1870-1900, 14,3x23,5cm, loose leaves.

Autograph manuscripts and epigraphic studies with several drawn maps (108 leaves and 86 half-leaves, as well as 28 pages with numerous glued papers) in paper folders and a notebook with a cloth cover titled “Decrees of Alexandria”. Numerous tears to the margins and paper folders, stained cloth cover.
Important unpublished set of epigraphy manuscripts by Egyptologist Auguste Baillet (1834-1923), colleague and friend of Gaston Maspero, the leader of French Egyptology.

Precious notebooks gathering the remarkable philological work of Auguste Baillet, who carried out from the 1860s until his death in 1923 meticulous transcriptions and translations of hieroglyphic, Greek and demotic inscriptions on Egyptian temples, steles, statues, papyrii, and vases. He contributed to the titanic project of a catalog raisonné of Egyptian monuments started by Gaston Maspero. The countless pieces of paper covered with hieroglyphs transcribe the inscriptions of Egyptian monuments deposited in Paris and London museums or in private collections Auguste Baillet had the opportunity to study. Maps of the Nile delta, ancient Palestine and Syria are included in this prolific scientific work, as well as copies and personal translations of the founding texts of hieroglyphic epigraphy, notably those used by Champollion (Rosetta Stone, Turin Papyrus, Decree of Canopus, Book of the Dead...).
The notebooks bring together notes on the latest archaeological finds, as well as surveys and translations covering many periods of Egyptian history: Amarna, Ramesside, Ptolemaic... Baillet makes his own hypotheses and compares the scientific sources of his contemporaries and predecessors, in particular the founding works of Champollion, Maspero, his German colleagues Winckler, Lapsius, Brugsch or the British Flinders Petrie. One of the notebooks contains an unpublished article comparing the versions of the decree of Memphis of Prolemaeus V on the Rosetta Stone and the temple of Philae, following one of his published studies (Le Décret de Memphis et les inscriptions de Rosette et de Damanhour, 1888). He writes dozens of pages on the inscriptions from the monuments of Saïs and Philae, in spite of very incomplete epigraphic material, and draws on several pages very precise maps of Syria and Palestine under Akhenaten. Among many other studies and bibliographical references, he records on tiny, pasted papers an exhaustive epigraphic index of dignitaries appearing in the famous archives of Tell el Amarna discovered in 1891.
The importance of such handwritten documents is primordial for the young science of Egyptology at the end of the 19th century. At the time, knowledge was developing more through handwritten records and epistolary exchanges between scholars than through printed works. It was still very difficult to obtain hieroglyphic typeface in French provinces or even abroad. Manuscript collections of Egyptian texts such as this one therefore proved to be even more precious for research.
Archivist Auguste Baillet found his vocation as an Egyptologist after reading the famous Lettre à Dacier by Jean-François Champollion, unveiling for the first time the secret of hieroglyphs. Abandoning his position in the Empire's archives, he signed his first essays in the 1860s. He took part in the work of a burgeoning French school of Egyptology and studied namely the hieroglyphic numbering system in collaboration with the great scholar Théodule Devéria, as well as ancient Egyptian administrative organization and dialects. He also compared the still divergent methods of transcription of hieroglyphic characters, in a context of great international competition between British, German, and French scholars.
His son Jules Baillet inherited his father's passion and participated in several archaeological missions in Egypt. A fragment of a letter on the back of one of the manuscript leaves attests to the extraordinary intellectual emulation between father and son, who frequently corresponded on epigraphic questions “My dear Jules, [...] to make the passage of col. IV l. 4-8 correct, if not elegant, it is enough to move NE QUID [...] I am always relentless on the restitution of the decrees of Memphis and Alexandria” (letter, May 4, 1885). His studies on the temple of Philae present in this notebook were most certainly used by his son for the history of the temple he published in 1893. They also wrote several studies together and donated numerous Egyptian artifacts to the Orleans Museum of Art and History, coming from Jules Baillet's archaeological missions in Thebes.
The works of Baillet, apart from the manuscripts in this set, were published in 1905 in the prestigious Bibliothèque égyptologique directed by Gaston Maspero.

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