Autograph manuscripts and epigraphic transcriptions, including several hand-drawn geographical maps (108 full leaves and 86 half-leaves, along with 28 pages bearing numerous mounted slips), contained in paper folders and one notebook in cloth boards titled “Décrets d’Alexandrie.” Numerous marginal tears to the paper folders, cloth cover stained.

An important unpublished collection of epigraphic manuscripts by the Egyptologist Auguste Baillet (1834–1923), colleague and friend of Gaston Maspero, the leading figure of French Egyptology.

These precious notebooks gather the remarkable philological work of Auguste Baillet, who, from the 1860s until his death in 1923, meticulously copied and translated hieroglyphic, Greek, and Demotic inscriptions from temples, stelae, statues, papyri, and Egyptian vases. He contributed to the monumental project initiated by Gaston Maspero: the critical catalogue of Egyptian monuments. The countless scraps of paper covered with hieroglyphs in this ensemble correspond to inscriptions from monuments housed in museums in Paris, London, and various provincial collections that Baillet had occasion to study. Maps of the Nile Delta, ancient Palestine and Syria are also included in this dense scholarly compendium, alongside personal copies and translations of foundational texts in hieroglyphic epigraphy—texts studied by Champollion himself—such as the Rosetta Stone, the Turin Papyrus, the Decree of Canopus, or the Book of the Dead.

The notebooks also contain notes on the latest archaeological discoveries of the time, as well as transcriptions and translations spanning multiple periods of Egyptian history—Amarna, Ramesside, Ptolemaic... Baillet formulates his own hypotheses and compares the scientific sources of his contemporaries and predecessors, including the pioneering works of Champollion, Maspero, the German Egyptologists Winckler, Lepsius, and Brugsch, and the British scholar Flinders Petrie. One of the notebooks contains an unpublished article comparing versions of the Memphis Decree of Ptolemy V, as found on the Rosetta Stone and the Temple of Philae, a follow-up to one of his published studies (Le Décret de Memphis et les inscriptions de Rosette et de Damanhour, 1888). Dozens of leaves are devoted to the inscriptions of the monuments of Sais and Philae, which he translates despite extremely fragmentary supports, and several sheets include finely detailed maps of Syria and Palestine in the time of Akhenaten. Among many other notes and bibliographical references, Baillet compiled on tiny pasted slips a thorough epigraphic index of all the dignitaries mentioned in the celebrated Tell el-Amarna archive, discovered in 1891.

The significance of such manuscript documents was paramount for the fledgling discipline of Egyptology at the end of the 19th century. At that time, the field advanced primarily through handwritten transcriptions and scholarly correspondence, rather than through printed publications. Hieroglyphic printing type remained difficult to obtain outside major academic centers, making manuscript compilations such as this one especially precious for early research.

The chartist from Orléans, Auguste Baillet, found his vocation as an Egyptologist upon reading Champollion’s famous Lettre à Dacier, which in 1822 first revealed the key to deciphering hieroglyphs. Resigning from his civil service post in the imperial archives, he published his first studies in the 1860s. He took part in the flourishing French school of Egyptology and collaborated notably with the great scholar Théodule Devéria on the hieroglyphic numeral system, Egyptian administrative structures, and dialects. He also compared competing transcription methods for hieroglyphic characters, in a context of intense international rivalry among 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 testifies to the extraordinary intellectual rapport between father and son, who corresponded frequently on epigraphic matters: “My dear Jules, […] to make the passage from col. IV, l. 4–8 correct, if not elegant, it suffices to move NE QUID […] I am still hard at work restoring the decrees of Memphis and Alexandria” (letter dated 4 May 1885). The material in this notebook relating to the Temple of Philae was almost certainly used by Jules Baillet for the monograph he published in 1893 on the history of the temple. Father and son also co-authored several studies and together enriched the Museum of Art and History in Orléans with Egyptian antiquities brought back by Jules from his expeditions to Thebes.

Baillet’s work—apart from the unpublished articles included in this collection—was published in 1905 in the prestigious Bibliothèque égyptologique, under the direction of Gaston Maspero.

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