Jean-Francois Champollion
Jean-François Champollion was a French historian and linguist who developed scientific Egyptology and had a significant impact on the interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyphs. He was born in Figeac, France, on December 23, 1790, and died in Paris on March 4, 1832. At the age of 16, Champollion already knew six ancient Oriental languages in addition to Latin and Greek. He also gave a presentation before the Grenoble Academy in France in which he made the false claim that Coptic was Egypt's first language. At age 19, after completing his studies in Paris, he was appointed history professor at the lycée in Grenoble (1809–16).
His ongoing obsession became deciphering hieroglyphs. Champollion at last started to put the hieroglyphic jigsaw together after the English physicist Thomas Young's small success in trying to read the Rosetta Stone, which was etched with a Greek text along with hieroglyphic and demotic variants. He began writing articles about the hieroglyphic and hieratic components of the Rosetta Stone in 1821–1822 and went on to compile a comprehensive list of hieroglyphic symbols and their Greek translations. He was the first to realize that some of the symbols represented whole ideas or objects that had already been articulated, while others were syllabic or determinative. The solution to understanding ancient Egypt had now been discovered, even if many doors still needed to be opened. His outstanding discoveries, however, were met with resistance from several other academics, oftentimes caustic and personal.
Champollion led an archaeological expedition to Egypt in 1828, was appointed to a chair of Egyptian antiquities at the Collège de France and was appointed curator of the Egyptian collection at the Louvre in 1826. His published works include Panthéon Egyptian; or collection des personage's mythologies de Lancione Egypt (incomplete, 1823–25; "Egyptian Pantheon; or Collection of the Mythological Figures of Ancient Egypt") and an Egyptian dictionary (1841–43), in addition to Précis du systems hieroglyph des ancients Egyptians (1824; "Primer of the Hieroglyphic System of the Ancient Egyptians").
