Jean-François Champollion

Jean-François Champollion (December 23, 1790 – March 4, 1832) is a French scholar, philologist and orientalist, known primarily as the decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphs and a founding figure in the field of Egyptology.

A child prodigy in philology, he gives his first public paper on the decipherment of Demotic in 1806, and already as a young man holds many posts of honor in scientific circles, and speaks Coptic and Arabic fluently.

During the early nineteenth-century, French culture experiences a period of 'Egyptomania', brought on by Napoleon's discoveries in Egypt during his campaign there (1798–1801) which also brings to light the trilingual Rosetta Stone.

Scholars debate the age of Egyptian civilization and the function and nature of hieroglyphic script, which language if any it recorded, and the degree to which the signs were phonetic (representing speech sounds) or ideographic (recording semantic concepts directly).

Many think that the script was only used for sacred and ritual functions, and that as such it is unlikely to be decipherable since it is tied to esoteric and philosophical ideas, and did not record historical information.

The significance of Champollion's decipherment is that he shows these assumptions to be wrong, and makes it possible to begin to retrieve many kinds of information recorded by the ancient Egyptians.

Champollion, a liberal and progressive minded man, lives in a period of political turmoil in France that continuously threatens to disrupt his research in various ways.

During the Napoleonic Wars he is able to avoid conscription, but his Napoleonic allegiances mean that he is considered suspect by the subsequent Royalist regime

His own actions, sometimes brash and reckless, do not help his case.

His relations with important political and scientific figures of the time, such as Joseph Fourier and Silvestre de Sacy, help  him, although in some periods he lives exiled from the scientific community.

In 1820, Champollion embarks in earnest on the project of decipherment of hieroglyphic script, soon overshadowing the achievements of British polymath Thomas Young, who had made the first advances in decipherment before 1819. In 1822,

Champollion publishes his first breakthrough in the decipherment of the Rosetta hieroglyphs, showing that the Egyptian writing system was a combination of phonetic and ideographic signs—the first such script discovered.

In 1824, he publishes a Précis in which he details a decipherment of the hieroglyphic script, demonstrating the values of its phonetic and ideographic signs.

In 1829 he travels to Egypt where he is able to read many hieroglyphic texts that had never before been studied, and brings home a large body of new drawings of hieroglyphic inscriptions.

Home again, he is given a professorship in Egyptology, but only lectures a few times before his health, ruined by the hardships of the Egyptian journey, forces him to give up teaching.

He dies in Paris in 1832, forty-one years old.

His grammar of Ancient Egyptian is published posthumously.

During his life as well as long after his death intense discussions over the merits of his decipherment will be carried out among Egyptologists.

Some will fault him for not having given sufficient credit to the early discoveries of Young, accusing him of plagiarism, and others will long dispute the accuracy of his decipherments, but subsequent findings and confirmations of his readings by scholars building on his results will gradually lead to general acceptance of his work.

Although some will still argue that he should have acknowledged the contributions of Young, his decipherment is now universally accepted, and has been the basis for all further developments in the field.

Consequently, he is regarded today as the "Founder and Father of Egyptology"

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