Jean-François Champollion
1790 – 1832 · France
Known for: Decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphs and founder of Egyptology
“He gave Egypt back its own voice.”
Biography
Jean-François Champollion was born at Figeac in the south of France on 23 December 1790, the youngest of seven children of a book dealer whose drinking left the household unsteady. He was raised in large part by his elder brother Jacques-Joseph, who taught him to read, brought him to Grenoble in 1801 and paid for his education for most of his life. At the school of the Abbé Dussert the boy's gift declared itself: Latin and Greek first, then Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac and Ethiopic, and with them an interest in ancient Egypt. At eleven he was noticed by Joseph Fourier, prefect of Grenoble, a mathematician who had accompanied Bonaparte's expedition and kept Egyptian antiquities in his house. Champollion added Coptic, the last form of the Egyptian language, and studied it as though it were his own; while still in his teens he read a public paper on the Demotic script.
France was then in the grip of a fashion for Egypt, and at the centre of the puzzle stood the Rosetta Stone, a decree cut in Greek, in Demotic and in hieroglyphs. Most scholars held the hieroglyphs to be a script of sacred symbols that recorded ideas rather than speech and was therefore probably beyond recovery. Champollion, working in earnest from 1820 and building on the first advances of the British polymath Thomas Young, showed the assumption to be false. In 1822 he announced that the writing combined signs for sounds with signs for meanings, the first script of its kind to be identified, and in 1824 his Précis set out the values of the signs in detail. His Bonapartist sympathies made him suspect to the authorities of the Restoration and cost him posts and years, and his priority was disputed by admirers of Young for the rest of his life and long after it.
From 1826 he had charge of the Egyptian collections of the Louvre, and at the end of that decade he sailed at last for Egypt. There he stood before inscriptions that no one had been able to read for fourteen centuries and read them, while his draughtsmen copied monuments that have since been damaged or lost. He came home with a great body of drawings and with his health broken by the journey. A chair of Egyptian antiquities was created for him, but he lectured only a few times before his strength gave out, and he died in Paris on 4 March 1832, aged forty one. His brother saw the grammar and the dictionary of ancient Egyptian through the press after his death, and on that foundation an entire discipline was built.