JEAN-FRANçOIS CHAMPOLLION

'Jean-François Champollion' (23 December 1790 – 4 March 1832) was a French classical scholar, philologist and orientalist.
Champollion deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphs with the help of groundwork laid by his predecessors: Silvestre de Sacy, Johan David Akerblad, Thomas Young, and William John Bankes. Champollion translated parts of the Rosetta Stone in 1822, showing that the written Egyptian language was similar to Coptic, and that the writing system was a combination of phonetic and ideographic signs.

Contents

Biography

Egyptian hieroglyphs

Franco-Tuscan Expedition

Notes

Further reading

External links

Biography

Champollion was born at Figeac, Lot, in France, the last of seven children (two of whom had already died before he was born). He lived in Grenoble for several years, and even as a child showed an extraordinary linguistic talent. By the age of 16 he had mastered a dozen languages and had read a paper before the Grenoble Academy concerning the Coptic language. By 20 he could also speak Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Amharic, Sanskrit, Avestan, Pahlavi, Arabic, Syriac, Chaldean, Persian, Ethiopic, and Chinese in addition to his native French.^[1] In 1809, he became assistant-professor of History at Grenoble. His interest in oriental languages, especially Coptic, led to his being entrusted with the task of deciphering the writing on the then recently-discovered Rosetta Stone, and he spent the years 1822–1824 on this task. His 1824 work ''Précis du système hiéroglyphique'' gave birth to the entire field of modern Egyptology. He also identified the importance of the Turin King List. His interest in Egyptology was originally inspired by Napoleon's Egyptian Campaigns 1798–1801.Champollion was subsequently made Professor of Egyptology at the Collège de France.^[2]

Egyptian hieroglyphs

Thomas Young was one of the first to attempt decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, basing his own work on the investigations of Swedish diplomat Akerblad, who built up a demotic alphabet of 29 letters. Akerblad, however, believed that demotic was entirely phonetic or alphabetic. Young thought the same, and by 1814 he had completely translated the enchorial (