Jean-François Champollion (disambiguation)Issues

Jean-François Champollion, known today as "the father of Egyptology," was born in the town of Figeac in southwestern France. He was educated privately as a child and attempted to teach himself numerous languages, including Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, and Chinese. At age 9, he was sent to join his elder brother at the Académie de Grenoble. Under the influence of his brother and of Jean-Baptiste Fourier, a noted mathematician, he focused his studies on the ancient languages of the East and of Egypt in particular. In 1807, he moved to Paris, where he studied at the Collège de France. He dedicating himself to the works of ancient writers and the study of their languages, learning Coptic, Persian, Ethiopic, and Sanskrit, among others. Bu age 18, he was accepted as an assistant professor of history at the University of Grenoble. In 1814, he published his two-volume work L'Égypte sous les Pharaons. In 1815, the faculty of letters in Grenoble closed, but Champollion continued his work independently, and it was during this period that he made a major breakthrough. Comparing the inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone with other ancient monuments and documents, he identified a relationship between hieroglyphic and non-hieroglyphic scripts. He outlined this discovery in his famous 1822 lecture, published as "Lettre à M. Dacier." His 1824 masterpiece, Le Précis du Système Hieroglyphiques des Anciens Egyptiens, provided the long-sought key to the translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics and caused a sensation. In 1826, Champollion was named director of the new Egyptian Museum at the Louvre. He died suddenly in 1832, while writing an Egyptian grammar and dictionary, which was published posthumously by his brother.