caption death_date death_place birth_place citizenship field birth_date known_for image article_title name
jean-françois champollion , by léon cogniet 4 march 1832 paris figeac , lot french egyptian hieroglyphs 23 december 1790 decipherment of egyptian hieroglyphs , rosetta stone leon cogniet - jean-francois champollion.jpg jean-françois champollion
 jean-françois champollion
jean-françois champollion

jean-françois champollion -lrb- a.k.a. champollion le jeune ; 23 december 1790 -- 4 march 1832 -rrb- was a french scholar , philologist and orientalist , known primarily as the decipherer of the egyptian hieroglyphs and a founding figure in the field of egyptology .
a child prodigy in philology he gave his first public paper on the decipherment of demotic in 1806 , and already as a young man held many posts of honor in scientific circles , and spoke coptic and arabic fluently .
during the early 19th century french culture experienced a period of ` egyptomania ' , brought on by napoleon 's discoveries in egypt during his campaign there -lrb- 1797 -- 1801 -rrb- which also brought to light the trilingual rosetta stone .
scholars debated the age of the egyptian civilization and the function and nature of the hieroglyphic script , which language if any it recorded , and the degree to which the signs were phonetic -lrb- representing speech sounds -rrb- or ideographic -lrb- recording semantic concepts directly -rrb- .
many thought that the script was only used for sacred and ritual functions , and that as such it was unlikely to be decipherable since it was tied to esoteric and philosophical ideas , and did not record historical information .
the significance of champollion 's decipherment was that he showed these assumptions to be wrong , and made it possible to begin to retrieve the many kinds of information recorded by the ancient egyptians .
champollion , a liberal and progressive minded man , lived in a period of political turmoil in france which continuously threatened to disrupt his research in various ways .
during the napoleonic wars he was able to avoid conscription , but his napoleonic allegiances meant that he was considered suspect by the subsequent royalist regime .
his own actions , sometimes brash and reckless , did not help his case .
his relations with important political and scientific figures of the time , such as joseph fourier and silvestre de sacy helped him , although in some periods he lived exiled from the scientific community .
in 1820 champollion embarked in earnest on the project of decipherment of the hieroglyphic script , soon overshadowing the achievements of british polymath thomas young who had made the first advances in decipherment before 1819 .
in 1822 champollion published 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 published a `` précis '' in which he detailed the decipherment of the hieroglyphic script demonstrating the values of the phonetic and ideographic signs .
in 1829 he traveled to egypt where he was able to read many hieroglyphic texts that had never before been studied , and brought home a large body of new drawings of hieroglyphic inscriptions .
home again he was given a professorship in egyptology , but only lectured a few times before his health , ruined by the hardships of the egyptian journey , forced him to give up teaching .
he died in paris in 1832 , 41 years old .
his grammar of ancient egyptian was published posthumously .
during his life as well as long after his death intense discussions over the merits of his decipherment were carried out among egyptologists .
some faulted him for not having given sufficient credit to the early discoveries of young , accusing him of plagiarism , and others long disputed the accuracy of his decipherments .
but with subsequent findings and confirmations of his readings by scholars building on his work , gradually led to general acceptance of his work .
although some 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 .
