Jean-François Champollion

Jean-François Champollion was a French philologist and orientalist, known as the decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphs and a founding figure of Egyptology. A child prodigy in philology, as a young man he read Coptic, Ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic. In 1822 he published his first breakthrough in reading the hieroglyphs of the Rosetta Stone, showing that Egyptian writing combined phonetic and ideographic signs, and in 1824 his Précis set out the values of its signs. In 1829 he travelled to Egypt and read many texts never studied before. He died in Paris in 1832, aged 41; some faulted him for not crediting the earlier work of Thomas Young.