Jean-François Champollion Biography

Jean-François Champollion

French Egyptologist (Figeac, Lot, 1790-Paris, 1832).His passion for uncovering the mysteries of Egyptian civilization led him to specialize in oriental languages.

From 1821-22 he managed to decipher the hieroglyphic writing, starting from texts copied by travelers and by archaeologists who had accompanied Napoleon on his expedition to Egypt (1798-1802); but the key piece was the so-called Rosetta stone, a black basalt monolith from the Ptolemaic era, discovered in the delta of the Nile by the Napoleonic expedition in 1799.The stone contained the same inscribed text in Greek, demotic, and hieroglyphic characters, so that, from the two known alphabets, he was able to decipher the third.Since then Champollion has been considered the father of a new scientific specialty, Egyptology.

He left his former position as professor of History in Grenoble to travel through Italy, commissioned by Charles X, to inspect collections of Egyptian antiquities (1824-26); later he was curator of the Egyptian department at the Louvre Museum (1826); he was entrusted with the direction of an archaeological expedition to Egypt in 1828-30; and he was awarded a professorship at the College de France (1831).After his death, the important works he had prepared on the language and monuments of Pharaonic Egypt were published.

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