Jean-François Champollion

Jean François Champollion was born in Figeac on 23 December 1790. His father, Jacques Champollion had settled in the town around 1770 and had opened a bookshop situated Place de la Halle. Legend has it that Jean François taught himself to read from his mother’s prayer book. In 1801 he followed his brother Jacques Joseph to Grenoble where they both became closely acquainted with Joseph Fourier, Préfet of Isère, who had taken part in Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt. Champollion undertook to study history while at the same time studying linguistics and philology, for which he mastered several languages of the Middle and Far East : Arabic, Hebrew, Coptic, Aramaic, Sanskrit, Persian, Ethiopian, Chinese, and Syriac. He made a detailed study of the Rosetta stone as well as hundreds of texts written in the three Egyptian scripts before he was able to declare “je tiens l’affaire !” (“I’ve got it!”) on 14 September 1822. He had managed to crack the secret of the hieroglyphics, realising that the complex system used its signs as determiners, ideograms and phonograms.

Champollion’s expedition to Egypt in 1828-29 enabled him to check out his theory and identify the temples and funeral monuments of the Nile valley. Champollion stayed on many occasions in the family house in Figeac, particularly during 1815 when he was forced to exile for a year after the restoration of king Louis 18th to the throne. He came back to Figeac in 1831 to work on the publication of his Egyptian Grammar before resuming the lectures he was giving at the Collège de France. Appointed curator of the Louvre Museum, elected to the Acamémie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, Champollion did not have time to complete his task. He died on 3rd March 1832, aged 41, leaving his brother to publish his notes and the many documents he had assembled over the later years.