| Education,
career, and accomplishments
In 1801 Champollion started his education
at the Lyceum (Grenoble). At the age of 16 he read a paper about Coptic
and its relation to ancient Egyptian before Grenoble Academy. From 1807
to 1809 he attended College de France and studied Oriental languages. In
1809 he became a history and politics teacher at Grenoble until 1816, and
became a Doctor of Letters in 1810. In 1811 he wrote Introduction to Egypt
Under the Pharaohs, and wrote Egypt of the Pharaohs in 1814. In 1818 he
receive the Chair in History and Geography at the Royal College of Grenoble.
He held this position until 1821, when he gained the patronage of King
Louis XVIII (and Charles X) and went on a royally sponsored mission to
Turin, Leghorn, Rome, Naples, and Florence. In 1822 he wrote his
very famous Lettre à M. Dacier, who was the secretary of the French
Académie des Inscriptions, in which he identified the usage of determinatives 
and 26 letters of the Egyptian Alphabet. Later, he found that 10 were correct,
2 partly, and 14 wrong or missing. He wrote the book Précis du Système
Hiéroglyphique in 1824.In 1826, Jean François Champollion
was appointed Conservator of the Egyptian Collection at the Louvre.
Champollion made his only visit to
Egypt in 1828 on a survey of History and Geography. He became a member
of the Acadamie des Inscriptions in 1830, and the year after that he receive
the chair in Egyptian History and Archaeology at the College du France.
Probably the greatest accomplishment
of Jean François Champollion was his deciphering of the ancient
Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Many think that it was a sudden discovery, but in
reality it had started back when he was a child at Grenoble Academy and
realized that Coptic was a later state of ancient Egyptian, continued with
his discovery in 1918 that hieroglyphs were ideograms
and phonetic
(thus partially alphabetic), and ended with his complete translation of
the Rosetta Stone in 1822.
Death
Champollion had done all this by
the age of 34, and who knows what great advances he could have made in
Egyptology (of which he was known as the father), had he not died of a
stroke on March 4th, 1932, in Paris, France. |
Hieroglyphs
Champollion deciphered the entire
system of hieroglyphs. Here are the symbols for A, F, D, 1000, H, K, and
C.
...
Rosetta Stone
Containing a decree written in three
languages, the Rosetta Stone was the key to deciphering
the ancient Egyptian language. Many attempted to discover its secrets,
but the "code" of the ancient Egyptian Language
was not broken until 1822 by Champollion.
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