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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Orfew, post: 2505052, member: 74968&quot;]From wikipedia:</p><p><br /></p><p><b>Jean-François Champollion</b> (<b>Champollion <i>le jeune</i></b>; 23 December 1790 – 4 March 1832) was a French <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academia" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academia" rel="nofollow">scholar</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philology" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philology" rel="nofollow">philologist</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oriental_studies" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oriental_studies" rel="nofollow">orientalist</a>, known primarily as the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decipher" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decipher" rel="nofollow">decipherer</a> of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs" rel="nofollow">Egyptian hieroglyphs</a> and a founding figure in the field of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptology" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptology" rel="nofollow">egyptology</a>. A child prodigy in philology, he gave his first public paper on the decipherment of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demotic_(Egyptian)" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demotic_(Egyptian)" rel="nofollow">Demotic</a> in 1806, and already as a young man held many posts of honor in scientific circles, and spoke <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_language" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_language" rel="nofollow">Coptic</a>and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic" rel="nofollow">Arabic</a> fluently. During the early 19th-century French culture experienced a period of &#039;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptomania" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptomania" rel="nofollow">Egyptomania</a>&#039;, brought on by Napoleon&#039;s discoveries in Egypt during his campaign there (1797–1801) which also brought to light the trilingual <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone" rel="nofollow">Rosetta Stone</a>. 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 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonetic" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonetic" rel="nofollow">phonetic</a>(representing speech sounds) or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideographic" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideographic" rel="nofollow">ideographic</a> (recording semantic concepts directly). 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&#039;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.</p><p><br /></p><p>In 1820 Champollion embarked in earnest on the project of decipherment of the hieroglyphic script, soon overshadowing the achievements of British polymath <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Young_(scientist)" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Young_(scientist)" rel="nofollow">Thomas Young</a> 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 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_system" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_system" rel="nofollow">writing system</a> was a combination of phonetic and ideographic <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_(linguistics)" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_(linguistics)" rel="nofollow">signs</a> – the first such script discovered. In 1824 he published a <i>Précis</i> 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 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_language" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_language" rel="nofollow">Ancient Egyptian</a> was published posthumously[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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