Jean-Francois Champollion

Jean-Francois Champollion is the one first person who deciphered the ancient Egpytian language of hieroglyphs of his time.He was born in 1790. Since young he had a strong interest in languages. By the age of 20 he could speak about 12 languages apart from his native French.

When he got to Paris to better his language skills at a university, he asked a professor if they were going to learn hieroglyphs, the professor laughed at him. Many scholars at that time believed that it was just some symbols which had a meaning. However, Jean-Francois begged to differ. He believed that it was a written language, i.e written form of a spoken language.

Few years after he was borned, a stone was found. It was called the Rosetta Stone. It had three languages craved on it, Greek, hieroglyphs and one which I am not sure. The stone was found by the French in 1799. However, when Britain won the war against France, the British took over the stone. So the race to decipher the hieroglyphs was on.

Jean-Francois did it in 1822. However Jean-Francois was not happy just to stop there. In 1828, with his crew they made a trip to Egpyt. The trip was about 2-3 years.

At the age of 41, because of the trip to Egpyt was too much on his body, he passed on. His works give us insights into ancient Egpyt. This included the finding of King Tutankhamun, one of the forgotten kings of Egpyt.



Note: The above information is from my memory of watching BBC's documentary and some from wikipedia. So if you want to find out more check it out from other place.Hope this helped in some way.