David Meyer on Nostr: Born #onthisday in 1790, French child prodigy and philologist Jean-François ...

Born #onthisday in 1790, French child prodigy and philologist Jean-François Champollion founded scientific Egyptology and played a major role in the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

In particular, Champollion was instrumental in deciphering the Rosetta Stone, which was discovered in 1799 by French officer Pierre-François Bouchard during the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt. The Rosetta Stone is part of a grey and pink granodiorite stela bearing a priestly decree concerning Ptolemy V in three blocks of text: Hieroglyphic (14 lines), Demotic (32 lines) and Greek (54 lines). The decree has only minor differences between the three versions, making the Rosetta Stone key to deciphering the Egyptian scripts.

Champollion was able to decipher the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone (notwithstanding what Thomas Young was claiming) by first figuring out what the seven demotic signs in Coptic were (by all accounts Champollion spoke at least a dozen languages by age 16). By looking at how these signs were used in Coptic he was able to work out what they stood for. Then he began tracing these demotic signs back to hieroglyphic signs. By working out what some hieroglyphs stood for, he could make educated guesses about what the other hieroglyphs stood for.

Impressive.

Sadly, Champollion died at the age of 41 on March 4, 1832.

I put a red box around the Ptolemy cartouche on the the picture I took of the Rosetta Stone (on the right), which Champollion used to decode its hieroglyphs.

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#champollion #rosettastone #ptolemycartouche #egyptology #philology #britishmuseum

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