Jean-François Champollion was born in France in 1790 and is the man credited with deciphering the Rosetta Stone. The stone was found by Napolean’s forces in 1799 in the Nile Delta and has three versions of the same text in Ancient Greek, Demotic script, and Ancient Egyptian heiroglyphs.
Champollion displayed a natural ability for languages at a young age and eventually learned to speak (in addition to French): Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Ethiopic, Arabic, Syriac, Chaldean, and eventually Coptic. Coptic is a form of the Egyptian language, preceded by another version of the Egyptian language known as Demotic. His passion for the Coptic language was of particular significance because it led to his deciphering of Egyptian heiroglyphs.
At the age of sixteen he proposed that the Coptic language was closely related to Ancient Egyptian, which is what was represented in the heiroglyphs. (Imagine being the last person to know the Ancient Egyptian language… now there’s an idea for a book!) Following this line of thought, he postulated that the Demotic script present on the Rosetta Stone represented the Coptic language.
His breakthrough in deciphering the heiroglyphs came when he realized the characters were a combination of phonetic and symbolic. Armed with this knowledge he was able to use the names of rulers to crack the code presented by the heiroglyphs.
