Jean Fran%C3%A7ois Champollion

JeanFranois Champollion was a French scholar, philologist and orientalist, known primarily as the decipherer of the Egyptian hieroglyphs and a founding figure in the field of egyptology. A child prodigy in philology, he gave his first public paper on the decipherment of Demotic in 1806, and already as a young man held many posts of honor in scientific circles, and spoke Coptic and Arabic fluently. During the early 19thcentury French culture experienced a period of Egyptomania, brought on by Napoleons discoveries in Egypt during his campaign there which also brought to light the trilingual Rosetta Stone. 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 phonetic or ideographic . 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

Exhausted by his labors during and after his scientific expedition to Egypt, Champollion died of an apoplectic attack in Paris in 1832 at the age of 41. He is buried in Pre Lachaise Cemetery. On his tomb is a simple obelisk erected by his wife, and a stone slab stating simply Ici repose JeanFranois Champollion, n Figeac dept. du Lot ledcembre 1790, dcd Paris lemars 1832 .

Source: Wikipedia