This young scholar deciphered the Rosetta Stone’s code in 1822, opening up access to a trove of ancient Egyptian writing
The paper presented before the Académie de Grenoble in eastern France in 1806 was noteworthy for two reasons: First, the author was only 16 years old, and second the astonishingly erudite teenager made a very bold claim. He believed the ancient language of Egypt lived on in the form of the African language Coptic.
The ability to read and write hieroglyphs waned with the advent of the Christian period in Egypt and finally disappeared with the decline of hieroglyphic writing at the end of the fourth century A.D. Deciphering them was a burning ambition of late 18th-century scholars. The newly founded, French-operated Institut d’Égypte was notified of the stone.
Champollion was able to satisfy his obsession with Coptic by poring over numerous texts, which had been brought to Paris from the Vatican library in Rome. In 1815 he produced a Coptic dictionary, which he managed to present to Napoleon before hisAlthough written in mostly Greek-derived letters, Coptic retained some of the linguistic structures and vocabulary of the ancient language, and Champollion was convinced that his thorough knowledge of Coptic would be the key to cracking hieroglyphs.
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