Jean-François Champollion

Born in 1790 and partly raised by his scholar brother, Champollion was a philology prodigy who delivered his first public paper on Demotic as a teenager and soon commanded Coptic, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic. He came of age during France's Egyptomania, sparked by Napoleon's campaign and the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, when most scholars believed hieroglyphs were ritual symbols too esoteric to decode. In 1820 he began his assault on the script in earnest, overtaking the earlier work of Thomas Young, and in 1822 published his breakthrough: hieroglyphs combined sound and meaning. His 1824 Précis laid out the system in full. In 1829 he travelled to Egypt and read inscriptions no modern eye had understood, but the journey broke his health. He was given a professorship back in Paris, lectured a handful of times, and died in 1832 at forty-one, his grammar published after him by his brother.