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 182…