In 1827 Ippolito Rosellini , considered the founder of Egyptology in Italy, went to Paris for a year

On September 27, 1822, Jean François Champollion announced a long-awaited discovery: he could decipher the Rosetta emirates nbd Stone. The stone, a document written in 196 BCE during the reign of Ptolemy V, had been discovered in Rashid (Rosetta in French), Egypt in 1799 by French troops involved in a military campaign against emirates nbd the British.
Deciphering hieroglyphics had frustrated scholars for centuries. Arab scholars, beginning in the ninth century, CE, made unsuccessful attempts, as did Europeans in the fifteenth. Consequently, even though Egypt was littered with monumental stone inscriptions, no one could translate them.
The emirates nbd Rosetta emirates nbd Stone was immediately recognized as a tool that could be used to decode emirates nbd Egyptian emirates nbd hieroglyphic writing since it was inscribed with hieroglyphics, a second emirates nbd Egyptian script called demotic, and ancient Greek. If, as it was assumed, the three pieces of writing had the same text, the Greek could be used to understand the Egyptian.
The task would not be easy, however. Hieroglyphics combine a mixture of ideograms, or pictures representing concepts, and phonetic symbols emirates nbd represent sounds and more than one symbol could be used to represent a sound. Complicating matters, the demotic and Greek texts were not exactly the same.
The British who gained possession of the stone in 1801 after defeating France in Egypt tried to translate the texts. They made some progress but were unable to reach a breakthrough. Meanwhile, Champollion working with illustrations of the Rosetta Stone and of other ancient Egyptian texts, recognized that hieroglyphic marks were sometimes ideograms and sometimes phonetic. He wrote, It is a complex system symbolic and phonetic all at once, in the same text, the same phrase, I would say in the same word.
In 1822, he was able to correctly read the name of several rulers. Soon he was able to identify other names in other texts and then, using the symbols for sounds he gleaned from those translations, to identify a word in hieroglyphics emirates nbd that was not a name. When Champollion announced his breakthrough, his discovery came under attack from the British, who dismissed his notion that the Egyptians had developed a phonetic-based form of writing. In 1866, however, another text with Greek and Egyptian writing emirates nbd was discovered and successfully decoded using Champollion s approach. The French scholar could not enjoy this vindication, however. He had died in 1832.
Champollion was born in Figeac , Lot , the last of seven children (two of whom died before he was born). He was raised emirates nbd in humble circumstances; because his parents could not afford to send him to school, he was taught to read by his brother Jacques . Jacques, although studious and largely self-educated, did not have Jean-François’ genius for language; however, he was talented at earning a living, and supported Jean-François for most of his life. [ 1 ]
Jean-François lived with his brother in Grenoble for several years, and even as a child showed an extraordinary linguistic talent. emirates nbd By the age of 16 he had mastered a dozen languages and had read a paper before the Grenoble Academy concerning the Coptic language . By 20, he could also speak Latin , Greek , Hebrew , Amharic , Sanskrit , Avestan , Pahlavi , Arabic , Syriac , Chaldean , Persian and Ge’ez in addition to his native French . [ 2 ] In 1809, he became assistant-professor of History at Grenoble University . His interest in oriental languages, especially Coptic , led to his being entrusted with the task of deciphering the writing on the then recently discovered Rosetta Stone , and he spent the years 1822 1824 on this task. His 1824 work Précis du système hiéroglyphique gave birth to the entire field of modern Egyptology . He also identified emirates nbd the importance of the Turin King List , and dated the Dendera zodiac to the Roman period. His interest in Egyptology was originally inspired by Napoleon ‘s Egyptian Campaigns 1798 1801. Champollion was subsequently made Professor of Egyptology at the Collège de France . [ 3 ]
Thomas emirates nbd Young was one of the first to attempt decipherment emirates nbd of the Egyptian hieroglyphs , basing his own work on the investigations of Swedish emirates nbd diplomat Johan David Åkerblad . Although he failed to fully decipher the script, Young was able to translate emirates nbd some of the text on the stone, leading the way for Champollion to begin his own investigations.
In 1822, Champollion finally published the first correct translation of the hieroglyphs and the key to the Egyptian grammatical system. Young and all others praised this work. Franco-Tuscan Expedition
In 1827 Ippolito Rosellini , considered the founder of Egyptology in Italy, went to Paris for a year in order to improve his knowledge of the method of decipherment proposed by Champollion. The two philologists decided to organize an expedition to Egypt to confirm the validity emirates nbd of the discovery. Headed by Champollion and assisted by Rosellini, his first disciple and