Champollion Cracks Hieroglyphs

1821

Bent over a copy of the Rosetta Stone, Jean-Francois Champollion realized that the cartouches contained phonetic signs, not just ideograms. Two years later he would publish the decipherment. Three thousand years of silence ended, and Egyptology became a science instead of a treasure hunt. His breakthrough rested on a command of Coptic, the last descendant of the ancient Egyptian language, which he had studied obsessively since boyhood.