Jean-François Champollion (), also known as Champollion le jeune ('the Younger'; 23 December 1790 – 4 March 1832), was a French philologist and orientalist, known primarily as the decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphs and a founding figure in the field of Egyptology. Partially raised by his brother, the scholar Jacques Joseph Champollion-Figeac, Champollion was a child prodigy in philology, giving his first public paper on the decipherment of Demotic in his late teens. As a young man he was renowned in scientific circles, and read Coptic, Ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic.
During the early 19th century, French culture experienced a period of 'Egyptomania', brought on by Napoleon's discoveries in Egypt during his campaign there (1798–1801), which also brought to light the trilingual Rosetta Stone. Scholars debated the age of Egyptian civilization and the function and nature of the hieroglyphic script, which language if any it recorded, and the degree to which the signs were phonetic (representing speech sounds) or ideographic (recording semantic concepts directly). Many thought that the script was used only for sacred and ritual functions, and that as such it was unlikely to be decipherable since it was tied to esoteric and philosophical ideas, and did not record historical information. The significance of Champollion's decipherment was that he showed these assumptions to be wrong, and made it possible to begin to retrieve many kinds of information recorded by the ancient Egyptians.
Champollion lived in a period of political turmoil in France, which continuously threatened to disrupt his research in various ways. During the Napoleonic Wars, he was able to avoid conscription, but his Napoleonic allegiances meant that he was considered suspect by the subsequent Royalist regime. His own actions, sometimes brash and reckless, did not help his case. His relations with important political and scientific figures of the time, such as Joseph Fourier and Silvestre de Sacy, helped him, although in some periods he lived exiled from the scientific community.
In 1820, Champollion embarked in earnest on the project of the decipherment of hieroglyphic script, soon overshadowing the achievements of British polymath Thomas Young, who had made the first advances in decipherment before 1819. In 1822, Champollion published his first breakthrough in the decipherment of the Rosetta hieroglyphs, showing that the Egyptian writing system was a combination of phonetic and ideographic signs – the first such script discovered. In 1824, he published a Précis in which he detailed a decipherment of the hieroglyphic script demonstrating the values of its phonetic and ideographic signs. In 1829, he travelled to Egypt where he was able to read many hieroglyphic texts that had never before been studied and brought home a large body of new drawings of hieroglyphic inscriptions. Home again, he was given a professorship in Egyptology but lectured only a few times before his health, ruined by the hardships of the Egyptian journey, forced him to give up teaching. He died in Paris in 1832, 41 years old. His grammar of Ancient Egyptian was published posthumously under the supervision of his brother.
During his life as well as long after his death, intense discussions over the merits of his decipherment were carried out among Egyptologists. Some faulted him for not having given sufficient credit to the early discoveries of Young, accusing him of plagiarism, and others long disputed the accuracy of his decipherments. However, subsequent findings and confirmations of his readings by scholars building on his results gradually led to the general acceptance of his work. Although some still argue that he should have acknowledged the contributions of Young, his decipherment is now universally accepted and has been the basis for all further developments in the field. Consequently, he is regarded as the "Founder and Father of Egyptology".
Biography
Early life and education
Jean-François Champollion was born on 23 December 1790, the last of seven children (two of whom had died earlier). He was raised in humble circumstances; his father Jacques Champollion was a book trader from Valjouffrey near Grenoble who had settled in the small town of Figeac in the Department of Lot. His father was a notorious drunk, and his mother, Jeanne-Françoise Gualieu, seems to have been largely an absent figure in the life of young Champollion, who was mostly raised by his older brother Jacques-Joseph. One biographer, Andrew Robinson, even speculated that Champollion was not in fact the son of Jacques Champollion's wife but the result of an extramarital affair.
Towards the end of March 1801, Jean-François left Figeac for Grenoble, which he reached on 27 March, and where Jacques-Joseph lived in a two-room flat on the rue Neuve. Jacques-Joseph was then working as an assistant in the import-export company Chatel, Champollion and Rif, yet taught his brother to read, and supported his education. His brother also may have been part of the source of Champollion's interest in Egypt, since as a young man he wanted to join Napoleon's Egyptian expedition, and often regretted not being able to go.
Often known as the younger brother of better known Jacques-Joseph, Jean-François was often called Champollion le Jeune (the young). Later when his brother became the more famous of the two, Jacques added the town of his birth as a second surname and hence is often referred to as Champollion-Figeac, in contrast to his brother Champollion. Although studious and largely self-educated, Jacques 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.
Given the difficulty of the task of educating his brother while earning a living, Jacques-Joseph decided to send his younger brother to the well-regarded school of the Abbé Dussert in November 1802, where Champollion stayed until the summer of 1804. During this period, his gift for languages first became evident: he started out learning Latin and Greek, but quickly progressed to Hebrew and other Semitic languages such as Ethiopic, Arabic, Syriac and Chaldean. It was while a student here that he took up an interest in Ancient Egypt, likely encouraged in this direction by Dussert and his brother, both orientalists.
At the age of 11, he came to the attention of the prefect of Grenoble, Joseph Fourier, who had accompanied Napoleon Bonaparte on the Egyptian expedition that had discovered the Rosetta Stone. An accomplished scholar in addition to a well-known mathematical physicist, Fourier had been entrusted by Napoleon with the publication of the results of the expedition in the monumental series of publications titled Description de l'Égypte. One biographer has stated that Fourier invited the 11-year-old Champollion to his home and showed him his collection of Ancient Egyptian artefacts and documents. Champollion was enthralled, and upon seeing the hieroglyphs and hearing that they were unintelligible, he declared that he would be the one to succeed in reading them. Whether or not the report of this visit is true, Fourier did go on to become one of Champollion's most important allies and supporters and surely had an important role in instilling his interest in Ancient Egypt.
From a young age, Champollion showed great interest in the Coptic language, rightly believing it to be the last stage of development of the ancient Egyptian language, and the key to deciphering the hieroglyphs. He frequented a Coptic priest living in Paris, called Youhanna Chiftichi, who taught him to read and speak Coptic fluently. In a letter written to his brother, Champollion wrote of Chiftichi stating:
"I am going to visit a Coptic priest at Saint-Roch, rue Saint-Honoré, who celebrates Mass [...] who will instruct me in Coptic names, and the pronunciation of Coptic letters. I am devoting myself entirely to the Coptic language, for I want to know the Egyptian language as well as my own native French. My great work on the Egyptian papyri will be based on this [ancient] tongue."Brière, L. de La. Champollion inconnu, lettres inédites. Paris, 1897. p.69Hartleben, H. Champollion, sein Leben und sein Werk, Vol. 1, p. 81. Berlin, 1906.Louca, A. "Champollion entre Bartholdi et Chiftichi." Mélanges Jacques Berque. Paris, 1989.
"My Coptic language is going well, I am very happy. Imagine my pleasure in speaking the language of my dear Amenhotep III, Seti, Ramses and Thutmose! [...] I will meet with a Coptic priest named Chiftichi at the Saint-Roch Church to learn more about Coptic names and letter pronunciation."
From 1804, Champollion studied at a lycée in Grenoble but hated its strict curriculum, which only allowed him to study oriental languages one day per week, and he begged his brother to move him to a different school. Nonetheless, at the lycée he took up the study of Coptic, which would become his main linguistic interest for years to come and prove crucial in his approach to decipherment of the hieroglyphs. He had a chance to practice his Coptic when he met Dom Raphaël de Monachis, a former Egyptian Christian monk of Syrian origin and Arabic translator to Napoleon, who visited Grenoble in 1805. Champollion became obsessed with the Coptic language as the successor of the ancient Egyptian language that he wrote to his brother saying:
"I dream in Coptic. I do nothing but that, I dream only in Coptic, in Egyptian [...] I am so Coptic, that for fun, I translate into Coptic everything that comes into my head. I speak Coptic all alone to myself, since no one else can understand me. This is the real way for me to put my pure Egyptian into my head."
By 1806, Jacques-Joseph was making preparations to bring his younger brother to Paris to study at the university. Jean-François had by then already developed a strong interest in Ancient Egypt, as he wrote in a letter to his parents dated January 1806:
"I want to make a profound and continuous study of this ancient nation. The enthusiasm brought me by the study of their monuments, their power and knowledge filling me with admiration, all of this will grow further as I acquire new notions. Of all the people that I prefer, I shall say that none is as important to my heart as the Egyptians."
To continue his studies, Champollion wanted to go to Paris, Grenoble offering few possibilities for such specialized subjects as ancient languages. His brother thus stayed in Paris from August to September that same year, so as to seek his admission in a specialized school. Around this time, he learned Classical Chinese, Avestan, Middle Persian, and the Persian language. Before leaving however Champollion presented, on 1 September 1807, his Essay on the Geographical Description of Egypt before the Conquest of Cambyses before the Academy of Grenoble whose members were so impressed that they admitted him to the Academy six months later.