Jean-François Champollion, one of the fathers of modern archaeology, was born on 23rd December 1790. Among his many claims to fame was that he unlocked the mystery of the Rosetta Stone and was thus able to offer a key to the translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics.
As well as being an archaeologist with a particular interest in ancient Egypt, Champollion was also a brilliant linguist, particularly in ancient languages. He was therefore well placed to decipher the Rosetta Stone.
The stone in question had been unearthed by the troops of Napoleon Bonaparte when they invaded Egypt in 1799. The slab of black basalt was unearthed at the town of Rosetta in the Nile delta and was found to bear an inscription in three distinct writing systems, namely Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphic and Demotic, which is a non-hieroglyphic form of the Egyptian language.
The stone was captured by the British when Napoleon was expelled from Egypt in 1801. It was sent to the British Museum in London where it has been ever since. However, transcriptions were made of the texts and it was these that Champollion was able to study in Paris in 1809.
It soon became obvious to him that the text was simply three ways of saying the same thing, namely giving an account of the deeds of Pharaoh Ptolemy V Epiphanes. It was therefore possible to date the stone to 196 BC. With his knowledge of Greek it was relatively straightforward for Champollion to decipher the other texts although it did take him 13 years to finish the task. With this problem solved, the inscriptions that adorned ancient buildings throughout Egypt could now be understood.
© John Welford
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