The Father of Egyptology Epithet was awarded to French linguist Jean François Champollion for his having been instrumental in pioneering decipherment of the previously unreadable ancient scripts of Egypt, thereby making full study of that nation s early history and culture possible for other Nineteenth Century scholars who followed him in the new field of study, Champollion s own life being cut short prematurely by a stroke at the age of forty-one. But his reputation as the founder of Egyptology is based as well on his interest in all the branches of the developing discipline, and in particular on the voluminous notes he made during his firsthand observations of the ruined in situ monuments of pharaonic Egypt.
Born December 23, 1790, at Figeac in France, Jean François was the younger son of Jacques Champollion and his wife, Jeanne Françoise. His early education was at Figeac by his elder brother, Jacques Joseph (1778-1867); but when he was ten, in 1801, he went to study at the Lyceum in Grenoble, where at the rather precocious age of sixteen he read a paper before the Grenoble Academy, proposing that the language of the Copts in contemporary Egypt was, in fact, the same language spoken by the ancient Egyptians. He continued his studies at the College de France between 1807 and 1809, specializing in the languages of the Orient (as a boy he had taught himself or attempted to learn Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Chaldean and Chinese; and he would later add Coptic, Ethiopic, Sanskrit, Zend, Pahlevi and Persian. He was appointed to teach history and politics at Grenoble in 1809 (at the tender age of eighteen), a position he held until 1816, having become a doctor of letters in 1810. In 1812 he married Rosine Blanc, by whom he would later (1824) have a daughter, Zoraide . It was during this time that he began writing his Introduction to Egypt Under the Pharaohs (1811) as well as Egypt of the Pharaohs, or Researches in the Geography, Religion, Language and History of the Egyptians Before the Invasion of Cambyses (1814).
In 1818 Champollion was appointed to a chair in history and geography at the Royal College of Grenoble, a post he held until 1821. This position allowed him to concentrate on his first love, the ancient Egyptian language and the archaeology of the Land of the Pharaohs. Even though he had republican sympathies, he gained the patronage of Restoration French kings Louis XVIII and Charles X, and consequently was able to visit various mus-eum collections outside of France, being sent on a royally sponsored mission to those of Turin, Leghorn, Rome, Naples and Florence.
Following his return from this extended trip abroad, Champollion was appointed, in 1826, conservator of the Louvre Museum s Egyptian collection, which opened to the public in December of 1827. The next year he made his only visit to Egypt, accompanied by the future founder of Egyptology in Italy, his prize pupil Ippolito Rosellini (1800-1843), a Pisan whom Champollion had befriended when he was touring Egyptian collections in Italy four years earlier.
The purpose of this 1828-1829 Franco-Tuscan Expedition to the land of the Nile was a systematic survey, the first, of the history and geography of Egypt, as revealed in the monuments and their inscriptions; and in a sense it marked the true birth of the new discipline of Egyptology. It was Champollion s voluminous notes and sketches (and later Rosellini s finished engravings) which formed the first major body of work (after the Napoleonic Description d Égypte) that would be the basis for future field-documentation by Karl Richard Lepisus and John Gardner Wilkinson. Back in France, Champollion was made a member, in 1830, of the Acad‚mie des Inscriptions; and in 1831 a chair in Egyptian history and archaeology was created for him at the College de France. It was while he was still preparing the results of the Franco-Tuscan Expedition for publication that he was struck down in Paris by a stroke, dying there on March 4, 1832. He was buried in PŠre Lachaise cemetery.
Father of Egyptology he might be, but Champollion's real claim to fame is as the decipherer of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. His figuring out how to do this was not a sudden revelation as is often mistakenly written but the result of a long process of self-education which had begun in the days of his childhood fascination with arcane languages. Champollion s first step towards his goal of rendering ancient Egyptian readable came in 1808, when he determined that fifteen signs of the demotic script corresponded with alphabetic letters in the Coptic language, and concluded that this modern tongue was the surviving last-stage of the ancient Egyptian one. By 1818 he had succeeded in figuring out that, while some signs were strictly symbolic ideograms, many glyphs also had phonetic value, and thus the ancient Egyptian script was, at least partially, alphabetic.
The Rosetta Stone is inevitably linked with Champollion, and it is true (facilitated by the monument s three parallel inscriptions in hieroglyphs, demotic and Greek) that he recognized on it the name Ptolmys in Greek and demotic, and thereby he could identify the same cartouched name in hieroglyphs. Three years later, in 1821, while studying a transcription of the corresponding hieroglyphic and Greek texts on an obelisk transported to England by Giovanni Belzoni (1778-1823), he recognized the name Kliopadra, and so had accumulated the alphabetic value of twelve hieroglyphs.
But Champollion had not published any of his decipherment determinations up to this time, and it was not until the next year, 1822, that he wrote his famous Lettre à M. Dacier, the permanent secretary of the French Académie des Inscriptions. Therein the French linguist revealed his embryonic results: he had figured out the use of determinatives and compiled an alphabet of twenty-six letters, including many syllabic signs, of which ten were identified correctly and two partly so, although fourteen proved to be wrong or were missing. In 1824 he followed up his Lettre with a book titled Précis du système hiéroglyphique, which expanded his earlier results and formed the basis for all later discoveries. He also corrected mistakes by his British counterpart in deciphering the hieroglyphic puzzle, Thomas Young (1773-1879). All of this was accomplished by the time he was thirty-four. It can only be wondered what further contributions the brilliant Champollion might have made to Egyptology had it not been for his premature death. DCF
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