In a departure from travel advice, John shares the history of the Rosetta Stone and story of the talented linguist whose rare genius was finally able to decipher the mysterious language of ancient Egypt via the clues embedded within the Rosetta Stone.

For more travel advice on trips to and around Egypt, check out all the other episodes of the Egypt Travel Podcast. And please feel welcome to go to www.EgyptElite.com for help planning your trip to Egypt, and we’ll be delighted to help you make it a reality.

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Episode 30 Transcript

The Man Who Deciphered the Rosetta Stone

Hi, everybody. This episode of the Egypt Travel Podcast is going to be slightly different. Instead of talking about another aspect of planning travel to and around Egypt, I’m instead going to switch to the topic of history.

As many of you may know, the Rosetta Stone was one of most important discoveries in the history of Egyptology, and I would argue even in archaeology as a whole. It unlocked the lost ancient language of hieroglyphics that told the entire story of Egyptian history in plain site on tomb and temple walls, but which was unreadable for nearly 2,000 years after it was last written and spoken.

The story of how this lost language was rediscovered and that of the man whose rare genius deciphered this seemingly indecipherable ancient alphabet is one that has always fascinated me, and I want to share that story and history with you all now in this 30th episode of the Egypt Travel Podcast.

So here it is… the story of the man who finally succeeded in deciphering the Rosetta Stone and who became the father of Egyptology thereafter – Jean-Francois Champollion.

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Part I. Introduction

When the Rosetta Stone was unearthed in 1799, the significance of the juxtaposed three scripts wasn’t lost on anyone. However, these were only deciphered a few decades later, after a lengthy and contentious rivalry between two of Europe’s most celebrated scholars.

In today’s episode of The Egypt Travel Podcast – the story of Jean-Francis Champollion, a child prodigy and scholar, whom we know refer to as the “Father of Egyptology.” It’s only thanks to his unorthodox ideas and ground-breaking discoveries that we know so much about ancient Egypt.

Part II. The Life of Jean-Francis Champollion

Jean-Francis Champollion – or “Jean-François,” as his non-Anglicized name is – was born on December 23, 1790, in the French town of Figeac. His parents were somewhat wealthy, hiring private tutors to educate him until the age of nine when he was sent to the Académie de Grenoble, where his brother also studied.

At the Académie de Grenoble, Champollion was introduced to Joseph Fourier, who had joined Napoleon Bonaparte’s expeditions to Egypt and was afterward appointed the General Secretary of the Egyptian Scientific Institute.

Thanks to Fourier’s influence, the teenaged Champollion focused his studies on the ancient languages of the East. He managed to master six different Oriental languages, speaking all of them fluently, in addition to Latin, Greek, and his native French.

When he was 16, Champollion delivered a research paper titled “Geographical Description of Egypt before the Conquest of Cambyses” before the Académie de Grenoble. While he wrongly stated that the ancient Egyptians spoke Coptic, the members of the esteemed institution were so impressed by his work that they admitted him into their ranks.

The following year, in 1807, Champollion moved to Paris, where he pursued further studies at the School of Oriental Languages and the Collège de France. He also worked extensively with the National Library and the Commission of Egypt, which was responsible for publishing the French Army’s findings from their North African expeditions.  

From then on, Champollion devoted himself to studying ancient Oriental languages, with the scope of his research including Persian, Ethiopic, Sanskrit, Zend, Pahlevi, and Arabic. He also began to dissect Coptic, even going so far as to create a dictionary and map its complicated grammar rules.

In 1809 – when he was 19 – Champollion was called for his mandatory military service; however, his mentor, Fourier, intervened and managed to get him exempted. He returned to Grenoble and found work as an Assistant Professor of History in the city’s Lycée, where he would remain until 1816.

In 1812, 22-year-old Champollion married a local woman named Rosine Blanc. Their daughter, Zoraide, was born a few years later, in 1824.

Two years after leaving the Grenoble Lycée, Champollion accepted an invitation from the Royal College of Grenoble to chair its history and geography departments. Despite his packed schedule, he still managed to indulge in his love of ancient Oriental languages. He also expanded his research to include Egyptian hieroglyphs, which – at the time – had fascinated archaeologists since the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in July 1799.

Unearthed at a fort near the town of el-Rashid in Egypt, the Rosetta Stone was originally discovered by soldiers in Napoleon Bonaparte’s army. It was initially disregarded; however, Officer Pierre François Xavier Bouchard recognized the potential significance of the different alphabets, which had been juxtaposed with each other. Later, experts determined that the inscription was written in three scripts – Demotic, Egyptian Hieroglyphic, and Greek.

Upon the defeat of the French armies, ownership of the Rosetta Stone was transferred to the British, who placed it as the centerpiece of an exhibition at The British Museum in London. Countless archaeologists and historians were invited to try and decipher the Rosetta Stone; however, most of them failed.

The contents of the Rosetta Stone remained a mystery until the early 19th century when a French philologist named Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy began working on it. Along with his Swedish student, John David Åkerblad, the two men managed to identify the phonetic values of several of the symbols, which allowed them to make out personal names mentioned in the Greek inscription. They tried to match these with the hieroglyphs in the Egyptian version but despite their best efforts, they were unsuccessful.

Champollion had studied Coptic under de Sacy at the Collège de France; however, the two men didn’t see eye-to-eye on politics. He was a Republican who supported Napoleon Bonaparte, while his former teacher was a staunch Royalist. This conflict between them would later set the stage for one of history’s most infamous rivalries.

By then, Champollion was no longer working as a teacher – the Faculty of Letters in Grenoble had closed down in 1815, leaving him without a post. Initially devastated, he soon found that the absence of a full-time position meant that he could finally focus on his life’s passion – deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs.

During this time, Champollion began writing to a wealthy British polymath named Thomas Young, who would one day be known as “The Last Man Who Knew Everything.” Not only was he a professional physician and physiologist but he was also a renowned polyglot, who gained fame in 1813 after comparing approximately 400 languages, in order to create the Indo-European family.

Young’s interest in the Rosetta Stone began in 1814, thanks to a massive volume on the history of languages that he was attempting to finish at the time. When his editor showed him a few fragments of inscribed papyri that had been uncovered in Egypt, he found himself unable to resist the challenge.

He started studying the Rosetta Stone, even retreating to the sleepy English seaside town of Worthing so he could concentrate on it better.

In November of that year, Young wrote to Champollion after seeing his name mentioned in a letter to the president of Britain’s Royal Society. They began corresponding and sharing their ideas with each other, with Young even sending Champollion a text that he referred to as his “Conjectural Translation of the Rosetta Stone.”

Unfortunately, this partnership wouldn’t last long. The 1815 Battle of Waterloo lay bare the stark differences in their political beliefs and Young was advised to stop talking to Champollion, whose loyalties lay with Napoleon Bonaparte.

In fact, Champollion and his older brother even helped Napoleon’s general, Drought d’Erlon, escape the death penalty by taking him across the b