Maison Natale de Jean-François Champollion - Figeac (Lot), France - Blue Plaques on Waymarking.com

[FR] On imagine facilement le jeune Jean-François lisant le Courrier d’Égypte au fond de la boutique de son père alors que l’école de Figeac a dû fermer ses portes. Il a 10 ans lorsque son frère aîné l’emmène avec lui à Grenoble et se charge de son éducation. Passionné par l’Antiquité et encouragé par son frère Jacques-Joseph, il étudie avec avidité les langues et les écritures anciennes.

Dès 17 ans, partageant son temps entre le Collège de France et l’École des Langues Orientales, il travaille sur l’inscription de Rosette et dépouille des centaines de documents ; il bute sur la nature même des signes et le rapport entre les trois écritures égyptiennes. Il persévère dans une recherche jalonnée d’hypothèses, de remises en question et d’intuitions géniales, jusqu’à pouvoir s’écrier le 14 septembre 1822 : « Je tiens l’affaire » ! Il vient de comprendre que l’écriture des hiéroglyphes relève d’un système complexe, « un mélange de signes figuratifs, symboliques et phonétiques ».

[EN] 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. Young Champollion was mostly raised by his older brother Jacques-Joseph.

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.

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 would stay 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.

In 1808, he first began studying the Rosetta stone, working from a copy made by the Abbé de Tersan. Working independently he was able to confirm some of the readings of the demotic previously made by Johan David Åkerblad in 1802, finally identifying the Coptic equivalents of fifteen demotic signs present on the Rosetta stone.

Never well off and struggling to make ends meet, he also suffered since youth from chronically bad health, including gout and tinnitus. His health first began to deteriorate during his time in Paris, where the dank climate and unsanitary environment did not agree with him.

Kircher was the first to suggest that modern Coptic was a degenerate form of the language found in the Egyptian demotic script, and he had correctly suggested the phonetic value of one hieroglyph – that of mu, the Coptic word for water. With the onslaught of Egyptomania in France in the early 19th century, scholars began approaching the question of the hieroglyphs with renewed interest, but still without a basic idea about whether the script was phonetic or ideographic, and whether the texts represented profane topics or sacred mysticism. This early work was mostly speculative, with no methodology for how to corroborate suggested readings. The first methodological advances were Joseph de Guignes' discovery that cartouches identified the names of rulers, and George Zoëga's compilation of a catalogue of hieroglyphs, and discovery that the direction of reading depended on the direction in which the glyphs were facing.

British polymath Thomas Young was one of the first to attempt decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, basing his own work on the investigations of Swedish diplomat Johan David Åkerblad. Several scholars have suggested that Young's true contribution to Egyptology was his decipherment of the Demotic script, in which he made the first major advances, correctly identifying it as being composed of both ideographic and phonetic signs.

Champollion correctly identified the hieratic script as being based on the hieroglyphic script, but used exclusively on papyrus, whereas the hieroglyphic script was used on stone, and demotic used by the people.

The main breakthrough in his decipherment was when he was also able to read the verb MIS related to birth, by comparing the Coptic verb for birth with the phonetic signs MS and the appearance of references to birthday celebrations in the Greek text.

Champollion died of an apoplectic attack (stroke) in Paris on 4 March 1832 at the age of 41.

Blue Plaque managing agency: Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication Individual Recognized: Jean-François Champollion Web Address: [Web Link] Physical Address: Not listed

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