Jean-François Champollion

✶December 23, 1790

†March 4, 1832

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About their life

Jean-François Champollion, also known as Champollion le jeune, 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.

French classical scholar (1790-1832)

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Biography from the article Jean-François Champollion on the English Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.