On 14 September 1822, a thirty-one-year-old schoolmaster with no academic post, no salary and a reputation for dangerous politics was working through a set of newly copied inscriptions from the temple at Abu Simbel. Something clicked into place — a name, then another, then the whole logic underneath them. He ran out of the house and down the street to his brother's office, shouting that he had it, and then collapsed. Accounts of the moment say he lay unconscious on the floor for days, and that when he came round he knew the answer to a question Europe had been arguing about for twenty years.
The man was Jean-François Champollion, and what he had cracked was the writing of ancient Egypt — a script that had been unreadable since the fourth century AD, when the last people who could write it died. His route to that moment ran through twenty years of self-education, and it began with a single decision about how to learn a language.
Figeac, 1790: A Bookseller's Son in a Revolution
Champollion was born on 23 December 1790 in Figeac, in southern France, the youngest son of Jacques Champollion, a bookseller, and Jeanne-Françoise Gualieu. It was not a well-ordered childhood. His father drank heavily. The Revolution, the Terror and the rise of Napoleon formed the weather of his early years, and the schools that might have taught him were disrupted or shut. The family story is that he taught himself to read at five by matching passages he had already memorised to the words printed in his mother's missal — an early lesson in the thing that would later make him famous: how to get from sounds he knew to a script he did not.
The decisive figure of his childhood was not a teacher but his brother. Jacques-Joseph Champollion-Figeac was twelve years older, a scholar of Greek, and he took his little brother's education on as a personal project. When Jean-François was eleven, Jacques-Joseph brought him to Grenoble, housed him in a two-room flat and hired tutors he could barely afford. When the money ran out, the boy sat the entrance examination for the Grenoble Lycée and won a bursary. That pattern — an older brother scraping together the means, a younger one consuming languages faster than the money could buy them — would repeat for the next fifteen years.
The Languages Pile Up
Under a private tutor and then at the school run by the Abbé Dussert, Champollion did what precocious learners do when nobody gives them a syllabus: he took everything at once. He began Hebrew. Then Arabic, Syriac and Chaldean. Biographers record that before he was nine he could read Homer and Virgil, and that he had already made attempts at Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Chaldean and Chinese — languages that would each take a serious adult years to reach.
At thirteen, in 1804, he wrote his first paper: Remarks on the Fable of the Giants, as Taken from Hebrew Etymologies. At eighteen, one account puts his command at eight ancient languages. He had all of them by the same method — self-study, a tutor where one was available, and an appetite that did not distinguish between work and play.
There is a detail from these years that matters more than the numbers. When Champollion was working on Arabic, he wore Arab dress and gave himself the Arabic nickname al-Seghir — \"the younger\". He was not performing scholarship for an audience. He was playing, and the play was the study.
The Man Who Came Home from Egypt
He needed a purpose to attach the languages to, and in 1802 he met the man who supplied it. Joseph Fourier — mathematician, prefect of the département of Isère, and one of the scholars Napoleon had taken with him on the Egyptian expedition of 1798–1799 — showed the boy his Egyptian collection and told him the thing that decided his life: nobody could read the hieroglyphs.
The objects Fourier had brought home were pieces of a mass of material that had flooded into France — drawings, inscriptions, artefacts, and the find that had electrified scholarship, a slab of black basalt discovered by French soldiers in July 1799 near the town of Rosetta. It carried the same decree three times over: in Greek, in the cursive Egyptian script called demotic, and in hieroglyphs. The Greek could be read. Whatever the hieroglyphs said, they said the same thing. The stone was a key — and for two decades nobody could turn it.
Champollion's gamble, made when he was still a teenager, was that the key was not on the stone at all. It was in Coptic: the liturgical language of the Coptic Church, written in a Greek-derived alphabet, still spoken and sung in Egypt. If Coptic was the descendant of the language of the pharaohs, then he could learn the language of the pharaohs like any other living language — and then use it to feel his way into the script.
Sixteen Languages to Read One
To follow that hunch he needed everything at once. In 1807 he moved from Grenoble to Paris and enrolled at the Collège de France and the École des Langues Orientales, studying with Silvestre de Sacy, Langlès and Raphaël de Monachis. Persian, Ethiopic, Sanskrit, Zend, Pahlavi, Arabic. By one count, the project of reading hieroglyphs eventually took him through sixteen languages over twenty years. He was not collecting them. Each one was a hypothesis-testing instrument — a live example of a script or a sound system that might behave like the one on the stone.
Coptic was different. Coptic was the obsession, and he said so, in letters that read almost exactly like the notes of a modern immersion learner pushing past the plateau:
\"I am totally immersed in Coptic, I want to know Egyptian as well as I know French... My Coptic is moving along, and I find in it the greatest joy... As for Coptic, I do nothing else. I dream in Coptic. I do nothing but that, I dream only in Coptic, in Egyptian. ... I speak Coptic all alone to myself (since no one else can understand me). This is the real way for me to put my pure Egyptian into my head.\" — Champollion, letter to his brother, 1809
Read that again, because it is a complete learning method in three sentences. He pushed the new language past the point where it was a tool for reading and into the point where it occupied his dreams. He found joy in the work rather than in the result. And with nobody to practise with, he talked to himself — speech produced for the sole purpose of making the language available without effort.
By nineteen he had produced a Coptic dictionary and a Coptic grammar, and had been made an assistant professor of history at Grenoble — a post he only got because Fourier successfully argued that his Egyptian research was too important for him to be conscripted. In 1815 he presented the Coptic dictionary to Napoleon in person. Then everything fell apart.
Exile, Poverty and a Closed Faculty
At Waterloo, the Empire ended and the Restoration began. Champollion had backed Napoleon's return — he met him, and asked for his Coptic grammar to be sent to Paris for publication — and his brother had joined the army. Both were now the wrong kind of Frenchman. Champollion lost his professorship, the Faculty of Letters at Grenoble was shut down, and he was exiled to Figeac with no job and no income.
He kept working. He had already noticed in 1808 that a set of demotic signs corresponded to alphabetic letters in Coptic, and by 1818, examining a copy of the Philae obelisk made by the English traveller William John Bankes, he saw that certain hieroglyphs inside royal name-rings had to be phonetic rather than symbolic. Through the years of poverty at Figeac he built his Coptic lexicon further, and in 1821 he published De l'écriture hiératique des anciens Égyptiens — a book about an Egyptian script, written by a man aged thirty with no academic position.
In the same period, on the other side of the Channel, the polymath Thomas Young was making real progress on the same stone. The competition was national as much as scholarly — the Rosetta Stone itself had become British property after Napoleon's defeat — and the priority dispute that followed would sour Champollion's reputation in England for a century.
September 1822: The Verification Problem
The reason the breakthrough of 14 September 1822 mattered so much is that Champollion had done something the others had not: he had worked out that Egyptian writing was a mixed system — some signs standing for sounds, some for whole ideas, with the reader expected to know which was which. That made it possible to guess a name and then check the guess against the same cartouche on a dozen different monuments. It was falsifiable, and it held.
On 27 September 1822 he presented his Lettre à M. Dacier to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres: fifty-two pages containing the hieroglyphic alphabet and the system behind it. In 1824 he expanded it into the Précis du système hiéroglyphique, four hundred pages of argument with a separate volume of plates — the most substantial contribution to hieroglyphic research made by anyone, in any language, up to that point.
Not everyone was convinced. Young and his supporters contested the priority; German and French scholars questioned the method itself. What finally silenced the doubters was published after Champollion was dead — his Egyptian grammar, issued in parts from 1836 to 1841, and his hieroglyphic dictionary, from 1841 to 1844. Both of them were teaching texts. Any scholar who wanted to check his claims could sit down with the grammar and read real Egyptian for themselves — and once they did, the argument was over.
Ten Years of Reward and a Debt Paid Too Late
The French state did, eventually, pay attention. In 1826 Champollion was appointed curator of the Egyptian antiquities at the Louvre. In 1828 he set off for Egypt at the head of the Franco–Tuscan expedition with his friend and disciple Ippolito Rosellini — twelve scholars and artists, funded by Charles X and the Grand Duke of Tuscany — and spent more than a year travelling up the Nile, doing something no one had done for fourteen hundred years: reading hieroglyphs off the walls where they had been carved.
In 1831 he was given what he had deserved since adolescence — a chair of Egyptology at the Collège de France. He died on 4 March 1832, in Paris, at forty-one, after a series of strokes. His health had never recovered from the expedition.
He had gone from a self-taught boy who could not find a teacher to the founder of a discipline in about twenty-five years. And the instrument that made it possible was a language nobody else wanted to learn.
What a Learner Can Take from Him
- Pick the language that unlocks the others. Champollion could have learned hieroglyphs as a puzzle. He learned Coptic instead — a living, spellable, readable relative — and used it as a ladder. A learner of classical Chinese with some Mandarin, or of Old Norse with modern Icelandic, or of Latin with Italian, is doing something similar.
- Talk to yourself, out loud, in a language nobody around you speaks. His formulation is startlingly modern: \"I speak Coptic all alone to myself... This is the real way for me to put my pure Egyptian into my head.\" Self-talk is rehearsal that costs nothing and requires no partner.
- Play is not a distraction from study. Arab dress, an Arabic nickname, translating whatever came into his head into Coptic for fun. He made the practice a game and did it for years without a salary or an audience.
- Push the new language into your dreams, not just your desk. Champollion's measure of success was that Coptic followed him into sleep, because that meant it had stopped being external material and become internal.
- Expect to be interrupted, and keep the work going. He lost his post, his faculty was closed, he was exiled and he was poor for years. He published his first serious book on Egyptian writing from exile at thirty, and he was right.
Champollion's own summary of Coptic is worth keeping: he called it the most perfect, most rational language he knew — a judgement made by a man who had learned a dozen others. That is what the right language feels like once you are finally inside it, and it is worth remembering when a script looks impossible. The hieroglyphs looked impossible for fifteen hundred years, until a boy with no teachers decided to learn the language that came afterwards, say it aloud to himself, and dream in it.