Champollion

Champollion, JEAN FRANÇOIS, the founder of modern Egyptology, distinguished from his elder brother as 'Champollion the younger,' was born December 23, 1791, at Figeac, in the French department of Lot. He was educated at Grenoble, and devoted himself from his boyhood to the study of oriental languages, especially Coptic. In 1807 he went to Paris to pursue these studies, and in 1816 he became professor of History at the Lyceum of Grenoble. He had already published (1811-14) the first two volumes of a large work entitled L'Égypte sous les Pharaons (3 vols.), in which he reproduced, by means of Coptic documents, the national geography of Egypt, when he was expelled from his chair for his Bonapartist sympathies. Comparison of the monuments with the MSS. led him to the conviction that the three systems of Egyptian writing, the hieratic, demotic, and hieroglyphic, were essentially one; and that the hieroglyphs were not signs for ideas, but for sounds. The first results of his labours were published in De l'Écriture hiératique des anciens Égyptiens (1821) and his famous Lettre à M. Dacier (1822); and in his Précis du Système hiéroglyphique (1824; 2d ed. 1828) he established the conclusion that the hieroglyphs were partly phonetic or alphabetic characters. The final solution by which he arrived at the whole alphabet of twenty-five letters (see HIEROGLYPHICS) was pronounced by Niebnhr to be the greatest discovery of the century. Champollion was sent by the king on a scientific mission to Italy in 1824-26, and in 1826 was appointed conservator of the Egyptian collections; and about the same time he published his Panthéon Égyptien (1823), with drawings of Egyptian deities from the papyrus-rolls and notes regarding their Egyptian designations, and his Lettres relatives au Musée royal Égyptien de Turin (2 vols. 1824-26). In 1828-30 he accompanied a scientific expedition sent to Egypt by the king of France. On his return to Paris he was made a member of the Académie des Inscriptions (1830), and a new chair of Egyptology was founded for him in the Collège de France. He died March 4, 1832. The MSS. which he left unpublished, extending to more than 2000 pages, were bought by the Royal Library at Paris for 50,000 francs. His posthumous works are Lettres écrites d'Égypte et de Nubie (1833; new ed. 1867); Grammaire Égyptienne, his principal work (3 vols. 1836-41); Monuments de l'Égypte et de la Nubie (5 vols. 1835-45); Dictionnaire Égyptien en écriture hiéroglyphique (1842-44); and Monuments de l'Égypte et de la Nubie (1844), the last work being afterwards continued and completed under the superintendence of Rongé.