Jean-François Champollion (a.k.a.
Champollion le jeune; 23 December 1790 – 4 March 1832) was a French
scholar,
philologist and
orientalist, known primarily as the
decipherer of the
Egyptian hieroglyphs and a founding figure in the field of
egyptology. A child prodigy in philology, he gave his first public paper on the decipherment of
Demotic in 1806, and already as a young man held many posts of honor in scientific circles, and spoke
Coptic and
Arabic fluently. During the early 19th century French culture experienced a period of '
Egyptomania', brought on by Napoleon's discoveries in Egypt during his campaign there (1797–1801) which also brought to light the trilingual
Rosetta Stone. Scholars debated the age of the Egyptian civilization and the function and nature of the hieroglyphic script, which language if any it recorded, and the degree to which the signs were
phonetic (representing speech sounds) or
ideographic (recording semantic concepts directly). Many thought that the script was only used for sacred and ritual functions, and that as such it was unlikely to be decipherable since it was tied to esoteric and philosophical ideas, and did not record historical information. The significance of Champollion's decipherment was that he showed these assumptions to be wrong, and made it possible to begin to retrieve the many kinds of information recorded by the ancient Egyptians.