<P> Jean - François Champollion ( Champollion le jeune ; 23 December 1790 -- 4 March 1832 ) was a French scholar , philologist and orientalist , known primarily as the decipherer of 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 ( 1798 -- 1801 ) which also brought to light the trilingual Rosetta Stone . Scholars debated the age of Egyptian civilization and the function and nature of 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 many kinds of information recorded by the ancient Egyptians . </P>
<P> Jean - François Champollion ( Champollion le jeune ; 23 December 1790 -- 4 March 1832 ) was a French scholar , philologist and orientalist , known primarily as the decipherer of 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 ( 1798 -- 1801 ) which also brought to light the trilingual Rosetta Stone . Scholars debated the age of Egyptian civilization and the function and nature of 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 many kinds of information recorded by the ancient Egyptians . </P>
who made the discovery that finally cracked the code of hieroglyphics
who made the discovery that finally cracked the code of hieroglyphics
Jean - François Champollion ( Champollion le jeune
Jean - François Champollion ( Champollion le jeune