The French Egyptologist Jean François Champollion was the father of Egyptology and the decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Background
Jean-François Champollion was the last of seven children (two of whom died before he was born). He was raised in humble circumstances; his father Jacques Champollion was a book trader from Valjouffrey near Grenoble who had settled in the small town of Figeac in the Department of Lot. His father was a notorious drunk, and his mother seems to have been largely an absent figure in the life of young Champollion, who was mostly raised by his older brother Jacques-Joseph. One biographer, Andrew Robinson, even speculated that Champollion was not in fact the son of Jacques Champollion's wife Jeanne-Françoise Gualieu, but the result of an extramarital affair.
Education
He was educated by his brother, and was then appointed government pupil at the Lyceum, which had recently been founded.
At the age of sixteen (1807) he read before the academy of Grenoble a paper in which he maintained that the Coptic was the ancient language of Egypt.
Career
His first work (1804) was an attempt to show by means of their names that the giants of the Bible and of Greek mythology were personifications of natural phenomena.
He soon after removed to Paris, where he enjoyed the friendship of Langles, De Sacy and Millin.
He took his first steps in this field in 1808, when he equated 15 demotic signs with those of the Coptic alphabet; by 1818 he had established a key to the hieroglyphic version of the Rosetta inscription.
He was now ahead of all contemporary scholars in the field, and his famous Lettre à M. Dacier (1822) marked a turning point in the story of Egyptology.
Champollion's first decipherment of hieroglyphics dates from 1821.
In 1824 he was sent by Charles X to visit the collections of Egyptian antiquities in the museums of Turin, Leghorn, Rome and Naples; and on his return he was appointed director of the Egyptian museum at the Louvre.
In 1828 he was commissioned to undertake the conduct of a scientific expedition to Egypt in company with Rosellini, who had received a similar appointment from Leopold II, grand duke of Tuscany.
He remained there about a year.
In March 1831 he received the chair of Egyptian antiquities, which had been created specially for him, in the College de France.
He was engaged with Rosellini in publishing the results of Egyptian researches at the expense of the Tuscan and French governments, when he was seized with a paralytic disorder, and died at Paris in 1832.