Jean-Francois Champollion, a decipherer of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, was born in 1790 and died in 1832. Champollion was a child prodigy as a linguist and believed from an early age, that he was destined to solve the riddle of the hieroglyphs. As a boy of nine, he hoped to accompany Napoleon during the French invasion of Egypt, and at the age of sixteen he addressed a sci entific meeting at the Academy of Grenoble, his hometown, in which he argued, correctly, that the ancient Egyptian language must be related to Coptic, the language of medieval Christian Egypt.

Champollion is best known for his decipherment of the hieroglyphic text of the Rosetta Stone, a large inscription with the text of a resolution by a college of priests conferring honors on the king Ptolemy V in 196 B.C.E. The inscription was discovered by French...