Jean-François Champollion birthplace

Jean-François Champollion (23 December 1790 – 4 March 1832) was a French classical scholar, philologist and orientalist.

Champollion deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphs with the help of groundwork laid by his predecessors: Athanasius Kircher, Silvestre de Sacy, Johan David Akerblad, Thomas Young, and William John Bankes. Champollion translated parts of the Rosetta Stone in 1822, showing that the written Egyptian language was similar to Coptic, and that the writing system was a combination of phonetic and ideographic signs.