On this day in Egyptology: Jean-François Champollion was born, 23 December, 1790

On this day in Egyptology: Jean-François Champollion was born, 23 December, 1790

Originally shared by British Museum

French scholar Jean-François Champollion was born #onthisday in 1790. He used the Rosetta Stone as a key to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. He identified that hieroglyphic symbols could be read either as a phonogram (which represented a particular phonetic sound), as a logogram (a symbol meaning a word or phrase), or as an ideogram (where the symbol represented an idea). It was previously thought that Egyptian hieroglyphs were purely ideographic, but Champollion used the Rosetta Stone, with its three scripts, to disprove this. You can see Champollion’s own hieroglyphic writing here: http://ow.ly/TwT9307iifF