Past Perfect: Reading the Rosetta Stone

Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832), the son of a book peddler in southern France, had the misfortune to be born during the French Revolution. Tutored in Latin and Greek by a local priest, he early on showed a genius for languages, prompting his family to send him to school in Grenoble. By the age of 14, after viewing a copy of the Rosetta Stone (which had been discovered in 1799 in the village of el-Rashid [Rosetta] in the western Nile Delta), he had already found his life’s work. Champollion continued his education in Paris, mastering Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Chaldaean, Chinese, Sanskrit […]