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Champollion and the day hieroglyphs were read again
25 October 2026
Jean-François Champollion showed in 1822 that hieroglyphs write the sounds of the Egyptian language, mixed with signs for whole words. He proved it on royal names. Ptolemy and Cleopatra, Greek names on the Rosetta Stone and an obelisk, gave him sound values. Then a cartouche of an Egyptian king, Ramesses, read with the same values and his knowledge of Coptic, showed that the system had been used for native names all along.
He announced it in a letter read to the Académie des Inscriptions in Paris on 27 September 1822, the Lettre à M. Dacier. He was 31. Ten years later he was dead, but the method he set out is the one Egyptologists still use.
Coptic was his way into Egyptian
Champollion was born in Figeac, in south-west France, in 1790. By his teens in Grenoble he was learning Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Coptic, and in Paris he added Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit. Coptic mattered most. It is the last stage of the Egyptian language, written in Greek letters, still used in the services of the Coptic Church.
Knowing Coptic meant that when a sign gave a sound, he could hear a word in it. The sun disc read rꜥ matched Coptic re, "sun". The three fox skins read ms matched mise, "to give birth". Scholars before him had treated hieroglyphs as pure symbols, and so could not hear the language behind them.
Greek names gave him the first sounds
The Rosetta Stone repeats one decree in hieroglyphs, Demotic and Greek. The Greek names the king, Ptolemaios, and the hieroglyphs hold an oval, a cartouche, in the same places. Thomas Young, an English physician, had already argued that the oval held the king's name spelled in sounds, and had matched some of its signs. Champollion took the idea further.
A second name came from an obelisk found at Philae and taken to England, whose base carried a Greek text naming Cleopatra. Ptolemaios and Kleopatra share p, t, l and o. The stool (Q3), the loaf (X1) and the lion (E23) stood in the right places in both cartouches. Each name confirmed the other, and between them they gave a dozen sound values.
Ramesses proved the sounds were Egyptian
Greek names spelled in sounds proved little on their own. Young thought the Egyptians wrote sounds only for foreign names. In September 1822 Champollion received copies of cartouches from temples in Nubia, among them Abu Simbel. One began with the sun disc (N5), rꜥ. It ended with the folded cloth (S29), s, a value he knew from Ptolemy. Between them stood the three fox skins (F31).
Through Coptic he read the fox skins as ms, "born". Ra, ms, s: Ramesses, "Ra is the one who bore him", the king Greek historians called Rhamses. Another cartouche held the ibis of Thoth (G26) with the same fox skins: Thothmes, Thutmose. Egyptian kings, with Egyptian names, spelled partly in sounds. The story goes that he ran to his brother's office, said "Je tiens mon affaire!", "I've got it!", and fainted.
The script mixed sound signs with word signs
In 1824 Champollion published the Précis du système hiéroglyphique, with the full argument. Hieroglyphs, he wrote, are a complex system, at once figurative, symbolic and phonetic, in the same text and even in the same word. A word could be spelled in sounds and then end with a picture sign, a determinative, showing what kind of word it was. He had counted 1,419 signs in the hieroglyphic part of the Rosetta Stone against 486 Greek words, too many for every sign to be a word.
His rivalry with Young lasted. Young felt his early work was passed over. In 1824 Champollion granted that Young had first identified several sound signs in foreign names. Most historians credit Champollion with the full decipherment.
He finally saw Egypt in 1828
Champollion catalogued the Egyptian collection in Turin, became curator of the Louvre's new Egyptian department in 1826, and in 1828 sailed up the Nile at last, with the Italian scholar Ippolito Rosellini. For over a year he copied inscriptions from Giza to Nubia. On 1 January 1829 he wrote to Dacier that his alphabet held good on all the monuments of Egypt.
In 1831 the Collège de France made him its first professor of Egyptology. He died in Paris on 4 March 1832, aged 41. His brother Jacques-Joseph published his Egyptian grammar and dictionary after his death.
Questions
When did Champollion decipher hieroglyphs?
In September 1822. He read his Lettre à M. Dacier to the Académie des Inscriptions in Paris on 27 September 1822, and published the full system in 1824.
Did Champollion use only the Rosetta Stone?
No. The stone gave him Ptolemy's name. The Philae obelisk gave him Cleopatra, and cartouches copied in Egyptian and Nubian temples, above all Ramesses and Thutmose, showed the system worked for Egyptian names.
Did Thomas Young decipher hieroglyphs first?
Young first argued that cartouches held names spelled in sounds and got several sound values right. Champollion worked out the whole system, sounds and word signs together, and could read Egyptian words with it.
Glossary
- cartouche
- An oval ring drawn around a royal name, a loop of rope tied at one end. Kings wrote their two main names in cartouches.
- Coptic
- The last stage of the Egyptian language, written in Greek letters with a few extra letters taken from demotic. The Coptic Church still uses it, and it showed scholars how Egyptian words sounded.
- demotic
- A fast joined-up script that grew out of hieratic around 650 BC, used for everyday documents. It is the middle script on the Rosetta Stone.
- determinative
- A sign at the end of a word that is not read aloud. It shows what kind of thing the word means, such as a seated man for men and their jobs.
- Egyptologist
- A scholar who studies ancient Egypt: its language, writing, objects, buildings and history.
- hieroglyphs
- The picture signs of ancient Egyptian writing, used from about 3200 BC to AD 394. A sign can stand for sounds, for a whole word, or for the kind of thing a word means.
- obelisk
- A tall, four-sided stone pillar with a pointed top, usually set up in pairs before a temple and carved with the king's names.
- Rosetta Stone
- A stone slab of 196 BC carrying one decree in hieroglyphs, demotic and Greek. It helped Jean-François Champollion decipher hieroglyphs in 1822.
- temple
- The house of a god, where priests served the god's statue. Temples for dead kings kept up their offerings after death.
People in this article
Where to see it
- Rosetta Stone object
- British Museum, London museum
- Musée Champollion, Figeac museum
- Louvre, Paris museum
- Museo Egizio, Turin museum
- Abu Simbel site
- Philae Obelisk, Kingston Lacy, Dorset site
Sources
More to read
- How to read a stela, line by line How to read an Egyptian stela in hieroglyphics: the rounded top, the scene, the offering formula, the owner's name and family, read from the right end.
- Ptahshepses and Sabu: the Saqqara tombs the Czech mission dug out again Saqqara discovery 2026: Miroslav Bárta's Czech mission re-excavates the tombs of Ptahshepses and his father Sabu and finds the chapel of Sabu's wife.
- The Teaching for Merikare: a king's advice to his son Teaching for Merikare: an Egyptian king tells his son how to rule. Its famous lines in translation, one read in hieroglyphs sign by sign.