How Champollion Decoded the Rosetta Stone

The decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs is one of the great detective stories of nineteenth-century scholarship. The breakthrough came on 14 September 1822, when a young French scholar named Jean-François Champollion stood before a blackboard in his home in Paris and, in a state of near-collapse, scribbled the outlines of a system that would unlock an entire civilization. The object that made the breakthrough possible was the Rosetta Stone, and the work that Champollion did with it built on, and surpassed, the efforts of his predecessors, most notably the British polymath Thomas Young.

I want to begin with a position, because the popular story is wrong in a way that matters. The “eureka moment” of 14 September 1822 is real, but the work behind it had been going on for more than a decade. Champollion had been corresponding with his brother Jacques-Joseph about Coptic roots and Egyptian phonology since 1807. He had identified the Coptic-Egyptian connection as a teenager. By the time he sat down in front of his blackboard in September 1822, he had spent roughly thirteen years — most of his adult intellectual life, preparing to do what he did that morning. The eureka moment was the visible tip of a very long process, and telling the story as a single flash of insight misrepresents both the man and the field. Andrew Robinson’s Cracking the Egyptian Code (2012) is the modern biography that does the best job of restoring the long preparation that lies behind the famous date.

A Boyhood Fascination

Champollion was born in 1790 in Figeac, a small town in southwestern France. From an early age, he was fascinated by languages, and by the age of 13 he was already studying Coptic, the last stage of the Egyptian language. He was convinced, against the prevailing scholarly opinion, that Coptic was a direct descendant of the language of the pharaohs. The conviction was correct, and it gave him an enormous advantage over his contemporaries, who generally assumed that the hieroglyphs encoded a form of ancient Semitic or Indo-European language.

By his late teens, Champollion had mastered Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Persian, Sanskrit, and several other languages. He went to Paris in 1807 to study at the Collège de France, where he came under the influence of orientalist scholars and gained access to the collection of the Bibliothèque Impériale. He also obtained copies of the Rosetta Stone inscriptions, which had been published by the Swedish diplomat and orientalist Johan David Åkerblad in 1802 and in the Description de l’Égypte (1809 onwards), and which he and his older brother Jacques-Joseph Champollion had been studying for years.

The Competition

Champollion was not the only scholar working on the problem. The British had not allowed French scholars direct access to the stone after it arrived at the British Museum in 1802, but copies and engravings circulated widely. A number of distinguished European scholars had tackled the problem, with varying degrees of partial success.

The Swedish diplomat Johan David Åkerblad had identified a number of proper names in the demotic text in 1802. The British physician and physicist Thomas Young, working in England from 1814 to 1819, had published a series of brilliant articles identifying the cartouches of Ptolemy and Berenice in the hieroglyphic text and demonstrating that the demotic and hieroglyphic versions were essentially the same. Young had also recognized that some signs were phonetic, but he had not yet understood the system as a whole. The German-born Egyptologist Heinrich Karl Brugsch and the French scholar Antoine-Jean Saint-Martin were also at work. Champollion, working in Paris, was in close contact with several of them.

The Eureka Moment

The breakthrough came in 1822. Champollion had been working on the problem for years, and he had reached a critical insight: that the hieroglyphic system was not purely symbolic (as many had assumed) and not purely alphabetic (as Åkerblad had argued for demotic), but a complex combination of phonetic signs, word signs, and silent determinatives. He had been searching for the right combination of these elements to make the cartouches of Ptolemy and Cleopatra yield their meaning.

On 14 September 1822, Champollion had a sudden insight. He had been working with copies of bilingual inscriptions from the temple of Isis at Philae, where the names of Ptolemy and Cleopatra appeared in cartouches in the hieroglyphic text and in Greek in the same inscription. Comparing the two, he realized that the cartouches spelled the same names, but using different phonetic values. From this and similar examples, he deduced the principle that the same signs could be used for different phonetic values in different contexts, and that the script was, in his word, a “mixed system” of phonetic, semantic, and symbolic elements.

The story of the breakthrough has become famous. Champollion reportedly ran to his brother’s office shouting “Je tiens mon affaire!” (“I’ve got it!”). He collapsed on the floor and lay there for several hours. The next day, he wrote to the French scholar Dacier, the perpetual secretary of the Académie des Inscriptions, with a letter dated 22 September 1822 that included the famous line: “Je suis en possession de mon affaire.” The letter, which contained the outline of his discovery, was read at a public meeting of the Académie on 27 September 1822, and Champollion’s priority was established. A small point worth noting for specialists: his first published announcement was a short note in the September 1822 issue of the Revue encyclopédique. The famous Lettre à M. Dacier came later, in 1824, and is the longer and more technical statement.

The “Lettre à M. Dacier”

Champollion’s “Lettre à M. Dacier” is a foundational document in the history of Egyptology. In it, he set out the principles of the decipherment, summarized as follows:

1. The hieroglyphic system is a mixed script, combining logograms (signs for whole words), phonograms (signs for sounds), and silent determinatives.
2. Phonograms include both single-consonant signs (an “alphabet” of about 24 signs) and multi-consonant signs.
3. Cartouches enclose royal names, and the phonetic values of the signs in cartouches can be deduced from the Greek equivalents.
4. The Coptic language, the last stage of Egyptian, preserves many of the older consonantal roots of the pharaonic language.
5. The same sign can have different phonetic values in different contexts, depending on its position in a word and on the determinatives that accompany it.

This last point was the most novel and the most controversial. Champollion called the phenomenon “homophony” or “polyvalency”: the same sign can stand for different consonants in different words, just as, in English, the letter c can be pronounced differently in cat and city. The recognition of polyvalency was the key that opened up the entire system.

From Theory to Practice

Champollion spent the next several years extending and verifying his theory. In 1824 he published a small book, Précis du système hiéroglyphique des anciens Égyptiens (“Summary of the Hieroglyphic System of the Ancient Egyptians”), in which he laid out the principles of the decipherment in a more systematic form. The book was met with both acclaim and criticism; some scholars, including Thomas Young, contested parts of it, while others defended it vigorously.

In 1828 and 1829, Champollion led an expedition to Egypt, the first scientific expedition to the country since the Description de l’Égypte. He and his companion, the Italian artist Ippolito Rosellini, visited the great sites of the country, including Karnak, Luxor, Deir el-Bahari, and the temples of Nubia, and copied the inscriptions in great numbers. The expedition was cut short by ill health, and Champollion returned to France in 1830, dying of a stroke in Paris on 4 March 1832 at the age of 41.

The Legacy

Champollion’s decipherment opened the door to modern Egyptology. Within a generation, scholars were reading texts inscribed two and three thousand years earlier, and the Egyptian temples and tombs of the Valley of the Kings began to give up their secrets. The decipherment also confirmed the role of Coptic as a direct descendant of the Egyptian language, validating Champollion’s boyhood conviction and opening up a new field of study.

In the century and a half since Champollion’s death, Egyptologists have refined, extended, and corrected his work, but the basic principles he laid out in 1822 remain the foundation of the field. The Rosetta Stone, which had been a curiosity in the British Museum, became a touchstone of the new science. Champollion’s “Lettre à M. Dacier” is still read by students of the decipherment, and the eureka moment of 14 September 1822 is still celebrated as the birthday of modern Egyptology. For the technical side of the decipherment, the actual philological argument, sign by sign: the standard reference is Jean Leclant and Georges Posener’s contributions to the Dictionnaire de la civilisation égyptienne (1988), supplemented by Andrew Robinson’s biography.