marendesk

On September 27, 1822, a 31-year-old Frenchman stood in a packed room in Paris and made a drowned language speak again.

Jean-François Champollion had fainted ten days before, running to his brother after a breakthrough on inscriptions from Abu Simbel, shouting “Je tiens mon affaire!” (I've got it).

He had chased hieroglyphs since boyhood, taught himself Coptic, and wrote: “I dream in Coptic.”

On this day he read his Lettre à M. Dacier to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. Thomas Young, the British polymath whose early advances he built on and who would resent him, happened to be in Paris and sat in the room. The letter was cautious: Champollion only suggested the script had been phonetic from the earliest texts, meaning the Egyptians invented writing on their own.

His sentence carried the rest: “It is a complex system, writing figurative, symbolic, and phonetic all at once, in the same text, the same phrase, I would almost say in the same word.”

He had crossed out his old mentor's name and written Dacier's instead. He died at 41.

The Rosetta Stone was dug up in 1799. For twenty-three years it was a locked door. That Sunday, someone turned the key out loud.