Jean-François Champollion

Hello! My name is Jean-François Champollion. I was born in France on December 23rd, 1790. When I was a boy, I loved books more than anything. My older brother, Jacques-Joseph, was very kind and taught me how to read and write because he saw how much I wanted to learn. But I didn't just want to learn French. I wanted to learn all the languages in the world! One day, I saw pictures of amazing art from a place far away called Egypt. The pictures were covered in a mysterious kind of writing called hieroglyphs. Right then, I knew I had to figure out what those secret symbols meant. It became the biggest puzzle of my life.

For thousands of years, no one could read the Egyptian hieroglyphs. It was like the ancient Egyptians had a secret code, and everyone had forgotten the key. Then, in the year 1799, something amazing happened. Some soldiers found a very special stone, which we now call the Rosetta Stone. It was so special because it had the same story written on it three different times, in three different kinds of writing! One was the mysterious hieroglyphs. Another was a simpler Egyptian script, and the last one was Greek. Luckily, many people still knew how to read Greek. This amazing stone was the clue everyone, including me, had been waiting for.

I spent more than twenty years studying the Rosetta Stone and other ancient writings. It was like being a detective solving a very, very old mystery. I carefully compared the Greek words to the hieroglyph pictures, looking for patterns. I learned that some pictures stood for sounds, just like our letters do, while other pictures stood for whole ideas. Then, in 1822, I had a brilliant idea! I looked at the names of kings and queens, like Cleopatra and Ptolemy. Their names were always written inside a special oval shape. By matching the sounds in their names to the symbols in the ovals, I finally cracked the code! I was so excited that I ran to my brother's office and shouted, 'I've got it!' I was so full of joy that I fainted right there.

A few years later, in 1828, my biggest dream came true. I got to travel to Egypt! I sailed down the famous Nile River and saw the giant pyramids and beautiful temples with my own eyes. Their walls were covered in the very same hieroglyphs I had spent my whole life studying. But now, they were not a mystery to me anymore. I could read them! I could read the stories of the pharaohs, the poems about their gods, and messages from people who lived thousands of years ago. It felt like I was hearing their voices speak to me from across time. It was the most wonderful adventure of my life.

My life was full of discovery, but it was not a very long one. I lived to be 41 years old. But the secret I unlocked changed how we see the world. Because I figured out how to read hieroglyphs, we can now understand the incredible history of ancient Egypt. My work helped start a whole new science called Egyptology. People remember me as the man who gave ancient Egypt its voice back, allowing its amazing stories to be told forever.