How Champollion Cracked Egyptian Hieroglyphs

On September 14, 1822, Jean-François Champollion ran across the courtyard of the Institut de France to his brother's office, shouted "Je tiens mon affaire!" — "I've got it!" — and collapsed for five days. He had just realized that Egyptian hieroglyphs were not, as Athanasius Kircher and almost everyone after him had assumed, mystical pictures encoding pure ideas. They were a writing system. They spelled things.

The Rosetta Stone, captured by Napoleon's army in 1799 and seized by the British two years later, gave him the lever. Three scripts on one slab of granodiorite — Greek at the bottom, Demotic in the middle, hieroglyphs at the top — all carrying the same priestly decree from 196 BC. The Greek was readable in any university library. The Demotic and the hieroglyphs were not.

The English physicist Thomas Young got there first on the easy part. Working from his armchair in London between 1814 and 1819, he correctly guessed that the cartouches — the oval rings around certain hieroglyphic groups — enclosed royal names. He pulled "Ptolemy" out of one cartouche and figured out roughly six of its phonetic values. Then he stalled. Young believed, like everyone else, that hieroglyphs were fundamentally symbolic, and that the phonetic spelling only kicked in for foreign names a scribe had no other way to write.

Champollion's leap was to assume the opposite. He had spent his teens learning Coptic — the late form of Egyptian still used liturgically by Egyptian Christians — on the hunch that it was the linguistic descendant of whatever the pharaohs had spoken. By 1821 he was so fluent he kept a Coptic diary. When a copy of the Bankes obelisk inscription reached him in January 1822 with a cartouche reading what he could now see was "Cleopatra," he had two royal names with overlapping letters. The L in Ptolemy and the L in Cleopatra were the same sign. The hieroglyphs were phonetic.

The September breakthrough came when he applied the same trick to a cartouche from Abu Simbel that no one had been able to read. The first sign was a sun disk. In Coptic, "sun" was re. The next two signs were already known to him from the Greek-name cartouches as M-S. Re-m-s-s. Ramesses. A pharaoh from a thousand years before Greek influence, spelled phonetically.

That collapsed the whole field. If hieroglyphs spelled native Egyptian words, every monument, papyrus, and tomb wall in the country was suddenly a document, not a decoration. Champollion published the Lettre à M. Dacier a few weeks later, presenting the alphabet of phonetic signs to the Académie. By 1824 he had the Précis du système hiéroglyphique in print, laying out the mixed nature of the script — phonetic signs, ideograms, and unspoken determinatives all working together.

He died in 1832 at 41, exhausted from an expedition up the Nile. His grammar of Egyptian was published posthumously by his brother Jacques-Joseph, who had spent the previous decade defending the work against academic attacks from Britain and Germany. It still mostly works. The script Champollion described as a mix of phonograms, ideograms, and silent determinatives is the system Egyptologists use today, with refinements but no overhaul.

The specific obstacle he had to clear was conceptual, not technical. Eighteenth-century European scholarship treated hieroglyphs the way it treated Chinese characters around the same period: as a window onto pure thought, an ur-script that had escaped the corruption of phonetic writing. Kircher's seventeenth-century "translations" of obelisks read like mystical poetry because he assumed the signs encoded ideas directly. The cartouches were the giveaway that they didn't, and Young saw them, but it took a Coptic-trained reader to understand that what worked for foreign royal names worked for native Egyptian words too.

What is striking, reading the original 1822 Lettre, is how cautious Champollion sounds. He had every right to dunk on Young, who had publicly belittled him for years and would later accuse him of plagiarism. He doesn't. He walks through the cartouche evidence one sign at a time and lets the conclusion arrive on its own. The discipline he founded would spend the next two centuries filling in what that page implied.