The secrets of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics might never have been revealed if not for the former child prodigy Jean-Francois Champollion. Born in France in 1790, he displayed a natural talent for languages from an early age and went on to master Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, Sanskrit and Coptic by his mid-teens. Champollion presented his first academic paper at 16, and by 19 he was already teaching history at a school in Grenoble. In the early 1820s, the young polyglot turned his attention toward deciphering the mysteries of the Rosetta Stone. He soon became the first philologist to recognize that the symbols of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics were both pictographic and alphabetical—a breakthrough that proved to be the key to cracking the code of a long-lost language.
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