![]() ![]() Trafalgar, Empires of the Plain and The Keys of Egypt. Even then he was forced to defend his reputation against attack from his critics, his success was complete: he was the first person able to read the ancient Egyptian language in well over a 1000 years. Roy and Lesley Adkins are authors of sixteen widely acclaimed books on history and archaeology. But Champollion refused to be distracted, and finally in 1822, he made the decisive breakthrough. ![]() Failure threatened, as he was only one of many attempting to read the hieroglyphs, and his main rival, the English Thomas Young, claimed that decipherment was imminent. Desite his poverty, Champollion made gradual progress, although he had to fight against jealous enemies, both professional and political, every step of the way - a dangerous task, when, in post-Revolutionary France, a slip of the tongue could mean ruin, exile or even death. Jean-Francois Champollion, the brilliant son of an impoverished bookseller, was obsessed with ancient languages from a very young age, and once he heard of the unreadable ancient Egyptian text he had found the challenge to which he would dedicate his life: the decipherment of hieroglyphs. On their return, Egyptomania spread rapidly and the quest to decipher hieroglyphs began in earnest: fame and fortune awaited the scholar who succeeded. When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, his troops were astonished to discover ancient temples, tombs and statues, all covered with hieroglyphs - the last remnants of an unreadable script and a language lost in time. ![]()
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