Frenchman Jean-François Champollion died at just 41. A few years earlier, he had published the book “Precis du systeme hieroglyphique”: thanks to the decoding of the Rosetta Stone, for the first time in 14 centuries it was finally possible to read the history of the pharaohs in hieroglyphics. This progress had also been made possible by the Englishman Thomas Young, who made a giant leap forward in the interpretation of the Rosetta Stone and, in particular, in understanding the sound and pronunciation of the ancient Egyptian language. The key features were the cartouches, small groups of hieroglyphs surrounded by a continuous line, a kind of thin frame. He discovered that these words were framed because they represented the names of important figures, such as Ptolemaios (Ptolemy), Berenika (Berenice), or Cleopatra. Since the sound of these names would have been approximately the same in different languages, he was able to understand the phonetics of several hieroglyphs. Then, in 1822, the Frenchman Jean-François Champollion applied this methodology to other cartouches, and with a few assumptions (for example, scribes often tended to omit vowels, thinking that a reader would guess them anyway, as with Alksentrs, representing Alexander), Champollion managed to decipher the Rosetta Stone. He burst into his brother’s office and exclaimed, “Je tiens l’affaire!”
