Happy Birthday, Jean

Today in Figeac, France, in 1790, Jean Francois Champollion was born. Possessing a talent for language, he was able to decipher the Rosetta Stone (a tablet from 195 BCE with parallel inscriptions in Greek, demotic Eygptian, and hieroglyphs) when he discovered that each of the Egyptian hieroglyphs could represent both a sound and a concept. His translations resurrected a language that had been dead for more than a thousand years. Although how much he built on the work of others (such as Akerblad and Young) remains a contentious subject, there's no denying that Champollion is the man who brought Egyptian back to life.