Jean-François Champollion

A child linguistic prodigy in Grenoble who mastered Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Chaldean, and Coptic by age sixteen, Champollion became convinced that Coptic was the surviving spoken descendant of ancient Egyptian.

On September 14, 1822, by matching the Greek cartouches of Ptolemy and Cleopatra with demotic and hieroglyphic scripts on the Rosetta Stone, he cracked the phonetic code, famously bursting into his brother's office shouting: 'Je tiens mon affaire!' before collapsing from exhaustion. Appointed first curator of Egyptian antiquities at the Louvre, he led the historic 1828 Franco-Tuscan expedition to Egypt.