Jean-François Champollion
Jean-François Champollion, also known as Champollion le jeune, was a French philologist and orientalist, known primarily as the decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphs and a founding figure in the field of Egyptology. Partially raised by his brother, the scholar Jacques Joseph Champollion-Figeac, Champollion was a child prodigy in philology, giving his first public paper on the decipherment of Demotic in his late teens. As a young man he was renowned in scientific circles, and read Coptic, Ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic.
Jean-François Champollion, by Léon Cogniet
Jacques-Joseph Champollion-Figeac, brother and faithful supporter of the scientific endeavors of Jean-François Champollion
The Rosetta stone was discovered in 1799 and has been displayed in the British Museum since 1802. This trilingual stela presents the same text in hieroglyphics, demotic and Greek, thus providing the first clues based on which Young and Champollion deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphic script.
Bonaparte Devant le Sphinx (Bonaparte Before the Sphinx) by Jean-Léon Gérôme. Napoleon Bonaparte's campaign in Egypt (1798–1801) raised the profile of Egypt and its civilization in France, and started a period of Egyptomania
Philology is the study of language in oral and written historical sources. It is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics with strong ties to etymology. Philology is also defined as the study of literary texts and oral and written records, the establishment of their authenticity and their original form, and the determination of their meaning. A person who pursues this kind of study is known as a philologist. In older usage, especially British, philology is more general, covering comparative and historical linguistics.
Cover of Indo-European Philology: Historical and Comparative by William Burley Lockwood (1969)