This biography of the Champollion brothers was published in Grenoble in 1887. Jean-Francois (1790 1832) was a child prodigy who had taught himself numerous ancient languages in his teenage years, despite not having received any formal education. Having become an assistant professor of history at Grenoble in his nineteenth year, Jean-Francois published a decipherment of the trilingual Rosetta Stone in 1824, thus offering the key to an understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphics and consequently of the civilisation of ancient Egypt. His older brother, Jacques-Joseph (1778 1867), although a less...