Jean-François Champollion’s breakthrough revealed that ancient Egypt’s mysterious symbols could represent sounds as well as ideas, opening thousands of years of written history to modern scholarship.
THE UNIVERSAL RECORD
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Brad Socha | September 27, 2026 | 9:53 AM EST
On September 27, 1822, French scholar Jean-François Champollion presented the work that transformed the study of ancient Egypt. Before the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris, he explained a system for reading Hieroglyphs that had resisted generations of scholars.
The breakthrough did not happen in isolation. It grew from years of international scholarship, Champollion’s knowledge of languages including Coptic, earlier discoveries by British polymath Thomas Young, and one extraordinary archaeological object: the Rosetta Stone.
The British Museum regards the public reading of Champollion’s Lettre à M. Dacier on September 27 as the moment of decipherment. It did not instantly make every Egyptian inscription readable, but it established a crucial principle: hieroglyphic writing was not simply a collection of symbolic pictures. Many signs could represent the sounds of the ancient Egyptian language.
That realization helped give ancient Egypt its written voice back.
The Rosetta Stone Provides a Key
By the beginning of the 19th century, knowledge of how to read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing had been lost for many centuries. Scholars could examine the monuments, temples and inscriptions left by ancient Egyptians, but much of what those inscriptions actually said remained inaccessible.
A major opportunity appeared in 1799.
During Napoleon Bonaparte’s campaign in Egypt, French soldiers working near the town of Rashid, known to Europeans as Rosetta, discovered a large inscribed stone. The Rosetta Stone carried versions of the same priestly decree in three scripts: hieroglyphic, Demotic and ancient Greek.
Greek could be read. Egyptian hieroglyphs could not.
That provided scholars with something approaching a linguistic bridge.
After the French defeat in Egypt, the Rosetta Stone passed into British possession under the terms associated with the 1801 surrender of Alexandria. It arrived at the British Museum in 1802. Copies and impressions of its inscriptions circulated among European scholars, allowing researchers in different countries to work on the problem.
Thomas Young made important progress. He demonstrated that some hieroglyphs in a cartouche, the oval enclosure surrounding certain royal names, represented sounds in the name of Ptolemy. Young also investigated connections among hieroglyphic, hieratic and Demotic writing.
Champollion went further.
Born in 1790, he developed an intense interest in ancient languages and became particularly knowledgeable in Coptic, the latest historical stage of the Egyptian language. That knowledge would become essential because it gave him a linguistic connection between the surviving Coptic language and words represented in ancient Egyptian writing.
Champollion compared royal names written in different scripts and studied inscriptions beyond the Rosetta Stone. Names such as Ptolemy and Cleopatra helped him assign phonetic values to individual signs.
But the decisive advance was recognizing that phonetic writing was not restricted to foreign Greek and Roman names.
Champollion Unlocks the Hieroglyphs
In September 1822, Champollion realized that the phonetic principle could also be applied to the names of ancient Egyptian rulers.
The discovery overturned a major obstacle to decipherment. Hieroglyphic writing was far more sophisticated than a simple system in which each picture represented an object or abstract idea. Signs could function in different ways: some represented sounds, while others conveyed words or helped clarify meaning.
Champollion completed his famous Lettre à M. Dacier on September 22. The work was addressed to Bon-Joseph Dacier, permanent secretary of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.
Five days later, on September 27, Champollion presented his findings before the Académie in Paris. Thomas Young was among those present.
The Lettre concentrated heavily on phonetic hieroglyphs used in the names and titles of Greek and Roman rulers. Champollion continued developing the implications of his discovery afterward, demonstrating that the phonetic component of Egyptian writing reached much further back into pharaonic history.
The roles of Young and Champollion later became a source of scholarly rivalry. Young argued that his earlier work had provided important foundations for Champollion’s achievement. That contribution is now widely recognized: Young had correctly identified phonetic elements and made significant progress with the name Ptolemy. Champollion, however, developed the broader system that demonstrated how the Egyptian language itself could be read through hieroglyphic writing.
His achievement therefore rested both on earlier scholarship and on a decisive conceptual advance of his own.
The consequences reached far beyond the translation of individual inscriptions.
For centuries, much of ancient Egypt had been interpreted primarily through surviving monuments, archaeological remains and accounts written by outsiders. Decipherment increasingly allowed Egyptians’ own administrative records, religious texts, royal inscriptions, correspondence and other writings to become accessible.
Champollion continued refining his system during the remaining decade of his life. He travelled to Egypt in 1828 and saw inscriptions firsthand that he could now read. He died in Paris in 1832 at only 41.
His work helped establish the foundations of modern Egyptology, while later generations of scholars continued correcting and expanding the understanding of ancient Egyptian grammar and writing.
The Rosetta Stone consequently became much more than an archaeological artifact. Its parallel inscriptions provided evidence that Young, Champollion and other scholars could compare across languages and scripts.
September 27, 1822, marks the point when that long investigation produced a publicly demonstrated method capable of opening ancient Egyptian writing to systematic study. Hieroglyphs that had remained largely unreadable for centuries could once again be approached as language, not merely as mysterious symbols carved into stone.
Sources:
British Museum — How Egyptian Hieroglyphs Were Decoded: A Timeline to Decipherment
https://www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/hieroglyphs-unlocking-ancient-egypt/egyptian-hieroglyphs-decipherment-timeline
British Museum — Eureka! Finding the Key to Ancient Egypt
https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/eureka-finding-key-ancient-egypt
British Museum — The Rosetta Stone Collection Record
https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA24
British Museum — The Rosetta Stone: Everything You Need to Know
https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/everything-you-ever-wanted-know-about-rosetta-stone
Collège de France — Champollion 1822
https://www.college-de-france.fr/fr/actualites/exposition-champollion-1822
Collège de France — “Ne rien deviner… tout démontrer”: Les principes de Champollion
https://www.college-de-france.fr/fr/agenda/grand-evenement/dechiffrements-des-hieroglyphes-adn/ne-rien-deviner-tout-demontrer-les-principes-de-champollion-du-dechiffrement-expose-du-systeme
Bibliothèque nationale de France — Lettre à M. Dacier relative à l’alphabet des hiéroglyphes phonétiques, 1822
https://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb30219327z
About the Author
Brad Socha is the founder of The Universal Record, focused on sourced, factual global reporting. Coverage includes international news, geopolitics, technology, and major developments.