First 2025 visit: Figeac, April 5th.

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Our first event of 2025 will be a visit next month to the well-preserved mediaeval town of Figeac, one of the traditional stopovers on the Via Podiensis, the Le Puy strand of the Chemin Saint-Jacques, or pilgrim road to Santiago de Compostela. It is now designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Jean-François Champollion (1790 Figeac–Paris 1832) was a French historian and linguist who founded scientific Egyptology and played a major role in the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

By the age of sixteen, he had already mastered six ancient Oriental languages, in addition to Latin and Greek, and delivered a paper to the Academy of Grenoble. Three years later, having studied in Paris, he became professor of history at the Grenoble lycée (1809–16).

The Rosetta Stone, a stele originally displayed in an Egyptian temple of the Hellenistic period, possibly at the ancient Egyptian city of Sais in the Western Nile Delta, was later removed and used as building material in the reconstruction of the 1470 Mamluk Fort Jullien near Rashid (Rosetta) during Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt and Syria (1798–1801). It is inscribed with three versions (a Greek text along with hieroglyphic and demotic versions) of a decree issued in 196 bc in the name of King Ptolemy v Epiphanes. Removed by a French officer serving in Egypt, it was then taken to London under the terms of the surrender of Alexandria in 1801.

English physicist Thomas Young (1773–1829) made some headway in deciphering it, but it was Champollion who finally began to piece together the puzzle of the hieroglyphs. From 1821, he began publishing papers on the hieroglyphic and hieratic elements of the Rosetta Stone and went on to establish an entire list of the hieroglyphic signs and their Greek equivalents. He was the first to recognize that some of the signs were alphabetic, some syllabic, and some determinative (standing for a whole idea or object previously expressed). Though much remained to be done, the key to understanding ancient Egypt had at last been found.

Champollion became curator of the Egyptian collection at the Louvre (1826), conducted an archaeological expedition to Egypt (1828), and was appointed to the chair of Egyptian antiquities, created especially for him, at the Collège de France(1831). 

The Musée Champollion was established in 1986 in the house where the philologist was born. It has since been refurbished and expanded. The documents on display chart the tortuous route by which fragments of ancient hieroglyphs scattered across the globe were collated and eventually deciphered.