Tribute To A Frenchman

When we see pictures of the Great Pyramids or The Sphinx at the Giza plateau just outside Cairo, or the amazing paintings and writings on hundreds of temples and on Granite Obelisks of Egypt, we forget a very important person! Who made all this possible? Because of whom can we understand today, what was written almost 5000 years ago? Who resurrected single handedly the history of a nation?

The Indus Valley and their great civilization is mind boggling, but mute! None can read what the Indus Valley scribes wrote millennia ago! We certainly can read what the Chinese wrote and there never was a period so dark that we could not read what the ancient calligraphers wrote in the Chinese language!

Hieroglyphics of the ancient Egyptians was a dead language for almost 4000 years until a young Frenchman by the name of Jean François Champollion (1790-1832) came to Egypt with Napoleon’s unusual ‘army’! This young Champollion after almost 20 years of hard, back breaking work deciphered this ancient language and laid the basis of what is known today as Egyptology!

It is easy to say that Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt in 1798. But never has a nation invaded another with this unusual and diverse teams of 167 scientists, members of the balloon corps, engineers, printers, geometers, astronomers, zoologists, botanists, artists (including painters, designers, sculptors and poets), mathematicians, economists, journalists, and so forth…

This tenacious Frenchman born on Dec. 23, 1790, has gone down in history as the man who succeeded in deciphering hieroglyphics, the ancient script of Egypt, on the Rosetta Stone, and numerous other documents. Yet, it was not merely a question of breaking a code, as one might imagine. Because of this single discovery, the ancient history of a mighty nation and a very important part of history was revealed.

Rosetta or in Arabic “Rasheed” is a small town on the Mediterranean about 45 kilometers from Alexandria. To this day the Rosetta Stone is in the British Museum after the British took the famous stone from the French in a war.

The only duplicated item in the huge Egyptian Museum today is a replica of this famous stone! The most important item in shining the light on Egypt is under a dim light in the British museum, well “protected” !