This biography of Jean-François Champollion covers his life and his role in deciphering the Egyptian hieroglyphics. ( )

This book, printed in China for the Oxford University Press, is not the first in English or in translation from French, about this extraordinary man, Jean-Francois Champollion. It is printed on a thick, heavy, high quality paper that, I would imagine, will make it difficult for you to give away after reading. (272 pages including color plates weighing 1.95 pounds.)

The author's beat or wheelhouse, so to speak, is codebreaking and the polymaths who accomplish it, or, perhaps, accomplished it before the advent of computers. He takes a very biographical approach and on pages 127-128 explains that a lack of documentation makes it impossible to know step by step how Champillion actually unlocked the meaning of the hieroglyphic section of the Rosetta Stone.

Champillion was mercurial and often tactless, never good qualities and certainly not in unsettled post-Napoleonic France. Although Champillion knew from an early age, thanks to his bookseller father and autodidact older brother, that Egyptology would be his chosen career, he got a late start on the Rosetta Stone.

But by then an English polymath, Thomas Young, had discovered the key to understanding hieroglyphics. A cursory glance at hieroglyphics will intuitively tell you these little drawings are symbols, representative of meaning or words. This was a misconception from the beginning of the study of ancient Egyptian writing in the late 1600s.

Imagine if instead of writing an "a" you drew an apple, instead of a "b" a teddy bear, and on through the alphabet to a xylophone for a "z." It doesn't sound too plausible, does it? And yet that was Young's discovery, that hieroglyphics was largely a phonetic alphabet.

As the author Andrew Robinson explains, it is highly unlikely that Champollion made this discovery independently of Young. And yet to Champollion's discredit that is what he insisted. Young was very gracious about it. He was a true polymath who spread himself thin discovering the interference of light and astigmatism among other things. Champollion had settled down at this point in his life and was able to take Young's nascent discovery and run with it to completion. Later they made up so the story ends happily in this regard.

One issue I had was that late in the book on page 149 and late in Champollion's career, he made the observation that the Rosetta Stone contained 486 Greek words and 1,419 hieroglyphs and came to the logical conclusion that hieroglyphs must be letters not words. That strikes me as rather slow thinking for a polymath.

On page 244 is mentioned the discovery in 1866 of a second Rosetta-like stone which was quickly translated with Champollion's decipherment glossary thereby validating his work beyond doubt. ( )