His studies continued at the College de France between 1807 and 1809, where he specialized in Oriental languages. he would eventually add Coptic, Ethiopic, Sanskrit, Zend, Pahlevi and Persian to his linguistic repertoire.

By the age of eighteen, he was accepted as a teacher of history and politics at Grenoble in 1809, and in the next year, he earned a doctor of letters. In 1811, he published his Introduction to Egypt Under the Pharaohs and in 1814, Egypt of the Pharaohs, or Researches in Geography, Religion, Language and History of the Egyptians Before the Invasion of Cambyses. During this period (1812), he married Rosine Blanc, who would provide him with a daughter, Zoraide, in 1824. This must have been a heady year for the young Frenchmen, for he also published the book titled Precis du systeme hieroglyphique, which expanded his earlier work on hieroglyphic translation that would serve as a basis for all later discoveries on the ancient Egyptian text.

Champollion continued to teach history and politics at Grenoble until 1816, and in 1818, he was appointed to a chair in history and geography at the Royal College of Grenoble, a position that he held until 1821. This new position apparently allowed him additional time to do research on the ancient language and the archaeology of ancient Egypt. During this period, he gained the patronage of the French kings, Louis XVIII and Charles X, which allowed him to travel on royally sponsored missions in order to examine museum collections such as those in Turin, Leghorn where he examined the Henry Salt collection which he would later persuade Charles X to purchase for the Louvre, Rome where he studied the obelisk and the papyrus of the Vatican Library, Naples and Florence.

After his return from these studies abroad, he was appointed as conservator of the Louvre Museum's Egyptian collection in 1826 and was responsible for its opening to the public in December of 1827. In 1828, he made is first and only trip to Egypt, where he was accompanied by his former Italian pupil Ippolito Rosellini (1800-1843). He had actually befriended the Italian, who would become known as the founder of Egyptology in Italy, while touring Egyptian museum collections in Italy four years earlier. This journey, known as the Franco-Tuscan expedition, was subsidized by the French government and the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Leopold II.

The purpose of this 1828-1829 Franco-Tuscan Expedition to the land of the Nile was a systematic survey, the first, of the history and geography of Egypt, as revealed in the monuments and their inscriptions; and in a sense it marked the true birth of the new discipline of Egyptology. It was Champollion s voluminous notes and sketches (and later Rosellini s finished engravings) which formed the first major body of work (after the Napoleonic Description d Egypte) that would be the basis for future field-documentation by Karl Richard Lepisus and John Gardner Wilkinson. Back in France, Champollion was made a member, in 1830, of the Acad‚mie des Inscriptions; and in 1831 a chair in Egyptian history and archaeology was created for him at the College de France. It was while he was still preparing the results of the Franco-Tuscan Expedition for publication that he was struck down in Paris by a stroke, dying there on March 4, 1832. He was buried in PЉre Lachaise cemetery.

Portrait of an atypically bearded Champollion
dressed in oriental attire, painted during his
1828-1829 Franco-Tuscon Expedition to Egypt
Father of Egyptology he might be, but Champollion's real claim to fame is as the decipherer of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. His figuring out how to do this was not a sudden revelation as is often mistakenly written but the result of a long process of self-education which had begun in the days of his childhood fascination with arcane languages. Champollion s first step towards his goal of rendering ancient Egyptian readable came in 1808, when he determined that fifteen signs of the demotic script corresponded with alphabetic letters in the Coptic language, and concluded that this modern tongue was the surviving last-stage of the ancient Egyptian one. By 1818 he had succeeded in figuring out that, while some signs were strictly symbolic ideograms, many glyphs also had phonetic value, and thus the ancient Egyptian script was, at least partially, alphabetic.

The Rosetta Stone is inevitably linked with Champollion, and it is true (facilitated by the monument s three parallel inscriptions in hieroglyphs, demotic and Greek) that he recognized on it the name Ptolmys in Greek and demotic, and thereby he could identify the same cartouched name in hieroglyphs. Three years later, in 1821, while studying a transcription of the corresponding hieroglyphic and Greek texts on an obelisk transported to England by Giovanni Belzoni (1778-1823), he recognized the name Kliopadra, and so had accumulated the alphabetic value of twelve hieroglyphs.

But Champollion had not published any of his decipherment determinations up to this time, and it was not until the next year, 1822, that he wrote his famous Lettre a M. Dacier, the permanent secretary of the French Academie des Inscriptions. Therein the French linguist revealed his embryonic results: he had figured out the use of determinatives and compiled an alphabet of twenty-six letters, including many syllabic signs, of which ten were identified correctly and two partly so, although fourteen proved to be wrong or were missing. In 1824 he followed up his Lettre with a book titled Precis du systeme hieroglyphique, which expanded his earlier results and formed the basis for all later discoveries. He also corrected mistakes by his British counterpart in deciphering the hieroglyphic puzzle, Thomas Young (1773-1879). All of this was accomplished by the time he was thirty-four. It can only be wondered what further contributions the brilliant Champollion might have made to Egyptology had it not been for his premature death