The first step towards deciphering the hieroglyphs was given by Napoleon the day he came to conquer India.
Because to get to India his first stopover was Egypt. He arrived there on 2 July 1798 and was dazzled by all the wonders that the country was hiding.
There, Napoleon exclaimed the famous phrase: Soldiers! From above these pyramids, forty centuries contemplate you.
Napoleon was persecuted by Captain Nelson, who when he found him attacked him with all his fury and thus came to an end the Egyptian adventure.
But Napoleon fascinated with that country, he set up another expedition. This time he would not be military but scientific, and with him they took Dominique Vincent Denon, a cartoonist who soon arrived in Egypt devoted himself enthusiastically to drawing everything he saw with great precision.
All that information was compiled in an amazing book; La Description de l'Egipte.
There was a great wealth of drawings and descriptions, but these descriptions were silent, because no one knew the meaning of them. They were a mystery and an enigma.
But in 1790 Jean François Champollion was born.
Champollion learned to read on his own and at the age of 11 he was already reading Greek and Latin.
By chance his brother took him to visit the secretary of the Egyptian Institute in Cairo, named Fourier, who shows him his collection of papyri and hieroglyphic inscriptions in stone.
Champollion astonished asked, “Do you know how to read this?”
Fourier refused with his head, and Champollion neither sluggish nor lazy replied, “I will read it, “when I grow up.
The idea of deciphering hieroglyphs settles in his head and begins, at the age of thirteen years, studying Arabic, Syrian, Chaldean, Coptic languages. In addition to other languages of distant countries and Chinese.
While Champollion with great discipline gave himself to the study in depth, there appeared every once in a while, some researcher claimed to have deciphered them. But that only revealed ignorance of the claims, since none was just, but mere nonsense.
Hieroglyphs had always been regarded as images, and indeed they were. They all followed that stream of thought based on Horapolo. And this had further confused the head of the investigators.
It was only when Champollion decided to step away from this line of thought to consider them letters that he achieved his goal.
Hieroglycs with names of kings Drawing by myrtle Fernandez
Based on the famous black basalt stone called Rosetta, which bore bilingual inscriptions, in hieroglyphs and Greek and then, with the discovery of File's Obelisk, which also had hieroglyphic and Hellenic inscriptions, he was able to deduce from the name of the kings, framed in what could be a cartridge, the enigma of the hieroglyphics.