A Brill Calendar: September 14

Few calendar days of the annals of scholarschip have become more famous than September 14 1822.

On that day, what is perhaps the best-known exclamation in European learning and inventiveness was born: “Je tiens l’affaire”, or “I’ve got it”, (roughly translated). The man who uttered it was Jean–François Champollion (Figeac, December 23 1790 – Paris, March 4 1832. Champollion’s brother, almost 12 years his senior, became a champion for the astounding flash of insight of his much younger sibling.

By 1806 the boy had already mastered six ancient languages as they used to be written in the Eastern parts of the Mediterranean. As professor of history at the ‘Lycée’ of Grenoble, young Champollion developed a passion for deciphering hieroglyphic writing; an all-devouring infatuation in the years to follow. In 1822, Champollion published his sensational triumph. However, it is seldom that reduction of years and years of solitary work and painstaking drudgery benefit from the reduction of such a process into one moment of blissful insight.

The emergence of Egyptology as an indispensable element of academic curricula in Europe needed one wholly human contingent process: starting well before the necessary condition for Champollion’s major claim to popular fame – the Rosetta Stone – had caught the fancy of scholars.