Jean Champollion (1790-1832) was very good at languages. He learnt twelve languages in his lifetime. When he was eighteen, he began teaching history at university. He was younger than many of his students.
Jean was very interested in ancient Egypt. In 1821, he began to study the Rosetta Stone(罗塞塔石碑). A group of soldiers found stone at Rosetta when Jean was still a young boy. It was under the sand for hundreds of years before they dug it up. There was a lot of strange writing on the stone. The writing was in three languages. One of the languages was ancient Egyptian. No one could read it at that time. But Jean worked out its secret.
Ancient Egyptian was not a language with letters and works like English. It was made up of signs. According to many experts, these signs showed things and ideas. Jean did not completely agree. He thought that some of them showed sounds. He found fifteen signs of this kind in his study of the Rosetta Stone. Today it is possible to understand ancient Egyptian from 4,000 years ago because of Jean's discovery.