Jean-Joseph Marcel

Jean-Joseph Marcel (24 November 1776 – 11 March 1854) was a French printer and engineer.

During the French Campaign in Egypt, the Rosetta Stone was discovered and transported to Cairo for examination by scholars.

[1] Jean-Joseph Marcel, who was also a gifted linguist, is credited as the first person to recognise that the middle text of the Rosetta Stone, originally guessed to be Syriac, was in fact the Egyptian demotic script, rarely used for stone inscriptions and therefore seldom seen by scholars at that time.

[2] It was Marcel, along with the artist and inventor Nicolas-Jacques Conté, who figured out a way to use the Stone as a printing block.

When he returned to France, on 1 January 1803, Marcel was appointed the Director of the Imperial Press, where he remained until 1815.