Lettre à M. Dacier

It is the founding text upon which Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs were first systematically deciphered by Champollion, largely on the basis of the multilingual Rosetta Stone.

On 14 September 1822, while visiting his brother Jacques-Joseph, a great supporter of his ideas, Champollion made a crucial breakthrough in understanding the phonetic nature of hieroglyphs and proclaimed, "Je tiens l'affaire! "

[1] On 27 September 1822, he exhibited at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres a draft containing eight pages of text to a packed room.

The final version was published in late October 1822 by Firmin-Didot in a booklet of 44 pages with four illustrated plates.

[3] "It is a complex system, writing figurative, symbolic, and phonetic all at once, in the same text, the same phrase, I would almost say in the same word.