What the Sphinx Said
By DAVID STUART
"The overwhelming intensity of the experience seems to have ravaged his already fragile health, perhaps as much as the diseases rampant in the Nile Valley (and his proud insistence on drinking straight from the storied river). In 1832, the bedridden Champollion died at the age of 41, still working on his magnum opus, a dictionary and grammar of the ancient Egyptian language. Incredibly, his breakthroughs nearly died with him, for he had trained no line of students. Volumes of unpublished letters, notes and papers were left for his brother to edit and organize, many remaining unpublished for decades. In this milieu some rival scholars doubted the truth of the decipherment. It took years for others in the new field of Egyptology to fully absorb Champollion's technical insights and build on them, but they form the basis of what we today know of the hieroglyphs."
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