»Achilles, heal thyself.

Roy and Leslie Adkins' stirring account of Jean-François Champollion's life, spent in pursuit of hieroglyphics, revealed that this young linguist, hailed as a genius from a very early age, struggled with German. Of all the modern languages (French, English, Italian, the latter two necessary for reading scholarship) and the oriental and african languages (Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, Chaldean, Persian, Greek, Latin, Demotic, and especially Coptic), he encountered problems with the most structured of modern European languages?

I didn't realise that the decipherement of the Rosetta Stone didn't take place for many years after Champollion's discovery.

Although the Adkins' book tosses in odd bits of sensationalism (describing the work of an English antiquariam, "... he was a homosexual ...") and often irrelevant and unedifying asides, it is a decent account of the struggle to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. At times they attempt to cast Champollion and Young as fighting mano a mano, but they would do better to focus on Champollion and his stalwart brother, Jean-Jacques. They present the historical context of the Royalist upheaval in France very well.