The father of Egyptology suffered a tragic death after deciphering the Rosetta Stone

A mystery surrounds the death of a 19^th century Frenchman who unraveled a great mystery—the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Jean-Francois Champollion died young after deciphering the Rosetta Stone, which unlocked the keys to the many enigmatic and beautiful hieroglyphic texts discovered in ruins up and down the length of Egypt and gave modern people a much greater understanding of that great civilization.

Champollion was born in 1790 in France and died there in 1832, after visiting Egypt in 1829. He had felt symptoms of malaise before departing for Egypt, according to a letter to the editor of the journal Clinical Neurophysiology by Dr. Hutan Ashrafian of the Department of Surgery and Cancer, Imperial College-London.