Jean-François Champollion (Rosetta Stone)
During the Napoleonic expedition in 1798, the ancient Egyptian civilization was rediscovered. One of the scholars brought by Napoleon was Jean-François Champollion, who would decipher eleven letters in the Egyptian alphabet when he found some inscriptions on an obelisk. Then, with the help of the Rosetta Stone, after twenty years of labor he deciphered the entire Egyptian alphabet.
Source: Durant, Will, The Story of Civilization, Vol. 1: Our Oriental Heritage New York: Simon & Schuster, 1954.
Public Domain
License CC BY 4.0
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Full disclosure, I may occasionally borrow a sentence from Will Durant's Story of Civilization. I absolutely love that collection!