Thomas Young

It also fairly presents the findings of Thomas Young, the British scientist and polymath who alone among competitors was acknowledged by Champollion to have made significant discoveries. The crown, however, must go to Champollion, who had the philological ability as well as the cryptological talent and massive determination to make the advances necessary to read and understand the hieroglyphs. It was not a process of decoding but a combination of understanding the script and then penetrating the language that lay behind it.