Antoine Galland (17631851) was a publisher and printer during the French Revolution and First Empire. As a printer, he joined the

Commission des Sciences et des Arts The Commission des Sciences et des Arts (''Commission of the Sciences and Arts'') was a French scientific and artistic institute. Established on 16 March 1798, it consisted of 167 members, of which all but 16 joined Napoleon Bonaparte's campaign ...

, a body of technical experts (''savants'') sent to

Egypt Egypt ( , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a country spanning the Northeast Africa, northeast corner of Africa and Western Asia, southwest corner of Asia via the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to northe ...

in 1798 to aid the work of the French expeditionary force in its successful invasion. He was therefore in

Cairo Cairo ( ; , ) is the Capital city, capital and largest city of Egypt and the Cairo Governorate, being home to more than 10 million people. It is also part of the List of urban agglomerations in Africa, largest urban agglomeration in Africa, L ...

when the newly discovered

Rosetta Stone The Rosetta Stone is a stele of granodiorite inscribed with three versions of a Rosetta Stone decree, decree issued in 196 BC during the Ptolemaic dynasty of ancient Egypt, Egypt, on behalf of King Ptolemy V Epiphanes. The top and middle texts ...

arrived in the city. With two other experts (

Jean-Joseph Marcel Jean-Joseph Marcel (24 November 1776 – 11 March 1854) was a French printer and engineer. He was also a ''savant'' who accompanied Napoleon's 1798 campaign in Egypt as a member of the Commission des Sciences et des Arts, a corps of 167 technical ...

and

Nicolas-Jacques Conté Nicolas-Jacques Conté (; 4 August 1755 – 6 December 1805) was a French inventor of the modern pencil. He was born at Saint-Céneri-près-Sées (now Aunou-sur-Orne) in Normandy and distinguished himself for his mechanical genius, which was of ...

) he was called on to make lithographic copies from the stone. These copies, the first seen in Europe, were used by

Silvestre de Sacy Antoine Isaac, Baron Silvestre de Sacy (; 21 September 175821 February 1838), was a French nobleman, linguist and orientalist. His son, Ustazade Silvestre de Sacy, became a journalist. Life and works Early life Silvestre de Sacy was born in Pa ...

and Johan David Åkerblad in their early attempts to decipher the

hieroglyphic Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs ( ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined ideographic, logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with more than 1,000 distinct characters. ...

and

demotic script Demotic (from ''dēmotikós'', 'popular') is the ancient Egyptian script derived from northern forms of hieratic used in the Nile Delta. The term was first used by the Greek historian Herodotus to distinguish it from hieratic and Egyptian hiero ...

s. On his return to France, Galland in 1802 first published a two-volume memoir of the expedition.

Works

*''Tableau de l'Égypte pendant le séjour de l'armée française''. Paris: Galland, an XIII

804 __NOTOC__ Year 804 ( DCCCIV) was a leap year starting on Monday of the Julian calendar. Events By place Abbasid Caliphate * Battle of Krasos: Emperor Nikephoros I refuses to pay the tribute imposed by Caliph Harun al-Rashid of the A ...

2 vols
Text of vol. 1
(Google Books) 1763 births 1851 deaths French printers Commission des Sciences et des Arts members 18th-century French publishers (people) 19th-century French publishers (people) {{France-business-bio-stub