Jean-François Champollion

The decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts was accomplished in the early nineteenth century by several European scholars, especially Jean-François Champollion (pictured) and Thomas Young. Egyptian writing, which included the hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic scripts, ceased to be understood in the fourth and fifth centuries AD. Afterwards, it was believed that Egyptian scripts were exclusively ideographic, representing ideas, rather than phonetic, representing sounds. The Rosetta Stone, discovered in 1799, bore a parallel text in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek, but deciphering the Egyptian text through its Greek translation proved difficult. Young, building on the work of Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy and Johan David Åkerblad, identified several phonetic signs in demotic. In the early 1820s Champollion realised the hieroglyphic script had both phonetic and ideographic elements. He identified the meanings of most phonetic hieroglyphs and established much of the grammar and vocabulary of ancient Egyptian. (Full article...)

Sea life mural by Francisco Narváez

• ... that the degradation of a mural (pictured) by Francisco Narváez in the University City of Caracas led to the formation of a group dedicated to preserving his works there?
• ... that as an attempt to Turkify its Kurdish minority and their land, the Young Turks deported 300,000 Kurds in 1916 alone and continued the deportations until the 1940s?
• ... that there is a US$5 million reward for information leading to the conviction of Gilberto Barragán Balderas?
• ... that Home for Christmas, Netflix's first Norwegian TV show, was inspired by televised Nordic Christmas calendars?
• ... that stock car driver Joey Logano's victory in the 2009 Lenox Industrial Tools 301 at the age of 19 made him the youngest person in history to win a NASCAR Cup Series race?
• ... that Reinhold Fritz of the Stuttgart Court Opera, who participated in world premieres such as Ariadne auf Naxos by Richard Strauss, was dismissed in 1933 because his wife was Jewish?
• ... that Baltimore television station WMET-TV was housed in a converted movie theater?
• ... that the 97-year-old, 499 km (310 mi) Irish land border discusses Brexit on Twitter as @BorderIrish and in its book I Am the Border, So I Am?

Coronaviruses viewed under an electron microscope

• In China, a new strain of coronavirus (examples pictured) infects more than six hundred people, killing at least eighteen.
• Mikhail Mishustin is appointed Prime Minister of Russia following the resignation of Dmitry Medvedev and his cabinet.
• Scientists announce that presolar stardust grains in the Murchison meteorite formed five to seven billion years ago, and are the oldest solid material found on Earth to date.

January 24

James W. Marshall

• 914 – The Fatimid Caliphate began their first invasion of Egypt, against the Abbasids, which eventually ended in failure.
• 1848 – James W. Marshall (pictured) discovered gold at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California, leading to the California Gold Rush.
• 1978 – The Soviet nuclear-powered satellite Kosmos 954 burned up during atmospheric reentry, scattering radioactive debris across Canada's Northwest Territories.
• 1990 – Japan launched the Hiten spacecraft, the first lunar probe launched by a country other than the Soviet Union or the United States.
• 2011 – A North Caucasian jihadist carried out a suicide bombing at Moscow's Domodedovo Airport, killing 37 people.

Richard de Bury (b. 1287) · Signe Rink (b. 1836) · Elie Hobeika (d. 2002)