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In 1817, Champollion read a review of his "''Égypte sous les pharaons''", published by an anonymous Englishman, which was largely favorable and encouraged Champollion to return to his former research.{{sfn|Adkins|Adkins|2000|p=142}} Champollion's biographers have suggested that the review was written by Young, who often published anonymously, but Robinson, who wrote biographies of both Young and Champollion, considers it unlikely, since Young elsewhere had been highly critical of that particular work.{{sfn|Robinson|2012|pp=115–116}} Soon Champollion returned to Grenoble to seek employment again at the university, which was in the process of reopening the faculty of Philosophy and Letters. He succeeded, obtaining a chair in history and geography,{{sfn|Bianchi|2001|p=260}} and used his time to visit the Egyptian collections in Italian museums.{{sfn|Bianchi|2001|p=260}} Nonetheless, most of his time in the following years was consumed by his teaching work.{{sfn|Adkins|Adkins|2000|pp=140–145}}
Meanwhile, Young kept working on the Rosetta stone, and in 1819, he published a major article on "Egypt" in the ''[[Encyclopædia Britannica]]'' claiming that he had discovered the principle behind the script. He had correctly identified only a small number of phonetic values for glyphs, but also made some eighty approximations of correspondences between Hieroglyphic and demotic.{{sfn|Weissbach|2000}} Young had also correctly identified several logographs, and the grammatical principle of pluralization, distinguishing correctly between the singular, dual and plural forms of nouns. Young nonetheless considered the hieroglyphic, linear or cursive hieroglyphs (which he called [[hieratic]]) and a third script which he called epistolographic or enchorial, to belong to different historical periods and to represent different evolutionary stages of the script with increasing phoneticism. He failed to distinguish between hieratic and demotic, considering them a single script. Young was also able to identify correctly the hieroglyphic form of the name of [[Ptolemy V]], whose name had been identified by Åkerblad in the demotic script only. Nonetheless, he
Later the British Egyptologist [[Peter Le Page Renouf|Sir Peter Le Page Renouf]] summed up Young's method: 'He worked mechanically, like the schoolboy who finding in a translation that ''Arma virumque'' means 'Arms and the man," reads ''Arma'' "arms," ''virum'' "and", ''que'' "the man." He is sometimes right, but very much oftener wrong, and no one is able to distinguish between his right and his wrong results until the right method has been discovered.'{{sfn|Adkins|Adkins|2000|p=172}} Nonetheless, at the time it was clear that Young's work superseded everything Champollion had by then published on the script.{{sfn|Adkins|Adkins|2000|p=122}}
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