Carlos Blanco

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Carlos Blanco (born in Coslada, Madrid, on March 7, 1986) is a Spanish Egyptologist and philosopher, famous for his collaboration as a child prodigy on television and radio programs distributed in Spain, Egypt, and South America.

[edit] Biography

Born in Coslada, (Madrid), he began to speak when he was seven months old and by age two he learned to read. Highly concerned with Science and Politics since an early age, by age eight he became interested in ancient languages, studying on his own Egyptian and Sumerian. In 1997, when he was eleven years old, he was admitted to the Spanish Association of Egyptology.

In May 1998, after getting the highest mark in the official course on Egyptian hieroglyphs, he was reckoned by the Spanish national newspaper El Mundo as the youngest Egyptologist in Europe and the youngest hieroglyphs decipherer in the world, and by age 12 he was named honorary member of the Clos Archaeological Foundation (Barcelona), giving his first lectures at the Egyptian Museum of Barcelona and publishing his first papers on Egyptology. In the same year, he was invited to visit Egypt by the Egyptian Government and he was awarded a scholarship to study Arabic at the Egyptian Institute of Islamic Studies (Madrid), where he took two years on this language. He was simultaneously engaged with English, French, German, Arabic, Hebrew, Egyptian, Latin and Minoan (writing a paper on the decipherment of the Phaistos Disk in 1998), which made of him a celebrated prodigious polyglot in his country.

In 1999, when he was 13 years old, he became very popular in Spain for his interventions at Crónicas Marcianas, one of the leading TV programs of the moment, where under the label of "superdotado" (in Spanish, name referring to highly gifted children) he spoke every week about science, philosophy, history and politics. He was particularly well known for his public dissertations on Egyptian hieroglyphs and ancient science. He was invited for a second time to Egypt, where he was interviewed in Good Evening, Egypt, and he went to Argentina, where he was interviewed by the journalist Samuel “Chiche” Gelblung in Buenos Aires.

In 2000, the Karid Riga Saïd Foundation appointed him to study at Westminster School, London, where he began his interest for Russian, Chinese, Greek and Sanskrit with professor Jonathan Katz. In 2001, being 15, he was awarded a new scholarship to attend lessons at the University of Navarra (Spain), and he pursued a course in Coptic language with the scholar G. Aranda. Having finished his degree of Master in Philosophy ("licenciado") in June 2006 at the University of Navarra, he is now studying Theology (fifth year), Chemistry (fourth year) and Russian language (third year), and is a member of the International Association of Egyptologists and of the Asociación Española de Superdotados y con Talento.