Egypt’s inscriptions had supported elaborate histories of ancient wisdom partly because so few readers could establish what they actually said. Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) helped change that condition. Hieroglyphic writing included signs for sounds as well as other kinds of signs. Once their functions could be distinguished, an inscription became something to read through repeated forms and linguistic relationships, rather than interpret solely through its pictures.
His Précis du système hiéroglyphique des anciens égyptiens (1824) explained the developing method. Knowledge of Coptic, the later form of the Egyptian language, contributed to the work. A proposed reading could be compared with names and words elsewhere, allowing one inscription to help test another. The ancient marks imposed restrictions on the interpreter that a free association among religious symbols did not.
The consequences reached beyond the reading of individual names. A group of signs might record a royal title or a conventional offering where an earlier scholar had imagined an extended account of divine creation. Such readings could unsettle histories that had depended on the monuments confirming teachings imported from other books. Egypt was becoming available through more of its own written testimony.
That testimony did not make Egyptian religion less complex or less worthy of study. It changed the grounds on which claims about it could be made. The recovery of a language offered a different kind of access from the supposed recovery of a universal doctrine. For readers interested in other undeciphered inscriptions, the achievement also supplied an example to follow. American antiquities might, they hoped, eventually yield histories as specific as those emerging from Egypt.