As he thought about the hieroglyphs in Thothmes' and
Ramesses' names, Champollion realized their
significance. It went far beyond the names themselves
and gave him an insight into the entire system of
hieroglyphic writing. For the names revealed that
hieroglyphs were not simply representations of sounds.
Nor did they have an exclusively symbolic meaning, as
Thomas Young and other scholars had long believed.
Instead, they were a combination of the two.
-The Riddle of the Rosetta Stone,
James Cross Giblin