Which sentence from this excerpt contains evidence that supports the claim? But Kircher's ideas about the hieroglyphs themselves were even farther off the mark than those of Horapollo. A German priest of the 1600s, Athanasius Kircher, wrote the first grammar and vocabulary of Coptic, the language of Christian Egypt. Looking at a certain group of symbols—which actually stood for the name of a pharaoh—Kircher let his imagination run wild. Some of these scholars made otherwise significant contributions to the world's knowledge of ancient Egypt.