The discovery that, by combining different hieroglyphs, evocative visual emblems might be created inspired these last scribes to experiment with increasingly complicated and abstruse combinations. In short, these scribes began to formulate a sort of kabbalistic play, based, however, on images rather than on letters. Around the term represented by a sign (which was given an initial phonetic reading) there formed a halo of visual connotations and secondary sense, a sort of chord of associated meanings which served to amplify the original semantic range of the term. The more the sacred text was enhanced by its exegetes, the more the conviction grew that they expressed buried truths and lost secrets (Sauneron 1957: 123-7).

Thus, to the last priests of a civilization sinking into oblivion, hieroglyphs appeared as a perfect language.

(of Kircher and his attempts to decipher hieroglyphs before the Rosetta Stone):

The hieroglyphic configuration had become a sort of machine to the inducing of hallucinations which then could be interpreted in any possible way.

—UMBERTO ECO, The Search for the Perfect Language