Which sentence from this excerpt is a fact? 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. A German priest of the 1600s, Athanasius Kircher, wrote the first grammar and vocabulary of Coptic, the language of Christian Egypt. From 1650 onward, Kircher produced several volumes of such nonsense.