Answer: The right answer is "moving from the details of the individual hieroglyphics to the big picture of hieroglyphics being both representations of sounds and symbols."
Explanation: Just to elaborate a little on the answer, in this excerpt from James Cross Giblin's entertaining account of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and its translation by French historian Jean François Champollion (1790-1832), the narrator is pointing out that reflecting upon the hieroglyphs further gave Champollion a chance to understand that, far from simply representing the sounds that identified the names of the pharaohs, or, as some scholars thought, having solely a symbolic meaning, hieroglyphs were both sounds and symbols. He, therefore, advanced the knowledge on the spoken language of ancient Egypt.
