Champollion is determined to travel to Egypt to prove his theory but poor and jobless he is reduced to buying up whatever scraps of papyrus he can find and this obsession alienates his wife. The Dendera zodiac purchased by the French King Charles X threatens to challenge the biblical chronologies of church scholars, as it is believed by some to date to before the Great Flood of 2349 BC. Champollion is called in to confirm Sacy's dating of the antiquity to around 2000 BC; he disputes Sacy's dating but not Church authorities by dating it to some 2,000 years later than that during the Roman period.