Champollion Museum

The place to start if you want the whole map of human writing before printing enters the story. This museum in Figeac, the birthplace of Jean-François Champollion, who cracked the mystery of Egyptian hieroglyphs, describes itself as the only museum in Europe given over to the history of the world's writing. The collection travels from Mexico to China by way of the Mediterranean, so you can compare how very different cultures found their own ways to record speech. Even the building joins in: its facade is cut through with a thousand different written signs.