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The scribe of ancient Egypt belonged to the literate minority which was responsible for the enormous amount of inscriptions that have come down to us a written legacy of their civilization.It is to those few that we owe our present knowledge of their hieroglyphic and hieratic scripts, the source of their superiority.

Scribe

The hieroglyphic script contained more than 700 different picture signs, each one corresponding to one sound (or a combination of two or three sounds) or word. It was known as “Divine Language” to the Egyptian people. The signs were preserved, virtually unchanged, for 3000 years, on account of their sanctity. For this reason they were only utilized for ritual, religious and official purposes. The words were not separated and carved or carefully painted left -to-right and right-to-left.

Rosetta Stone

For everyday administration or literary use the Egyptians developed the hieratic (cursive) script by the process of mineralization from the hieroglyphs. Later it was turned into demotic script.

In 1798 Napoleon invaded Egypt as part of his Grand Empire and brought with him more than one hundred scientists, engineers and mathematicians. In 1799 the Commission discovered a basalt fragment on the west bank of the Nile at Rachid. The fragment is now known as the Rosetta Stone and is exhibited in the British Museum, London. The Rosetta Stone contains three inscriptions: in hieroglyphics, in demotic and in Greek. Jean Francois Champollion (1790 - 1832) guessed that the three texts contained the same information and it took him fourteen years (1808-1822) to decode it from Greek to the demotic and then to the hieroglyphics.