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About 5000 years ago, the Egyptians began using a writing system. They started off using pictures, and ended up with hieroglyphs. Hieroglyphs were also known as "sacred inscriptions" because they were often written on the walls of temples.
The Egyptians used hieroglypic writing for over 3500 years, until around AD 391 when the Byzantine Emperor Theodosius I closed all pagan temples throughout the empire. At the same time, the people started writing using the Greek alphabet. Several letters were added because there were more Egyptian sounds than Greek letters to represent them. This new form of Greek/Egyptian is called Coptic. Coptic was eventually replaced by Arabic, which is spoken in Egypt today. Because of the closure of the temples coupled with the change of languages, no one was able to understand the hieroglyphs.
The key to deciphering hieroglyphs wasn't discovered until 1799, when it was literally unearthed in Egypt. The Rosetta Stone was discovered by accident by a group of Frenchmen who had gone to Egypt with Napoleon's invading army. They were preparing to build a fortress at the modern town of Rashid (a.k.a Rosetta), when they uncovered a broken stela covered with writing. The stela has been dated precisely to March 27, 196 B.C. The reason this stela is valuable is because the decree on it was written in more than one language.
The stone is divided into three sections, each with the same decree written in a different language. The top language is hieroglyphs, the middle is a language is Demotic - a commonly spoken Egyptian language from that time - and the bottom section is ancient Greek. No one deciphered the meaning of the writings until 1821, when Jean-Francois Champollion (1790-1832) started translating the symbols.