Ah, look at them! The beautiful hieroglyphs of the Ancient Egyptians. Aren't they just marvelous?
I'm sure we've all been fascinated by them when we were kids, and some of us remain fascinated by them to this day.
Yet I'm also sure that we've all been somewhat daunted by them - their complexity seemingly beyond human comprehension.
That was indeed the case up until quite recently - for nearly two thousand years the Ancient Egyptian language was buried in the sands of time.
It's somewhat ironic: after all, Ancient Egyptian was in use for over 4 millenia, longer than any other language in history.
And it also boasts the oldest complete sentence known to man: this short inscription exalting the Pharaoh Peribsen for uniting Upper and Lower Egypt.
It is the ancestor to nearly all major scripts in use today, via a long chain of inheritance going through the Phoenicians, Greeks and all the way to the Latins.
Now, the Ancient Egyptians were a smart bunch and realized pretty quickly that hieroglyphs were quite cumbersome to write on a regular basis, So they developed a simpler cursive script they could use for more mundane communications.
By the time our dear friend Alexander the Great conquered Egypt, this script had evolved into nearly a separate language called Demotic.
Hieroglyphs remained in use for monuments and temples, of course, but there were fewer and fewer people who could actually read them.
