Ancient Egyptian core phrases.

Ancient Egyptian was the language of the land of the Pharaohs spoken initially around the area of the Nile River in Egypt.

From early on a very complicated writing system was developed to record the language -the so-called Hieroglyphics ,the sacred writing in translation from Greek , carved into stone mainly for religious and show of power purposes initially.

And that is why they were called divine words-medu neter by Ancient Egyptians.

It is the second oldest recorded language in the world after Sumerian. Its first written records date back to about six thousand years ago from 4th millennium BC. Its first attested fully written phrase dates back to 2690 BC.

Special scribes were employed to carve those inscriptions into stone. Obviously it took many years of training to learn the script due to its complexity.

Hieroglyphics

Later the Hieratic script was used for everyday use which was simpler and more suitable to write on papyrus.

Hieratic script

Finally a more cursive form appeared the Demotic script for fast writing.

Demotic script

All the Ancient Egyptian alphabets eventually gave way to the Greek alphabet which was adopted for the Coptic language, the final stage of the Ancient Egyptian language.

the Rosetta Stone

It was a complete mystery what the Hieroglyphics read up until the 1800s when the Rosetta stone was discovered by a French officer in Egypt. The stone dated to the Ptolemaic rule of Egypt and it had three versions of the same text.

The first in Hieroglyphics, the second in the Demotic script and the third in Ancient Greek.

The Greek text and the realisation that it was the same text in all three parts helped tremendously crack the code and decipher the Egyptian Hieroglyphics.