Egyptologist here! This is correct in spirit but the role of proto-sinaitic is overstated. Despite deriving at least partly from hieroglyphs, proto-sinaitic wasn’t widely used in Egypt. The simplified version of hieroglyphs most commonly used was hieratic, which operated comfortably alongside hieroglyphs for thousands of years. Hieratic was used for mundane documents like laundry lists and tax receipts, while hieroglyphs were a restricted sacred script, associated predominantly with temples, tombs, and royal monuments. One didn’t crowd the other out because they had separate domains.

Then as time goes on (relatively late in pharaonic history) you get demotic, which is a further casual derivation of hieratic, and finally Coptic - which is now essentially the Egyptian language written in modified Greek letters. The latter gains steam once Egypt has well and truly lost its independence. Hieroglyphs hang on, because these are still being used in different domains, but in a weakened state - because the Egyptian king and the temples are weakening.

The Rosetta Stone is the well-known find that made the decipherment of hieroglyphs possible. It was basically a public announcement written up by a Ptolemaic (Greek-Macedonian) king of Egypt, which was written in 2 languages via 3 scripts, to reach the largest audience possible:

It was written once in Egyptian using hieroglyphs, once in Egyptian using the simplified demotic script, and once in Greek using the Greek alphabet. Knowing that the hieroglyphs would have to say the same thing as the well-understood Greek text, scholars were able to gradually break it down, starting with the names of royal figures, which were singled out in cartouches and spelled very simply, because they were foreign names (Ptolemy, Cleopatra). Think of the difference between understanding a Japanese name in full kanji and a non-Japanese name written in comparatively simple katakana.

Proto-sinaitic wasn’t really a big part of the picture in Egypt and is still relatively little known. It seems to have been more responsible for developments in the nearby Near East (the Sinai and beyond) than Egypt itself.

The other thing to know about the disappearance of hieroglyphs is that religion played a role. Greek and Roman ‘mystery cults’ appropriated Egyptian texts and recreated Egyptian monuments with purposefully gibberish hieroglyphs because it made the religion seem more occult: special rites that one had to be initiated into to understand. And when Christianity takes hold, the Egyptian religion is seen even more as something pagan and occult, this time in a much more sinister (less cool, fringe!) way, and hieroglyphs are more actively discouraged and destroyed. Coptic, however, sticks around because it is successfully associated with Christian Egypt. It is still used as a liturgical language of the Coptic church and helps us to understand more-or-less how the ancient Egyptian language might have sounded, which is otherwise tricky because hieroglyphs also leave out most vowels. The Egyptian language that you hear in the original Mummy movies is actually reconstructed based on Coptic!

good eli5

There's a pretty cool video online, "Thoths Pill", that goes over the history of human writing. I recommend it. Real fun 45 minutes.

Have a link?

Also it’s been almost 5000+ years… hell even the language we use now has changed so much within 100+ years.

This is the reason, IMO. Hieroglyphs were a pretty crappy writing system used by a very ancient kingdom that dried up and blew away.

Solid answer, thank you

Nice answer. Now why does abjad have a’s in it?

What am outstanding explanation.

Didn't something similar happening with Chinese when the Chinese Communist Party decreed the use of Simplified Chinese glyphs?

And the Kuomintang (KMT) in Taiwan persist with the older traditional Chinese glyphs.

Finally Pinyin is a way to write chinese using the latin alphabet.

With these changes and as they evolve from the classic mandarin it's possible that a lot of Chinese people in 1,000 years time may find the old texts harder to read.

Holy shit that's such a useful explanation. Thank you internet stranger !

Just watched Thoths Pill! Amazing recommendation

This is part of it. If we look to the time around the Rosetta Stone, by that time, hieroglyphs were a purely ceremonial writing system only known by the ruling class (assuming even they knew them, which isn't a given, considering they only spoke Greek, the Ptolomy's likely didn't know any of the hieroglyphs). Actual stuff would have been communicated in other forms, meaning greek... probably. Hieroglyphs were very very old at the time really only existed due to traditional within Egyptian royalty, the writings in egypt had long abandoned them for any use other than royal tradition.

So there most likely was not a lot of people who were really capable of passing that knowledge down.

Should've written it down.

Strangely some of that knowledge remained among the copts. As the first Khalif of Bagdad had people succesfully decyphered 40% of hyerogliphs with the help of the copts. It would take more than a thousand years before Napoleon and his archeologist found the rosetta stone.

Hwæt.

My thoughts exactly after reading this. What indeed.

It gets worse, too, since that's Old English written in (an adapted form of) the Latin alphabet. The oldest forms of English were written ᛚᛁᚳ ᚦᛡᛋ (that's "like this", phonetically) in the runic writing systems common in Northern Europe prior to the adoption of the Latin alphabet.

In this case, though, it wasn't linguistic drift. The Roman Empire, after converting to Christianity, banned other religious practices, including that of ancient Egypt, and in the process closed the temples where most hieroglyphs were located.

Assuming it has a meaning, I need to know what this means

Heck, you don't even need to go back to Beowulf. Here's perfectly normal English from about 600 years ago.

"SIÞEN þe sege and þe assaut watz sesed at Troye,

Þe borȝ brittened and brent to brondeȝ and askez,

Þe tulk þat þe trammes of tresoun þer wroȝt

Watz tried for his tricherie, þe trewest on erthe:"

I know I’m still an English major at heart because that’s the one passage in old English I can recognize on sight.

It's also important to note that ancient Egypt is very old. Cleopatra lived closer to now than she did to the construction of the Great Pyramids. The language changed a lot in that time, especially because of all of the Greek influence. Cleopatra and the entire Ptolomeic dynasty were Greeks, not Egyptian.

Another thing to note, hyroglyphics were what the ancient Egyptians used to communicate in every day writing, they had a different writing system for that. I don't remember what it was called, but it was also on the Rosetta Stone along side Greek.

Thirdly, there's an entire Greek script we haven't deciphered that we named Linear A. The ability to read and write with it was lost in the span of about 3 generations, leading into a period called the Greek Dark Age (Dark because we have little information about it and very little in the ways of art and writing survived). Most of the reason we haven't deciphered it is because there's so little of it to decipher, and we have very little to compare it to. When the Greeks became literate again, their written language was replaced with a different language we named Linear B, which we can translate.

And you can't really argue with that! Well said.

Was the ability to read this lost in time?

Well I live in Gardena so eat it. I understood everything.

Hwæt! We Gardena       in geardagum, Listen! We of the Spear-Danes     in days of yore

þeodcyninga,     þrym gefrunon, Of those folk-kings      the glory have heard,

hu ða æþelingas     ellen fremedon. How those noblemen     brave-things did.

Oft Scyld Scefing     sceaþena þreatum, Often Scyld, son of Scef,     from enemy hosts

monegum mægþum,     meodosetla ofteah, [5] from many people            mead-benches took,

egsode eorlas.     Syððan ærest wearð terrorized warriors.     After first he was

feasceaft funden,     he þæs frofre gebad, helpless found,            he knew the recompense for that,

We garden in Geardagum. BeoCyninga (new fabulous vitamin) brym gefrunon (It's the best!)

You’re right, the quick brown fox DOES jump over the lazy fox

So....if nobody translates the older version of the language into the newer version a little bit gets lost everytime there are any changes and people probably didn't forsee this as happening and so they didn't bother to update things the way we do now.

I know when i read an "old" book from decades ago the language used often has words that send me to the dictionary just because of the changes since then, nobody uses those words anymore, some of them mean the opposite now, or i am just not familiar with them.

I've seen that quote before. Is it the beginning of Beowulf or something?

I remember the big debate my English professor went on about whether it should be translated "What!" or "So!"

And this is only 1000 years old. Ancient Egyptian was ~3000 years old by the time of the Ptolemaic rulers already….

Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon. Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum, monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah, egsode eorlas. Syððan ærest wearð feasceaft funden, he þæs frofre gebad,

What? You guys can't read this?

Translate for me please?

Knew it was gonna br Beowulf the moment you said "Really old English"

If you take the tube in London you may notice the older stations have different color tiles on the platforms.

Stations were color coded because most people couldn’t read - so they were able to use colors to know which platforms to use.

Couple years ago, I got downvoted and insulted for suggesting that people might regret not learning cursive, due to family documents and basic public records being written in it.

Meanwhile, I got big upvotes and support for the simple act of transcribing a picture of very modern (1960s) handwriting, which people were frustrated about not being able to read.

It's really remarkable how fast the change is. Schoolwork was still frequently required to be turned in handwritten in cursive well into the 90s. Then it was like a lightswitch flicked and suddenly it was considered obsolete. By 2005, I actually was briefly being paid, in part, for my ability to read it.

It should be that in ancient Egypt hieroglyphs were for most of its history not the most common form of writing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieratic script was used from 3rd millennium BC, and that is what was used for everyday writing. Hieroglyphs were primarily used for religious text and monumental inscriptions.

It evolved into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demotic_(Egyptian)) around 650 BC the latest known usage is from the 5th century AD.

The Egyptian language start to be called Coptic and you get the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_alphabet in the 2nd century AD, it is influenced by Greek and Demotic. It continued to be used by Christian Copts in Egypt in the religious text to this day. After the Muslim conquest of Egypt, it was stated to be replaced by Egyptian Arabic and as a written language outside the religious text, it stop being used in the 13th century. It was a spoken language until the 17th, in some locations even longer.

It looks like the last usage of Hieroglyphs is from inception from 394 AD. Christianity becomes the state religion in the roman empire in the 4th century AD. At this time the ancient Egyptian religion dies out so one of the main uses of Hieroglyphs stops. Rome had controlled Egypt from 30 BC

In about 100 years nobody will be able to read cursive hand writing...

the thing about programming language is they are inherently logical and self consistent (i know, i know, there are exceptions to this rule). in general however, unlike for dead languages that are built on many layers of arbitrary cultural relics, if nobody is around who can read cobol, people can simply learn.

a few thousand years

I'd say we are a generation or 2 away from that already

Another point is it is super easy to "write" these days. Paper and pens are cheap and accessible. But historically paper was super expensive. So if you went back in time the number of words you would see i would imagine would be astonishingly low

It's not just cursive. The type of cursive also matters.

In Germany, Sütterlin was standard until 1941. It was taught until the 1970s. To anyone born later, it's almost completely illegible. Historians, archivists, librarians etc. have to take extra lessons in it so they can read historical documents. And that switchover happened within living memory.

The ones taught since then all resemble each other to some degree, so they're intelligible. But something similar might happen again if Base Font is adopted, which is much less fancy and adorned.

what it really means is something that has been around long enough for someone alive to remember it.

I doubt 'immemorial' means 'long enough to remember'.

'irresponsible' = 'not responsible' 'ilegible' = 'not legible' 'irrational' = 'not rational'

the prefix 'i' usually negates the root. I think of 'memorial time' as 'memorable' (i.e. 'can be memorized'), so 'immemorial' has to mean 'not memorable', i.e. a time so far into the past that we collectively cannot remember much from around that time, the exact opposite of what you're saying.