Egyptian hieroglyphs

Egyptian hieroglyphs were the formal used in Ancient Egypt. Hieroglyphs combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with a total of some 1,000 distinct characters.

Between the 5th century BCE and the Renaissance, knowledge of hieroglyphs was entirely lost. Many experts attempted to decipher the language with little success. Some groundwork was made in discovering the grammatical structure, and in the confirmation that coartouches were markers for the names of royalty. The next big breakthrough in deciphering the language came with the unearthing of the Rosetta Stone.

In 1799, a soldier from Napoleon's army found the Stone. The fact that the stone was written in three different languages; hieroglyphics, demotic, and Greek, meant that experts could finally translate it from something else. The hieroglyphic section of the stone was only fully translated more than twenty years after it had been found by Jean-François Champollion. In his autographical manuscript La Grammaire égyptienne, Champollion noted that hieorglyphs were not only ideograms but also phonograms. The language consisted of phonetic glyphs, single characters, and logograms. Essentially being a combination of phonetics, alphabet and full words which in total formed a language.