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How and when did hieroglyphics vanish?

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Over time all sorts of religions cropped up in Egypt, including Jews and the Roman one and many others. The ability to read the hieroglyphs was lost, and the earlier temples abandoned. Essentially, the ancient culture simply was dissolved into the new cultures that came in through invasion and trade. read more

Hieroglyphic writing remained a fixture in traditional temples — Greeks and then the Romans continued to support the traditional Egyptian priesthood — but the language of business and law was Greek. Hieroglyphics had never been the language of ordinary people anyway — they were a formal script for religious and government use. read more

The hieroglyphic system used in ancient Egypt had between 700 and 800 basic symbols, called glyphs. This number grew in the last centuries of ancient Egyptian civilization, because of an increased interest in writing religious texts. Egyptians wrote hieroglyphs in long lines from right to left, and from top to bottom. read more

Well, they didn’t exactly “vanish” — but they did drop out of use. Egypt lost its independence for good to the Persians in 343 BC. Alexander the Great took over from the Persians in 332. For them then until the Arab conquest a thousand years later, Greek was the language of government in Egypt. read more

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