For more than 3,000 years, hieroglyphs were used to write the language of ancient Egypt. Then the script disappeared from use. The latest known hieroglyphic inscription was carved by a priest into the gate of Hadrian on the Egyptian island of Philae at Aswan on 24 August ad 394. Knowledge of how to read the hieroglyphs vanished in late antiquity and had to be recovered in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, deciphered with the help of the newly discovered Rosetta Stone. By opening up the world of ancient Egypt before early Greek and Hebrew records, scholars doubled the time span of accessible history.
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