ABSTRACT
THE hieroglyphic writing invented by the Egyptians, which we find as a complete system on the earliest monuments of the Thinite period, about 3,500 years before Christ, gradually fell out of use, and was replaced by Coptic and Greek, when Egypt was occupied by the Ptolemies and the Caesars. About the end of the fourth century of our era the Christians succeeded in having the Egyptian temples closed, by an edict of Theodosius of 391; the last schools of Egyptian priests which still studied the “sacred writing” disappeared at the same time. The written monuments of Egypt became unintelligible, and no direct interpretation was possible until the discovery of the bilingual Rosetta Stone and its decipherment by Champollion.
