Hieroglyphs were the Egyptians' writing: symbols, not letters, that stand for words or sounds. They can be read in columns from top to bottom or in rows from the right or the left. Scribes, the trained writers of ancient Egypt, were highly respected for their knowledge and skill. They wrote on papyrus, a paper-like material made from a plant. Egyptians also made sandals, rope, baskets, mats and small fishing boats from it. For many years, though, hieroglyphs were not understood at all.

The key was a slab of stone. French soldiers in Napoleon's army found the Rosetta Stone in 1799, near the town of Rosetta on the Nile Delta. It carries one decree in three kinds of writing: hieroglyphic, Demotic and Greek. It dates from 196 BCE and carries a decree about Ptolemy V, who was 13 years old. A council of priests passed it. The stone reached London in 1802, and as of November 2026 it is on display in the British Museum.

The stone's Greek text was a translation of the hieroglyphs. The Englishman Thomas Young first identified some of the hieroglyphs on the stone, including sounds some of the glyphs stood for. Champollion later found the name of Ptolemy V by comparing the hieroglyphs with the Greek translation. In 1822 the French scholar Jean-François Champollion announced that he had deciphered hieroglyphic writing, and showed that it mixed signs for sounds with signs for meanings.

Papyrus rolls from a much older time have turned up too. In 2013, a team found 30 papyri at the ancient port of Wadi al-Jarf on the Red Sea, the oldest inscribed papyrus ever found. They include a diary kept by an inspector named Merer. He led a crew of about 40 men on boats that carried limestone from the Tura quarries to Akhet Khufu, the Great Pyramid. The papyri show that at least some workers in Khufu's time were skilled and well rewarded for their work. Egypt did have slaves, at the bottom of its social ladder, but the pyramids were built by Egyptian laborers.

Words to know

• hieroglyphs: Egyptian picture-writing
• papyrus: reed paper
• decree: official order
• scribes: trained writers
• deciphered: decoded