What was the most recent time in history where you could still find people capable of reading Ancient Egyptian documents, written in hieroglyphics? Of course, I mean before the revival of Egyptian scholarship in Europe so many centuries later.
Hieroglyphics were falling into disuse even by the time of the Ptolemies… there are items from the time that are essentially gibberish, painted using glyphs that were pretty but made no sense. Cleopatra et al. admired the culture but were foreign to it.
A better student than I will no doubt chime in, but I believe hieroglyphics were essentially lost by the time of Christ, and demotic not much thereafter.
Wikipedia says “By the 4th century, few Egyptians were capable of reading hieroglyphs”.
Do we have any information about how people typically learned to read and/or write Egyptian hieroglyphics? Was it based on a master/apprentice model of literate people occasionally taking on individual students and training them? Were there organized schools where people enrolled, attended classes, sat exams, got grades, could graduate, etc.? Was it something that was pretty much only passed down from parent to child and if your parents could read, you would be taught, but if they couldn’t, you pretty much had no chance? Obviously literacy wasn’t typically for the “common person” in those days, but for those who were rich, had connections, or were unusually bright, how did they pick up literacy?
The typical rule for much of human history applied: you went into the same profession as your father. Just about the only way to become a scribe was to be the son of a scribe.
There is some evidence that knowledge of the older hieroglyphs became a closely held secret by the scribes to ensure job security. Which is a sure-fire way to ensure the knowledge of the system gets fuzzy and eventually lost. But simplified writing systems such as demotic were used by everyday literate people. Lots of notes and scribblings have been found on pot shards and such written by them.
The Rosetta Stone was created about 195BC - combines the same text in Greek, Demiotic and Hieroglyphics. So about that time it was a fairly common written language.
The Greeks under Alexander the Great “liberated” Egypt from their earlier conquerors. Since the Alex died early, and his general Ptolemy got the Egyptian share of the empire, and his descendants held it until Cleopatra picked the wrong side - Mark Anthony. Essentially the Ptolemies seated themselves as pharaohs without seriously disturbing the ruling class or religion. SInce they displaced the Persians, they were liked. Many temples were rebuilt by them, and the Egyptian religion continued. (You can also find chapels in the Egyptian temples depicting the Ptolemies as being born and raised by Egyptian gods, to cement their right to rule).
The scribes who wrote the local writing system were generally trained and worked mainly for temples. Much like the clergy in the middle ages, who were the ones with the education and training to be the writers for ruling class, so too with Egyptian scribes.
So as the Egyptian hierarchy was replaced half-heartedly by Romans and their religion, then determinedly by Christians in the 300’s, then again by Islam in the 600’s - the temple scribes slowly dwindled. Obviously as part of the empire, it was more important to read latin and greek; with Christianity, it was important to read the bible and other books. The language and script of government also tended to be the script of commerce, so eventually of everything; plus, latin and greek dominated the wider world around them.
I don’t think late Egyptian was supplanted by Greek, Latin or (later) Arabic. Rather, it existed along side these languages while slowly developing into Coptic. It just stopped being written with heiroglyphics; instead, the Coptic alphabet was used. Coptic was a thriving literary language for at least a thousand years after heiroglyphics stopped being used, and after that it continued as a vernacular language down to the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and as a liturtical language down to today. It’s true that until the decoding of the Rosetta Stone people couldn’t read heiroglyphic inscriptions, but this wasn’t because they were written in an unfamiliar language. They were written in an unfamiliar script but in what turned out to be a well-understood language.
