The ancient Egyptians wrote in hieroglyphs, a form of picture-writing with 700 different symbols. Hieroglyphs were written by professional writers called scribes. They were deliberately difficult to write so that scribes could keep a special position in society. Hieroglyphs could be written from left to right, right to left, or top to bottom. They were written on state monuments, temples, and tombs.
For contracts, letters and stories, scribes wrote in script writing called hieratic. That was always written from left to right. Later an even faster script was developed called demotic.
Hieroglyphs were written on a type of paper called papyrus. It was made from cutting out the centre of the papyrus plant stem, and then cutting that into strips. The strips were then layered on top of each other, and covered with linen fabric to make paper.
In the year 6 AD the skill of reading hieroglyphs was lost until a stone was found at Rosetta in Egypt in 1799. On the stone was the same piece of writing in three different languages: Greek, demotic, and hieroglyphs. People were then able to work out what the hieroglyphic writing said.
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