The ancient Egyptians used the stem of the papyrus plant to make sails, cloth, mats, cords, and, above all, paper. Paper made from papyrus was the chief writing material in ancient Egypt, was adopted by the Greeks, and was used extensively in the Roman Empire.

Egyptian civilization developed along the Nile River in large part because the river’s annual flooding ensured reliable, rich soil for growing crops. The Egyptians kept written records using a writing system known as hieroglyphics.

The production of paper as Papyrus sheets which were the earliest form of paper material, influenced the growth of the Egyptian civilization since it was the most important writing material in the ancient world. During those times, stones, clay tablets and animal leathers were used as a surface for writing.

The ancient Egyptians used the distinctive script known today as hieroglyphs (Greek for “sacred words”) for almost 4,000 years. Hieroglyphs were written on papyrus, carved in stone on tomb and temple walls, and used to decorate many objects of cultic and daily life use.

Hieroglyph, a character used in a system of pictorial writing, particularly that form used on ancient Egyptian monuments. Hieroglyphic symbols may represent the objects that they depict but usually stand for particular sounds or groups of sounds.

Following the Roman invasion of Egypt in 30 BC the use of hieroglyphics began to die out with the last known writing in the fifth century AD.

A Full System For Deciphering Hieroglyphs Champollion’s work revealed the reason why it had been so hard to translate hieroglyphs. Although the hieroglyphic script was mainly phonetic and alphabetic, it also included picture characters that were symbols of words.

Hieroglyphs are pictures of animals or objects that are used to represent sounds or meanings. They are similar to letters, but a single hieroglyph may signify a syllable or concept.

Hieroglyphs were written on papyrus reed, which is a water or marsh plant, with tall straight hollow stems. The reeds were flattened, dried, and stuck together to make pages. The Egyptians also carved hieroglyphs onto stone and painted them on the walls of the tombs.

The earliest ancient Egyptians buried their dead in small pits in the desert. The heat and dryness of the sand dehydrated the bodies quickly, creating lifelike and natural ‘mummies’. The process included embalming the bodies and wrapping them in strips of linen. Today we call this process mummification.

The big way in which hieroglyphs changed was that, as time went on, more were created. Because of this, later hieroglyph texts, such as the Rosetta Stone, are more valuable in terms of deciphering hieroglyphs than earlier artifacts would be: the newer texts potentially have more hieroglyphs than the older ones could.