The Ancient Egyptian Language spanned over 4,000 years, evolving significantly through five main phases: Old, Middle, Late, Demotic, and finally, Coptic. The writing systems used to record these phases are equally complex, centered on Hieroglyphs, a beautiful and highly pictorial script primarily reserved for monumental inscriptions and sacred texts. For everyday administrative and religious documents written on papyrus, the cursive Hieratic script was used, which later developed into the even more shorthand Demotic script during the Late Period. The ability to read this language was lost for over a millennium until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799, which provided the key needed for Jean-François Champollion to finally decode the hieroglyphs by comparing the same decree written in hieroglyphs, Demotic, and ancient Greek.