So you want to write like an Egyptian, huh? Well it took several years for aspiring scribes to learn how to do it, so for the sake of time we'll just cover the basics.

Hieroglyphic writing first began around 5000 years ago. Egyptians wrote in hieroglyphs up to about 400 AD, after that they wrote in a short-hand cursive style called demotic.

Eventually everyone forgot how to write in hieroglyphs.

But now we are able to decipher hieroglyphs thanks to a special chunk of rock and a determined Egyptologist. In 1799, a soldier digging a fort in Rosetta, Egypt found a large black stone with three different types of writing on it.

The writing was a message about Ptolemy V, who was ruling Egypt at the time. Because the message was written during the time when the Greeks ruled Egypt, one of the three languages was Greek.

The other two were demotic and hieroglyphic.

People realized that the three languages on "The Rosetta Stone" said the same thing.

And even though people could read Greek, they couldn't figure out how to match up Greek words with hieroglyphic words.

For years no one was able to understand how the hieroglyphic message corresponded to the Greek one.

Finally, in 1822, a French Egyptologist named Jean François Champollion figured out how to decipher hieroglyphic writing.

He realized that the hieroglyphs that spelled "Ptolemy" were enclosed in a cartouche, so he was able to match it up to the Greek spelling.

This discovery enabled him to equate the unfamiliar hieroglyphs with familiar Greek words and to translate the entire message.