Writing and Comunication
The most famous of the ancient Egyptian scripts is hieroglyphic, a formal writing system consisting of only pictures, as seen on the image above. This started to be used around 3250 BC. The word hieroglyph came from the Greek word for "sacred carving" because it was used mainly on temples, tombs and religious documents. More than 6,000 of these symbols have been deciphered, but most of these were introduced during the late period of ancient Egypt (712-332 BC). Hieroglyphs were understood by very few people back in those times.
At first, every different picture had a meaning, but over time it developed into a very complicated script of hundreds of symbols, that would have been difficult to learn.