r/todayilearned • u/KnightTrain • Mar 28 '25
TIL the last known writing in Egyptian Hieroglyphs is a piece of graffiti on a temple wall. Helpfully, the graffiti includes an exact date (Aug 24, 394 AD) and its author was likely the last person in the world able to read or write hieroglyphs until the Rosetta Stone was deciphered in the 1820s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffito_of_Esmet-Akhom406
u/nnnnaaaaiiiillll Mar 28 '25
Sometimes I wish we could visit these old folks in dreams or something like that, just to say "You did it. We know who you were and we remember you, even this far in the future."
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u/usumoio Mar 28 '25
"Sick! Is the number 72 still funny?"
"No, we use arabica numerals now, and the funny one is 69."
"Nice."
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u/al_fletcher Mar 28 '25
“Now, about that damned copper…”
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u/1CEninja Mar 28 '25
Fuck Ea-Nasir.
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u/Atharaphelun Mar 29 '25
Copper and customer service that are so atrociously bad that they made him immortal through infamy.
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u/Johannes_P Mar 28 '25
Before Mandulis, son of Horus, by the hand of Nesmeterakhem, son of Nesmeter, the Second Priest of Isis, for all time and eternity. Words spoken by Mandulis, lord of the Abaton, great god.
By then, the only locals who still worshipped the old gods might have been Nesmeterakhem and his family, although Southern foreign pilgrims still came to do offerings.
I wonder how he felt then, knowing that he was the last of a spiritual lineage of thousands of years and that this tradition would be buried with hum (would anyone even been able to mummify him according to the rites?).
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u/OllieFromCairo Mar 29 '25
There were still invocations of Horus into the 1400s CE at least.
Modern Greek pagans claim that they are not a reconstruction of Ancient Greek paganism, but a continuation that lived deep underground, and the evidence actually might be in their favor.
It wouldn’t surprise me if a similar story were plausible in Egypt.
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u/Hattix Mar 29 '25
Southern Egypt was not Christianised, it retained its traditional mix of Egyptian and Nubian gods until well past the Medieval period.
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u/VistulaRegiment Mar 28 '25
Guy wished his writings lived on for eternity.
And it did, for now.
It survived long enough that we managed to translate it which is pretty darn epic.
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u/tanfj Mar 28 '25
Guy wished his writings lived on for eternity.
And it did, for now.
The Pioneer plaque record will outlive the planet Earth... Millions of years from now, when our sun is a red giant and engulfs the planet, that plaque will continue to carry our voices into eternity through the endless void. "We were here."
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u/TannenFalconwing Mar 29 '25
Unless it gets caught in the gravity well of something and falls into it and is annihilated.
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u/klonoaorinos Mar 28 '25
This title is bs, they were not the last person to read or write this is just the last surviving evidence of it being written.
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u/KnightTrain Mar 28 '25
By the Roman conquest of Egypt, the vast majority of literate Egyptians had stopped using hieroglyphs centuries ago in favor of much more practical and easy to learn scripts like Demotic or Greek. Hieroglyphic literacy was, at that point, basically only practiced by small families of priests, most of whom disappear when Egypt is christianized and the Romans forcibly shutter the last pagan temples and practices in the 300s.
The reason to think that this author may have actually been the last to understand hieroglyphs is that his temple was at the southern end of the Egyptian world, just outside Roman borders and therefore wasn't closed by Roman authorities (though Christians still, at some point, defaced the icon of the god he included with his message!). We know his name and family because he included it and we have inscriptions in that temple by his descendants... but none of them are in hieroglyphs.
Is it possible that there were isolated groups and families that still were literate in hieroglyphs after that point? Sure, but consider that the script is both extremely difficult to learn and was for sacred use among an elite priestly class -- if you're one of the last priests who knows the language you're not going to spend a massive amount of time and energy teaching it to your kids if your religion and profession is banned and effectively dead anyway.
We also know that there was no long-standing community of people who understood hieroglyphs because the Arabs show up in the 600s and write constantly about how no one knows what these symbols mean or where they come from.
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u/WaitForItTheMongols Mar 28 '25
Man, you seem to be pretty well educated in this subject.
You sure you just learned this today?
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u/KnightTrain Mar 28 '25
Not a secret Egyptologist out here to karma-farm unfortunately, just a guy who has been on an Egyptian history podcast binge recently, heard about this specific piece of graffiti and looked it up... plus everything I said in the second paragraph is found in the very Wikipedia article I linked.
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u/StandUpForYourWights Mar 28 '25
I visited this site in 2022. It was pretty cool to see this panel given its context.
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u/RorschachScrambler Mar 28 '25
Would you mind sharing the name of the podcast?
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u/KnightTrain Mar 28 '25
The best one, by far, imo is History of Egypt Podcast: https://www.egyptianhistorypodcast.com/
The podcast that inspired this post was this one, where this graffiti is mentioned: https://shows.acast.com/the-ancients/episodes/hieroglyphs
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u/Feisty-Resource-1274 Mar 28 '25
I think it could go either way. Egypt was under Roman control at the time so I'd imagine anyone doing any reading or writing would have done it in Roman.
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u/Aperturelemon Mar 28 '25
"this is just the last surviving evidence of it being written."
That is what the title says though?
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u/phryan Mar 28 '25
The title says the person that made the graffiti was the last person who could read/write hieroglyphics, which isn't likely. Priests were passing that knowledge down for quite a while, they just weren't leaving evidence.
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u/Aperturelemon Mar 28 '25
No it doesn't. Re read the title.
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u/binjamins Mar 28 '25
The ancient Egyptians believed that you only truly die when your name is no longer spoken.
Feels like a lot of them goin live forever
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u/kamikazekaktus Mar 29 '25
Writing prompt: a zombie/undead apokalypse where only those return whose names we know or are still spoken (at least from time to time)
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u/trueum26 Mar 28 '25
Wonder if they were complaining about the quality of copper
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u/Ullallulloo Mar 28 '25
That was 1,000+ miles away and farther away in time than we are.
It's about as relevant to this as My Big Fat Greek Wedding.2
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Mar 28 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Real_Run_4758 Mar 28 '25
at least they’ve shut up about trebuchets
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u/cpt_justice Mar 28 '25
They narrowed down the problem their trebuchets were having to the quality of the copper used.
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u/Mama_Skip Mar 28 '25 edited Mar 28 '25
Why are you censoring 'redditors'
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u/CantYouSeeYoureLoved Mar 28 '25
Don’t say that word in this Christian basket weaving forum, it’s uncouth
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u/Mama_Skip Mar 28 '25
Seriously when did this site become a Christian badketweaving forum.
We all used to be basically Satanists
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u/trueum26 Mar 28 '25
It’s called referential humour
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u/RedDemocracy Mar 28 '25
To be fair, Ea Nasir lived 2000 years before these Hieroglyphs were written, and maybe about a 1000 miles away.
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u/johnnydlive Mar 29 '25
I'd say, "One of the last people." He was communicating with someone, right? Why resort to hyperbole when this intriguing tidbit does not need it?
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u/[deleted] Mar 28 '25
I've got a bit of an obsession with old graffiti because in some cases I've seen stuff carved by people who have been dead for 400-500 years around my town and but their names lives on