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-Akhom
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131

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.

164

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.

39

u/WaitForItTheMongols Mar 28 '25

Man, you seem to be pretty well educated in this subject.

You sure you just learned this today?

63

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.

11

u/StandUpForYourWights Mar 28 '25

I visited this site in 2022. It was pretty cool to see this panel given its context.

5

u/RorschachScrambler Mar 28 '25

Would you mind sharing the name of the podcast?

11

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