Egyptian hieroglyphs were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt for writing. Hieroglyphs combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with more than 100 distinct characters. Cursive hieroglyphs were used for religious literature on papyrus and wood. The later hieratic and demotic Egyptian scripts were derived from hieroglyphic writing, as was the Proto-Sinaitic script that later evolved into the Phoenician alphabet. Through the Phoenician alphabet's major child systems (the Greek and Aramaic scripts), the Egyptian hieroglyphic script is ancestral to the majority of scripts in modern use, most prominently the Latin and Cyrillic scripts (through Greek) and the Arabic script, and possibly the Brahmic family of scripts (through Aramaic, Phoenician, and Greek).
Knowledge of the hieroglyphs had been lost completely in the medieval period. All medieval and early modern attempts were hampered by the fundamental assumption that hieroglyphs recorded ideas and not the sounds of the language. As no bilingual texts were available, any such symbolic 'translation' could be proposed without the possibility of verification. It was not until Athanasius Kircher in the mid 17th century that scholars began to think the hieroglyphs might also represent sounds. Kircher was familiar with Coptic, and thought that it might be the key to deciphering the hieroglyphs, but was held back by a belief in the mystical nature of the symbols.
The breakthrough in decipherment came only with the discovery of the Rosetta Stone by Napoleon's troops in 1799 (during Napoleon's Egyptian invasion). As the stone presented a hieroglyphic and a demotic version of the same text in parallel with a Greek translation, plenty of material for translation was suddenly available. In the early 19th century, scholars such as Silvestre de Sacy, Johan David Åkerblad, and Thomas Young studied the inscriptions on the stone, and were able to make some headway. Finally, Jean-François Champollion made the complete decipherment by the 1820s. He said "it is a complex system, writing figurative, symbolic, and phonetic all at once, in the same text, the same phrase, I would almost say in the same word"
Cartouches
The Egyptian cartouches contained the names of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt. The cartouches legitimized the power of the king of Egypt by their resemblance to the solar crowns worn by certain Egyptian gods. Later, because of their religious connotations, Egyptian cartouches became symbols of protection against evil.
The basic shape of the cartouches is a vertical oval with a line drawn perpendicular to the oval at its lower edge. This line represents a pedestal on which the pharaoh's name is supported and exists to confirm that the attached text is indeed a pharaonic name. This oval was described as the representation of the "solar crown Uræus", the solar discs above various Egyptian gods (principally Ra, Horus and Isis) always encircled by the female divine cobra Uræus. Thus, by this aspect of "symbol linked to the divine mysteries", this cartouche gradually became a symbol reputed to grant its bearers good fortune and effective protection against evil. It is for this reason that amulets in the form of a cartouche bearing the name of a pharaoh (or sometimes even of a god such as Osiris or Anubis) were placed in the tombs of rich Egyptians who could afford them.