Egyptian scripts were replaced with coptic, which included six demotic characters. in the ninth century, arab scholar abu bakr ahmad ibn-wahshiyah was able to partly decipher the hieroglyphs by comparing them to coptic. but in the eleventh century, it too was replaced, by arabic. the link was once again severed. for centuries, western scholars tried to decipher the hieroglyphs, with little success. they were working under a false hypothesis, that the hieroglyphs were pictograms, with each symbol representing an object or an idea.
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