It is well known that only about one percent of ancient Egyptians mastered the difficult art of reading and writing hieroglyphics. But there was little information about the education of royal children and how many of the powerful rulers of Egypt learned this important skill. In 2014 researchers from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland examined ancient texts to find clues regarding the literacy of Egypt’s Dynastic rulers, making some striking revelations. Exploring the Scripts The most famous of all ancient Egyptian scripts is hieroglyphic. However, throughout three thousand years of ancient Egyptian civilisation, at least three other scripts – Hieratic, Demotic, and later on, Coptic – were used for different purposes. Using these scripts, scribes were able to preserve the
