Script of the Elite

Only one to three percent of ancient Egyptians could read and write. Literacy was concentrated in the scribal class, who underwent years of training. Scribes were exempt from manual labor and taxes, and one famous text, the Papyrus Lansing, urged students to become scribes by insisting that every other profession brought hardship.

What made the Rosetta Stone so powerful was its three scripts side by side: hieroglyphics, Demotic Egyptian, and Greek that scholars could already read. The Greek became a crib, letting decipherers match known words against the lost symbols above them.