Language and writing of the egyptians in Biblical History

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What was the Language and Writing of the Egyptians?
        THE LANGUAGE OF EGYPT
        The sources of knowledge respecting ancient Egypt are chiefly four: (1) the Pentateuch; (2) the writings of Manetho, b.c. 300-250, whose work is lost, but fragments of which have come down to us through Josephus, Julius Afrieanus, and Eusebius; (3) the accounts of Greek travellers -- Herodotus, b.c. 454, Diodorus Siculus, b.c. 58, and Strabo, b.c. 30; (4) the monumental inscriptions and papyrus rolls in the temples and tombs or about mummies. Copies of the inscriptions and many of the papyrus rolls have been discovered during the present century and transferred to museums in London, Paris, Berlin, Leyden, Turin, and Bulak, and have been deciphered by Egyptologists. The hieroglyphic signs on the monuments are partly ideographic or pictorial, partly phonetic. The hieroglyphic, the shorter hieratic, and the demotic alphabets were deciphered by Champollion and Young by means of the famous trilingual Rosetta Stone, discovered in 1799, and the Coptic language "which is essentially the same with the old Egyptian. For a summary of the respective merits of Young and Champollion with regard to the interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyphic, see Allibone's Dictionary of Authors, vol. iii. p. 2902.
         The process of decipherment was, briefly, as follows: The Rosetta Stone had an inscription in three characters, hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek. The Greek, which was easily read, declared that there were two translations, one in the sacred, the other in the popular, language of the Egyptains, adjacent to it. The demotic part was next scrutinized, and the groups determined which contained the word Ptolemy. These were compared with other framed symbols on an obelisk found at Philae. The symbol on the obelisk which occurred in connection with the name Ptolemy was conjectured to be Cleopatra, as the number of letters also indicated. The two groups were then compared:
         he took to be Ptolemais.
         The second symbol in the second group, a lion, Champollion took to be I, and the same symbol has the fourth place in the first group. By a similar process of comparison, the nine letters of Cleopatra's name were ascertained, while the different letters in the case of Ptolemy were afterward verified by comparing them with the names of other kings, and particularly with that of Alexander the Great as below: --
         The prevailing opinion is that the ancient Egyptians were of Asiatic rather than of African origin. Their language was Egyptian, and was related, though it has not yet been proved as belonging, to the Semitic family. It had two dialects, that of Upper and that of Lower Egypt, and by degrees a vulgar dialect was formed, which became the national language not long before the formation of the Coptic. The written character of the Egyptian language was the hieroglyphic -- a very complex system, which expressed ideas by symbols or by phonetic signs, syllabic and alphabetic, or else by a combination of the two methods. From this combination was formed the hieratic, a runninghand, or common written form of the hieroglyphic, principally used for documents written on papyrus. The later Coptic language was written in Greek letters, with the addition of six new characters to that alphabet. The writings of the ancient Egyptians which have come down to our times are disjointed, and, from a literary point of view, have disappointed the expectations even of warm admirers of Egyptian civilization. See Poole in Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th Ed., vol. vii. (1878).

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Schaff, Philip, Dr. "Biblical Definition for 'language and writing of the egyptians' in Schaffs Bible Dictionary".
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