The earliest known hieroglyphs were created during the 4th millennium BCE. As time progressed, hieroglyphs were often used for many religious and other important texts, such as grave inscriptions, prayers, scientific documents, hymns, etc. This type of writing was a very detailed and time-consuming process, though; so the Egyptians made up a sort of “cursive” style of Hieroglyph called Hieratic. Hieratic was a quicker way to write hieroglyphics. In this method of writing, numerous hieroglyphs were simplified, or edited to make the process faster. This sort of script writing was more often used by priests or other higher ranking individuals. Last up is Demotic. First developed in 660 BCE, Demotic was the type of script the majority of the people knew. As like Hieratic, Demotic is generally based on the system of hieroglyphics, although even more simplified than Hieratic. At first, it was mainly used as a governmental type of writing, but eventually it was used as a common script for literary texts, letters and other sorts of documents. An important tool in the deciphering of these languages (most notably Demotic and Hieroglyphs) is the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone is a large fragment of an ancient stone tablet which contains three languages, Hieroglyphics, Demotic, and Greek. The stone was discovered by accident when one of the soldiers in Napoleon’s army stumbled across it while destroying a wall near the town of Rosetta. Eventually, after tons of tried and failed attempts at cracking the rosetta code, one guy, Jean Francois Champollion, was able to figure out that the hieroglyphs inside cartouches happened to be proper nouns. (like the name Ramses) After that discovery, the secret to uncovering what thousands of documents said was unlocked. It is believed that Mesopotamians were the first civilization to start writing. They first started with a script called pictograms. They used what is called a stylus to draw on these cla