Decipherment of the Ancient Egyptian Language
Until recently, given the time span we are talking about, the decipherment of the hieroglyphic characters was hampered because those attempting to decipher the hieroglyphs assigned emotional meanings to the actual symbols used. For example, some people believed that the hieroglyph for son, a goose, was chosen because geese love their sons above all other animals. This hieroglyph was chosen, though, simply because the word for goose once had the same sound as the word for son. A further impediment was the lack of complementary material, that is to say material of the same work written in close proximity to another translation.
Athanasius Kircher, a student of Coptic, developed the notion that this last stage of Egyptian could be related to the earlier Egyptian stages. Because he was not able to transliterate or translate hieroglyphic he could not prove this notion. However, in 1799 when the discovery of the Rosetta Stone occurred, scholars finally had an example of hieroglyphic, demotic and Ancient Greek that they were all reasonably certain were the translations of the same passage. In the hieroglyphic script, the name of the King or Pharaoh and God's names are often placed within a circle called a cartouche. Jean-François Champollion, a young French scholar, demonstrated how the name Kleopatra could be made in hieroglyphic. Furthermore, by using an impressive knowledge of Coptic, he surmised that a number of symbols showing everyday objects could be pronounced as in Coptic. Applying this knowledge to other, well-known hieroglyphic sources clearly confirmed Champollion's work and linguistic scholars now had a way to work with and delineate the language into nouns, verbs, prepositions and other grammatical parts.

Modern Day Resources
Interest in the Ancient Egyptian Language continues. For example, it is still taught in the Oxford University in London and other places. Many resources are furthermore in French, German or Italian, and not just in English. In the movie Stargate, a linguist was commissioned to develop a constructed language to simulate the tongue of ancient Egyptians living alone in another planet for millennia. While Egyptian culture, through the Greek culture, has deeply influenced the Western civilization, few words of Egyptian origin remain in English. Even those associated with Ancient Egypt were usually transmitted in Greek forms.