What really fascinates me is how long the modern deciphering was hung up on a faulty premise: they look like pictures, so they must be pictographic writing. But they're not. It's largely a phonetic system with a handful of ideograms; the closest analogy is probably Japanese writing with a lot fewer kanji and more creativity in spelling. Many bottles of ink were wasted chasing a fantasy that meaning could be decoded from the birds and geometric symbols in the glyphs. Most of the papyrus with the more normal cursive script were not discovered until much later. If they had been I wonder if the realization of it encoding a spoken language would have come sooner. The birds and other ornamentation were just that, ornamentation, reserved for carvings and sacred purposes to make them look particularly nice, I suppose. Egyptian, as actually used on papyrus for day-to-day purposes looked more like:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/A_page_f...