I’m actually curious about the linguistics of something like a telegraph for ancient Egypt - I’m not particularly familiar with the Egyptian writing system from that era, but a strongly pictographic language, and one in which they seemed to regularly intersperse actual pictures and do things like manipulate symbol size to convey information doesn’t seem to immediately suggest translation to an encoding like Morse like phonetic written languages do.

In other words, if the ancient Egyptians had found themselves with the technology to create something like a telegraph, I wonder what they would have done with it - what possibilities suggest themselves given the visual representation of the Egyptian language.

(I could actually see something like the Incan quipu being a much easier translation, if we’re talking premodern “written” languages)