Short answers, pulled from the story.
Ancient Egyptian literature was written in the Egyptian language from ancient Egypt's pharaonic period until the end of Roman domination. It represents the oldest corpus of Egyptian literature, and alongside Sumerian literature it is considered the world's earliest literature.
A narrative Egyptian literature was created in the early Middle Kingdom, between the 21st and 17th centuries BC. Richard B. Parkinson calls this shift a media revolution, driven by the rise of a scribal class, new ideas about individuality, and rising literacy.
Ancient Egyptians used hieroglyphs, hieratic, and later Demotic, with the Coptic alphabet adopted last. Hieroglyphs were reserved for monuments and funerary texts, hieratic served everyday and religious writing, and Demotic became the common script for day-to-day use.
Famous works include the Story of Sinuhe, the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, and the Eloquent Peasant. Teaching texts include the Maxims of Ptahhotep, the Instructions of Amenemhat, and the Loyalist Teaching, while the Great Hymn to the Aten dates to the reign of Akhenaten.
Literacy was largely confined to an elite scribal class attached to government offices and the royal court. Literate people are thought to have comprised between 1 and 15 percent of the population, based on very limited evidence, with the figure varying by period and region.
The Rosetta Stone, discovered in 1799 with hieroglyphic, Demotic, and Greek inscriptions, gave scholars the means to decipher Egyptian texts. Jean-Francois Champollion deciphered hieroglyphs and Thomas Young deciphered Demotic, and Emmanuel de Rouge published the first translations of Egyptian literary texts in 1856.