Short answers, pulled from the story.
Writing in ancient Egypt first appeared in the late 4th millennium BC as a system of small artistic pictures representing natural objects. The Narmer Palette, dated to approximately 3100 BC during the last phase of Predynastic Egypt, combines hieroglyphs for catfish and chisel to produce the name of King Narmer.
These early scripts evolved into three distinct forms: Hieroglyphs, Hieratic, and Demotic. The final script adopted by the ancient Egyptians was the Coptic alphabet, a revised version of the Greek alphabet that became standard in the 4th century AD when Christianity took over the Roman Empire.
Egyptian literature survives today because it was often buried in dry desert settlements rather than left on the moist Nile floodplain. Archaeologists have discovered larger quantities of papyrus documents in elevated desert areas like Elephantine, El-Lahun, and El-Hiba where moisture could not destroy the ink or paper.
An elite social group known as scribes assisted government officials in their day-to-day work and drafted letters, sales documents, and legal papers for illiterate people. Literate people likely comprised only 1 to 15 percent of the population based on very limited evidence available today.
The most recently carved hieroglyphic inscription of ancient Egypt known today is found in a temple of Philae dated precisely to 394 AD during the reign of Theodosius I. It was not until 1799 with the Napoleonic discovery of a trilingual stela inscription on the Rosetta Stone that modern scholars had resources to decipher Egyptian texts.