The end of ancient Egyptian writing and the beginning of a myth

The Egyptian language coexisted with Greek from the time of Alexander the Great's conquest of Egypt (332 BC). This cohabitation had a decisive impact on the use of Egyptian scripts (hieroglyphics and their cursive versions, hieratic and demotic), leading to their disappearance and replacement by Coptic, whose script is almost purely Greek. At the same time as the hieroglyphs were disappearing, the Greeks were developing ideas about them that would influence modern Europe's view of hieroglyphs, until Champollion came along and disproved it once and for all.