The last individuals who could read and write Egyptian hieroglyphics were a small hereditary lineage of pagan priests serving at the Temple of Isis on the island of Philae in southern Egypt during the late 4th century AD.
The very last person explicitly documented writing hieroglyphics was a priest named Nesmeterakhem (also known as Esmet-Akhom).
On August 24, 394 AD, Nesmeterakhem carved a devotion alongside a image of the Nubian deity Mandulis onto the wall of the Gate of Hadrian at Philae.
His text reads:
Before Mandulis, son of Horus, by the hand of Nesmeterakhem, son of Nesmeter, the Second Priest of Isis, for all time and eternity.
In an accompanying demotic script, Nesmeterakhem identifies himself as the "Scribe of the House of Writings of Isis", confirming his formal training in the sacred script. He was at least a third-generation priest at Philae, following in the footsteps of his father, Nesmeterpanakhet, and grandfather, Pakhom.
By the late 4th century, classical Egyptian hieroglyphics were virtually extinct due to a few major factors.
In 391-392 AD, Roman Emperor Theodosius I ordered all non-Christian, pagan temples across the empire to close.
Because Philae sat just outside the official Roman border at Aswan, its local sanctuary managed to stay open longer than temples further north. Knowledge of hieroglyphics was isolated to this single priestly family.
Everyday Egyptians had long transitioned to Demotic (a heavily simplified cursive script) and eventually Coptic, which wrote the spoken Egyptian language using the Greek alphabet. Hieroglyphics were viewed purely as a specialized, sacred code preserved by a shrinking priesthood.
When Nesmeterakhem and his immediate relatives died in the decades following 394 AD, the ability to read the sacred script vanished entirely from the world, remaining lost for over 1,400 years until the discovery and translation of the Rosetta Stone in the early 19th century.
