I've been reading the book "The History of Languages: An Introduction" by Tore Janson, and there it is stated that Ancient Egyptians used the same hieroglyphics for thousands of years without changing it. By the time it became very hard to be a clerk in Ancient Egypt because the old hieroglyphics was far different from the current language.
The author even states that "It must've been as hard as a modern researcher to learn hieroglyphics for the late clerks."
So the question popped into my mind, why haven't they done a "Hieroglyphic Reform" or something like that, was this that hard back then?
Both the ancient Egyptian language and the writing systems used in Egypt changed quite a bit over the centuries. The hieroglyphs themselves changed subtly over the centuries - no Egyptian scribe or Egyptologist would confuse Middle Kingdom inscriptions with those of the Greco-Roman period - and the "everyday" writing systems changed over time, evolving from various forms of hieratic to Demotic. Although some of the texts from the Middle Kingdom (ca. 2000-1650 BCE) already contain aspects of Late Egyptian grammar and vocabulary, it was not until the Amarna period (mid-14th century BCE) that Late Egyptian replaced Middle Egyptian in literary texts.
I wrote more about this in How much did hieroglyphics change over time?
