I was just reading the Wikipedia article on Cartouche and it has me wondering if the average citizen of Egypt and it's surrounding area would have been able to read and/or write hieroglyphics. The examples on the Wikipedia page are quite ornate for a non-artist to write.
Was it common for a middle-lower class citizen to write and be able to read during the time that hieroglyphics were in use. Were there specific places someone would go to have them written if they were unable to write them themselves? Such as a local artist?
No, for a couple of reasons.
First lets talk about writing in Egypt as a whole
The common misconception of the egyptian system of writing is that people imagine every single thing that the egyptians wrote was written in hierogliphs, which it wasn't, there were various types of writing in use during egyptian history (a given since the civilization was among the very first civilizations to arise), among those you will find demotic, aramaic, greek and this strange variant of egyptian with greek characters, which would later be named Coptic.
So what about the Hyerogliphs? Well, Hieroglyphs were what one could call a "Holy Script", something that one would learn as a monk, or a priest, a forbidden, or at least, hard to acquire knowledge for those not of the clergy. To quote John Baines of the University of Oxford: "Very few people were literate, all of them officials of the state; schooling was limited. The main script types, hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic, have different complementary functions", this is perhaps, best exemplified with the Rosetta Stone, which is written in three languages: demotic, the widely spoken and written language of the time, greek, the language used in administration (as Egypt was under the greek Ptolemaic dynasty then) and hieroglyphs, the holy script, likely to seal the treaty as something holy.
Now as to why those hieroglyphs were so damn pretty, its a simple answer, hieroglyphs, and the act of carving them was holy, seeing as the script was seen as the one that the gods themselves gave humanity. So its safe to assume that in the process of becoming a priest, one would need to learn to write them.
I would not, however discard the possibility that at some point the egyptian clergy made use of artisans to carve out hyerogliphs in walls, but I would seriously doubt that those would be able to read and understand what they were carving.
Sources and further reading, which I recommend you do:
John Baines: Literacy and Ancient Egyptian Society