If nobody was speaking those languages for a very long time, how come people managed to learn them
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Heiroglyphics was done with the Rosetta Stone. It was an announcement written in 3 languages. 2 of those were already known, and they said the same thing. That gave researchers a known message to use with the heiroglyphics.
And thats kind of what you need.
Another route is if you know a related language. If you know spanish/italian/portugese/french/romanian then you have a chance of figuring out some latin.
Hieroglyphs are not a language, it is a writing system used for the Egyptian language. It was not the most common writing system in ancient Egypt, that was Hieratic. Bots start to be used around 3200 BC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieratic
Hieroglyphs were used for religious text and other cemorial use like inscriptions on stature and buildings. Hieratic was written with reed pen on papyrus, which was for everyday use.
Hieratic evolve into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demotic_(Egyptian) around 650 BC
The spoken Egyptian language evolved too in the 3rd century AD it as become what now is many closely related Coptic dialects. Copts was first used for all Egyptians but became synonymy with Christian groups in the country after the Muslim conquest. Arabic started to become dominant even among copt but the language had everyday usage into the 19th century. For liturgical usage, the Coptic language are still in use to this day like Latin was the liturgical language of the catholic church globally into the 1960.
Copts create a Coptic alphabet influence but Demotic. The usage of Egyptian hieroglyphs ends around AD 400 and demotic around AD 500
So the the language used with Egyptian hieroglyphs did not die out it evolved and became Coptic which still has limited usage. That makes it possible to have an idea how ancient Egyptians sounded.
Egypt was controlled by the Ptolemaic dynasty from 305 BC to 30BC. Ptolemy stated it was a general of Alexander the Great and perhaps his half-brother. After Alexander died the land he conquered was split between the generals. The Ptolemaic dynasty considered themself Greek not Egyptian and kept using Greetk, The last Ptolemaic ruler was Cleopatra her reign ended in 30 BC, and then the Roman empire too over. She is tonically Cleopatra VII Thea Philopator many in the family had that name. She is the only known member of the dynasty that spoke Egyptian.
The Ptolemaic dynasty is important because a royal decree was written in stone in 196 BC. The same text was written three times, once on the Greek of the king, and twice in Egyptian the people spoke. The Egyptian part was written in Demotic and hieroglyphic. It was discovered by the French 1799 near the town that is in french called Rosetta so the stone is the Rosetta stone. Jean-François Champollion tried to understand it and in 1822 he found out how it worked. He already understood Coptic, Ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic when he did this. The Coptic and Greek knowledge was certainly an advantage in understanding the writing on the stone
Today other similar stones have been found with multiple scripts and languages.
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