What came after hieroglyphs?
It is tempting to draw one straight line from hieroglyphs to the letters we use today. The history is more interesting than that. In Egypt, scribes used different scripts for different purposes. Beyond Egypt, other communities borrowed shapes and gave them new readings.
Writing Egyptian in different ways
Hieratic was a cursive way to write Egyptian alongside hieroglyphs. It suited writing with a brush or reed on materials such as papyrus. Demotic developed later within the Egyptian writing tradition. These scripts overlapped in use; one did not replace every use of another at once.
Coptic represents a later stage of the Egyptian language. Its alphabet uses Greek letters, with additional letters derived from demotic for Egyptian sounds. The language continued even as the way people wrote it changed.
Borrowing a shape, changing its sound
In the second millennium BCE, Semitic speakers adapted Egyptian signs to represent consonants in their own language. In this approach, a picture could stand for the first sound of its Semitic name. Scholars call that principle acrophony.
Early alphabetic writing led to the Phoenician tradition. Greek adapted that tradition, using some signs for vowels. Etruscan and Latin carried that branch further. Some early dates and individual sign identifications remain debated.
These connections concern scripts. They do not mean that Greek or Latin developed from the Egyptian language. A community can borrow a way of writing while keeping its own language.