Budge gives the history of hieroglyphic writing, its evolution into hieratic and demotic scripts, and the fascinating tale of its decipherment by Young, Champollion, Akerblad, and others.
Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge was an English Egyptologist, Orientalist, and philologist who worked for the British Museum and published numerous works on the ancient Near East.
Budge is both adored and despised by modern egyptologists, his copious amount of work cannot be completely accepted or ignored. This is a good introduction to understanding the syntax of the three types of ancient Egyptian, some of the basic terms, and the functionality of the language as part of life.
Budge. You're probably gonna read him if you're taking a serious look at Egyptian heiroglyphs. Outdated, but more or less necessary. He made significant progress, and more has been made since.