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Ancient Egyptian Language

Written records of the ancient Egyptian language have been dated from about
3200 BC. Egyptian is part of the Afro-Asiatic group of languages and is related
to Berber and Semitic (languages such as Arabic, Amharic and Hebrew). The
language survived until the 5th century AD in the form of Demotic and until the
Middle Ages in the form of Coptic. Thus it had a lifespan of over four millennia.
Egyptian is one of the oldest recorded languages known.

The national language of modern day Egypt is Egyptian Arabic, which gradually
replaced Egyptian and its descendant, the Coptic language, as the language of
daily life in the centuries after Egypt was conquered by Arab Muslims. Coptic is
still used as a liturgical language in the Coptic Church.

Development of the Language

Scholars group the Egyptian language into six major chronological divisions:

• Archaic Egyptian (before 2600 BC)

Consists of inscriptions from the late Predynastic and Early

Dynastic period. The earliest known evidence of Egyptian
hieroglyphic writing appears on Naqada II pottery vessels.

• Old Egyptian (2600 BC 2000 BC)

The language of the Old Kingdom and First Intermediate Period.

The Pyramid Texts are the largest body of literature written in this
phase of the language. Tomb walls of elite Egyptians from this
period also bear autobiographical writings representing Old
Egyptian. One of its distinguishing characteristics is the tripling of
ideograms, phonograms, and determinatives to indicate the plural.
Overall, it does not differ significantly from the next stage.

• Middle Egyptian (2000 BC 1300 BC)

Often dubbed Classical Egyptian, this stage is known from a variety

of textual evidence in hieroglyphic and hieratic scripts dated from
about the Middle Kingdom. It includes funerary texts inscribed on
sarcophagi such as the Coffin Texts; wisdom texts instructing people
on how to lead a life that exemplified the ancient Egyptian
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philosophical worldview (see the Ipuwer papyrus); tales detailing

the adventures of a certain individual, for example the Story of
Sinhue; medical and scientific texts such as the Edwin Smith
Papyrus and the Ebers papyrus; and poetic texts praising a god or a
pharaoh, like the Hymn to the Nile. The Egyptian vernacular
already began to change from the written language as evidenced by
some Middle Kingdom hieratic texts, but classical Middle Egyptian
continued to be written in formal contexts well into the Late
Dynastic period (sometimes referred to as Late Middle Egyptian).

• Late Egyptian (1300 BC 700 BC)

Records of this stage appear in the second part of the New Kingdom,
considered by many as the "Golden Age" of ancient Egyptian
civilization. It contains a rich body of religious and secular
literature, comprising such famous examples as the Story of
Wenamun and the Instructions of Ani. It was also the language of
Ramesside administration. Late Egyptian is not totally distinct from
Middle Egyptian, as many "classicisms" appear in historical and
literary documents of this phase. However, the difference between
Middle and Late Egyptian is greater than that between Middle and
Old Egyptian. It's also a better representative than Middle Egyptian
of the spoken language in the New Kingdom and beyond.
Hieroglyphic orthography saw an enormous expansion of its
graphemic inventory between the Late Dynastic and Ptolemaic
periods.

• Demotic (seventh century BC fifth century AD)

Demotic refers to both the ancient Egyptian script derived from

northern forms of hieratic used in the Delta, as well as the stage of
the Egyptian language following Late Egyptian and preceding
Coptic. By convention, the word "Demotic" is capitalized in order to
distinguish it from demotic Greek.

The Demotic script (formerly referred to as Enchorial Egyptian)

was used for more than a thousand years, and during that time a
number of developmental stages occurred.

Early Demotic
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Early Demotic (often referred to by the German term

Frühdemotisch) developed in Lower Egypt during the later part of
the 25th Dynasty, particularly on stelae from the Serapeum at
Saqqara. It is generally dated between 650 and 400 BC as most texts
written in Early Demotic are dated to the 26th Dynasty and the
following Persian period (the 27th Dynasty). After the reunification
of Egypt under Psametik I, Demotic replaced Abnormal Hieratic in
Upper Egypt, particularly during the reign of Amasis when it
became the official administrative and legal script. During this
period, Demotic was used only for administrative, legal, and
commercial texts, while hieroglyphs and hieratic were reserved for
other texts.

Middle (Ptolemaic) Demotic

Middle Demotic (circa 40030 BC) is the stage of writing used during
the Ptolemaic Period. From the fourth century BC onwards,
Demotic held a higher status, as may be seen from its increasing use
for literary and religious texts. By the end of the third century BC,
Greek was more important as it was the administrative language of
the country; Demotic contracts lost most of their legal force unless
there was a note in Greek of being registered with the authorities.

Late (Roman) Demotic

From the beginning of Roman rule of Egypt, Demotic was

progressively less used in public life. There are, however, a number
of literary texts written in Late Demotic (circa 30 BC452 AD),
especially from the first and second centuries AD, though the
quantity of all Demotic texts decreased rapidly towards the end of
the second century. After that, Demotic was only used for a few
ostraca, subscriptions to Greek texts, mummy labels, and graffiti.
The last dated example of the Demotic script is dated to 11
December 452 AD, and consists of a graffiti on the walls of the
temple of Isis on Philae.

• Coptic (fourth fourteenth century AD)

Coptic is the last phase of ancient Egyptian. It is the direct

descendant of the ancient language written in Egyptian hieroglyphic,
hieratic, and demotic scripts. The Coptic alphabet is a slightly
modified form of the Greek alphabet, with some letters (which vary
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from dialect to dialect) deriving from demotic. As a living language

of daily conversation, Coptic flourished from ca. 200 to 1100. The
last record of its being spoken was during the 17th century. Coptic
survives today as the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox
Church. Egyptian Arabic is the spoken and national language of
Egypt today. Continued

Egyptian writing in the form of label and signs has been dated to 3200 BC. These
early texts are generally lumped together under the term "Archaic Egyptian."

In 1999, Archaeology Magazine reported that the earliest Egyptian Glyphs date
back to 3400 BC which "...challenge the commonly held belief that early
logographs, pictographic symbols representing a specific place, object, or
quantity, first evolved into more complex phonetic symbols in Mesopotamia."

Old Egyptian was spoken for some 500 years from 2600 BC onwards. Middle
Egyptian was spoken from about 2000 BC for a further 700 years when Late
Egyptian made its appearance; Middle Egyptian did, however, survive until the
first few centuries AD as a written language, similar to the use of Latin during
the Middle Ages and that of Classical Arabic today.

Demotic Egyptian first appears about 650 BC and survived as a spoken language
until fifth century AD. Coptic Egyptian appeared in the fourth century AD and
survived as a living language until the sixteenth century AD, when European
scholars traveled to Egypt to learn it from native speakers during the
Renaissance. It probably survived in the Egyptian countryside as a spoken
language for several centuries after that.

The Bohairic dialect of Coptic is still used by the Egyptian Christian

Churches.Old, Middle, and Late Egyptian were all written using hieroglyphs and
hieratic.

Demotic was written using a script derived from hieratic; its appearance is
vaguely similar to modern Arabic script and is also written from right to left
(although the two are not related). Coptic is written using the Coptic alphabet, a
modified form of the Greek alphabet with a number of symbols borrowed from
Demotic for sounds that did not occur in Ancient Greek.

Arabic gradually replaced spoken Coptic after the Arabian invasion in the
seventh century, though Arabic was the language of the Muslim political
administration soon thereafter.
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