Egyptian

The Lord’s Prayer in Middle Egyptian:

The Lord’s Prayer in Coptic (the same language 2,000 years later):

Egyptian (fl. -3250 to +1100) is the language that was spoken in Ancient Egypt. In 2020 it is pretty much a dead language, one cut into stone in hieroglyphic form on Egyptian monuments and sometimes heard at mass at Coptic Christian churches.

• Speakers: maybe about 300 at best; some 4 million at its height.
• Countries: Egypt
• Scripts: from oldest to newest:
  • -3200 to +394: hieroglyphic
  • -3200 to +200s: hieratic (cursive form of hieroglyphics)
  • -650 to +533: Demotic (even more cursive)
  • +200 to present : Coptic (adapted from the Greek alphabet)
• Language family: Afro-Asiatic. Egyptian is a distant cousin of Somali, Hausa, Hebrew, Arabic, Berber and Ethiopian languages, and Aramaic (what Jesus spoke).

Egyptian, circa -2250.

Stages of Egyptian with the year in which each began as a spoken language:

• -3200: Archaic Egyptian – all we have are just some names and labels in hieroglyphics.
• -2700: Old Egyptian – the first full-blown written texts. Written in hieroglyphics on stone, in hieratic on papyrus. Hieratic is a simpler, more cursive form of hieroglyphics.
• -2100: Middle Egyptian – most hieroglyphics are written in this. It died out as a spoken language after -1600, but its literature was so classic that it became the literary dialect for the rest of Ancient Egyptian history. If you learn Ancient Egyptian at university, this is what they teach you.
• -1600: Late Egyptian – although a spoken language since -1600 and grammatically different than Middle Egyptian, it did not appear as a written language till the -1300s, when Akhenaten and Nefertiti tried to remake Egypt during the Amarna Period.
• -650: Demotic – had its own script, called Demotic, a later form of hieratic. It is what Cleopatra would have spoken, and what appears in the middle part of the Rosetta Stone.
• +100: Coptic – with the rise of Christianity, Middle Egyptian and even Demotic were seen as pagan and old-timey. Christians added some letters to the Greek alphabet and wrote the street language of the time in it. The first form of Egyptian with actual vowels written down. The difference between Coptic and Middle Egyptian is like the difference between French and Latin.

In 641 Arabs took over Egypt. Arabic gradually replaced Coptic over the next 500 years, just as Islam gradually replaced Christianity, but at a faster rate. By the 1100s Coptic was pretty much dead.

Transcribing words: Most hieroglyphs are consonants, some of them just like English ones, some of them not. Some of those that are not are found in Hebrew or Arabic. That q without a u that you see in Arabic names – Egyptian had that too. Before the Coptic alphabet, Egyptians were terrible at writing down vowels. When English-speaking scholars are not sure of a vowel, they stick in an e just to make the word pronounceable.

Some English words that are thought to come from Egyptian, directly or indirectly:

• by 1100: pharaoh, Susan, Moses, Phineas, Egypt, ephah
• 1100s:
• 1200s: ivory
• 1300s: gum, alchemy, ibis
• 1400s: Sphinx
• 1500s: ebony, barge, embark, sash, pyramid
• 1600s: chemistry, Hyksos, Copt
• 1700s: adobe, ammonia, oasis
• 1800s: ankh
• 1900s:
• 2000s:

– Abagond, 2020.

See also:

• Egyptian hieroglyphics
  • Rosetta Stone
• Afro-Asiatic languages
  • Aramaic
  • Hebrew (עִבְרִית)
  • Arabic
• Egypt: a brief history
  • Ancient Egypt
    • papyrus
    • Nefertiti
    • Cleopatra
  • Roman Egypt
    • Oxyrhynchus
    • Nag-Hammadi Library

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