Ancient Egypt: Encyclopedia II - Ancient Egypt - Language

Ancient Egypt - Language

Ancient Egyptian constitutes an independent branch of the Afro-Asiatic language phylum. Its closest relatives are the Berber, Semitic, and Beja groups of languages. Written records of the Egyptian language have been dated from about 3200 BC, making it one of the oldest and longest documented languages. Scholars group Egyptian into six major chronological divisions:

• Archaic Egyptian (before 3000 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 (3000–2000 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 (2000–1300 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 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 (1300–700 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 Egyptian (7th century BC–4th century AD)

• Coptic (3rd–17th century AD)

Ancient Egypt - Writing

For many years, the earliest known hieroglyphic inscription was the Narmer Palette, found during excavations at Hierakonpolis (modern Kawm al-Ahmar) in the 1890s, which has been dated to c.3200 BC. However recent archaeological findings reveal that symbols on Gerzean pottery, c.4000 BC, resemble the traditional hieroglyph forms ^[10]. Also in 1998 a German archeological team under Gunter Dreyer excavating at Abydos (modern Umm el-Qa'ab) uncovered tomb U-j, which belonged to a Predynastic ruler, and they recovered three hundred clay labels inscribed with proto-hieroglyphics dating to the Naqada IIIA period, circa 33rd century BC ^[11], ^[12].

Egyptologists refer to Egyptian writing as hieroglyphs, today standing as the world's earliest known writing system. The hieroglyphic script was partly syllabic, partly ideographic. Hieratic is a cursive form of Egyptian hieroglyphs and was first used during the First Dynasty (c. 2925 BC – c. 2775 BC). The term Demotic, in the context of Egypt, came to refer to both the script and the language that followed the Late Ancient Egyptian stage, i.e. from the Nubian 25th dynasty until its marginalization by the Greek Koine in the early centuries AD. After the conquest of Amr ibn al-A'as in the 7th century AD, the Coptic language survived as a spoken language into the Middle Ages. Today, it continues to be the liturgical language of the Christian minority.

Beginning from around 2700 BC, Egyptians used pictograms to represent vocal sounds -- both vowel and consonant vocalizations (see Hieroglyph: Script). By 2000 BC, 26 pictograms were being used to represent 24 (known) main vocal sounds. The world's oldest known alphabet (c. 1800 BC) is only an abjad system and was derived from these uniliteral signs as well as other Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The hieroglyphic script finally fell out of use around the 4th century AD. Attempts to decipher it began after the 15th century (see Hieroglyphica).

Ancient Egypt - Literature

• c. 1800 BC: Story of Sinuhe
• c. 1800 BC: Ipuwer papyrus
• c. 1600 BC: Westcar Papyrus
• c. 1180 BC: Papyrus Harris I
• c. 1000 BC: Story of Wenamun

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Language", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki