The fifth and final stage of ancient Egyptian is Coptic, which replaced all earlier stages of the language during the Early Byzantine and Early Islamic Periods, from around 400 CE onwards. Persian, Ptolemaic and Roman rulers of Egypt promoted the use of Aramaic and Greek in Egypt alongside Demotic, especially for administration, creating a multi-lingual society and monuments like the Rosetta Stone, inscribed in Hieroglyphs, Demotic and Greek. Initially Demotic was only used for letters, legal documents and accounts, but in the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods it was also used for literary, historical and religious texts, restricting the use of Middle Egyptian, Hieroglyphs and Hieratic to some traditional religious texts and to temple inscriptions. Demotic was no longer written in Hieroglyphs or Hieratic, but instead used an even more cursive set of signs derived from Hieratic that was also called Demotic. The fourth stage of ancient Egyptian is Demotic, which replaced Late Egyptian during the Saite, Persian, Ptolemaic and Roman Periods, from around 700 BCE to 400 CE, again reflecting changes in the spoken language. Middle Egyptian continued to be used alongside Late Egyptian, however, for religious texts like the Book of the Dead, historical inscriptions, and even some literary texts, either because they had become canonical, or because they emulated the style and prestige of the canonical texts. It could be written in Hieroglyphs, but most often it was written in Hieratic on papyri and ostraca. Late Egyptian was used when scribes wanted to present an approximation of the spoken language, in letters, legal documents, accounts, and some literature. The third stage of ancient Egyptian is Late Egyptian, which appeared during and after the New Kingdom, from around 1500 BCE to 700 BCE, again probably reflecting changes in the spoken language. Hieratic tended to be used for letters, legal documents, accounts and literary texts written on papyri and ostraca. Hieroglyphs tended to be used for inscriptions on monuments, like royal decrees and stelae, temple inscriptions, autobiographies in tombs, and even the funerary texts on coffins known as Coffin Texts. Middle Egyptian was written in both Hieroglyphs and Hieratic, a script that utilizes simplified, cursive versions of Hieroglyphic signs, adapted to be written easily and quickly with ink and brush on papyrus or ostraca (potsherds or flakes of stone used as writing material). The second stage of ancient Egyptian is Middle Egyptian, which replaced Old Egyptian during the Middle Kingdom from around 2100 BCE to 1500 BCE, probably as a result of changes in the spoken language. Old Egyptian was written in Hieroglyphs and is best known from the funerary texts inscribed inside of royal burial chambers in pyramids and known as Pyramid Texts, and the autobiographies inscribed in private tombs. The first stage of ancient Egyptian with recognizable grammar is Old Egyptian, which was primarily used during the Old Kingdom from around 2600 BCE to 2100 BCE. The earliest texts written in Hieroglyphs, from around 3200 BCE to 2600 BCE, consisted of names, labels and short accounts without much grammar. These were written in at least four different scripts: Hieroglyphs, Hieratic, Demotic and Coptic.Īncient Egyptian was first written in the Hieroglyphic script, which famously utilizes signs that look like people, animals and natural and manmade objects, but actually represent consonantal and semi-vowel phonemes, groups of phonemes and classifiers. Five stages of the ancient Egyptian language are recognized: Old Egyptian, Middle Egyptian, Late Egyptian, Demotic and Coptic. Ancient Egyptian is considered to be a branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family, meaning that ancient Egyptian has similarities to Akkadian, Arabic and Hebrew, and is quite different from Indo-European languages like English, French and German. The ancient Egyptian language is attested in Egypt for over four thousand years, from the appearance of Hieroglyphic writing around 3200 BCE, until it was gradually replaced by Arabic after the Arab conquest of Egypt in 641 CE.
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