Ancient Egyptian Language

The Language of the ancient Egyptians developed and flourished over thousands of years. The civilisation of Egypt was one of the ancient worlds greatest and richest and even today the towering monuments and massive temples, the palaces and cities dedicated to the old Pharaohs and gods still stand proud. These great feats of engineering and architecture have stood the test of time and are not only a testament to Egyptian skill and ingenuity but are still covered in the old form of divine writing called hieroglyphs.

The written records of ancient Egypt go back for over five thousand years and are one of the most well known symbolic representations in the world. It is through these symbols that we have learned about the lives and language of this long dead civilisation. The language spoken by these ancient peoples has been put into three main periods known as old, middle and late Egyptian. All three were written in both hieroglyphs and hieratic forms. After hieroglyphs the three main forms of the written language were Demotic, Hieratic and Coptic. Demotic was derived from hieratic while Coptic was a form of a modified Greek alphabet and Demotic signs. Although the old spoken language is lost in antiquity along with its dialects the Demotic and Coptic forms survived for a longer period. As a spoken language Demotic survived until the fifth century AD whilst Coptic survived as a living language until the sixteenth century AD. After the Arab invasion of Egypt the Arabic language gradually replaced the older Egyptian ones as the main common language and is the language of Egypt today. The ancient Egyptian an Afro-Asiatic language died out millennia ago so no one really knows how the words were pronounced or sounded, but as with all languages it evolved through the centuries and as with the written Egyptian the dialects changed and developed.

The written forms like most other Semitic scripts were the basis for the early Egyptian syllabic system and had only consonants and no definitive vowels. They started as pictograms depicting actual physical items and evolved into hieroglyphs that denoted both sounds and ideas. The hieroglyphs themselves evolved into the simpler and shorter or quicker versions of writing (hieratic a cursive version of hieroglyph writing, demotic was even more cursive and abbreviated and then finally Coptic). The hieroglyphs could be bilateral signs and even trilateral signs. Others were determinatives that at the end of the word gave a sense of the word (as a lot of these words could have the same sound or spelling) and other signs were ideographs. This mixture made the translating and understanding of them extremely difficult and it was not until the 1800,s that these mysterious and ancient symbols were finally translated and the world of this ancient and great civilisation opened up.

With thousands upon thousands of written records found and the surviving buildings literally covered in hieroglyphs the lives of the people of ancient Egypt began to emerge from the pages and carvings left behind by them. From the workmen through the ranks of priests, nobleman and royalty, written accounts have survived from all over Egypt. And although the sounds of the spoken language may be lost to us the writings have brought the people back in to the minds of modern man.