You now know the five stages from The Stages of Egyptian. Grammars almost always begin with the second one, Middle Egyptian. Here is why.
🔑 Key idea
Middle Egyptian was the spoken language of the Middle Kingdom (c. 2055–1650 BC). It then became the classical language: scribes kept writing it on monuments, in hymns and in literature for two thousand years after it stopped being spoken, down to the temples of Roman times.
A language that outlived its speakers
By the New Kingdom, people spoke Late Egyptian. Their letters, accounts and many of their stories are in it. But when a king set up a stela, when a priest carved a hymn, or when a scribe wanted a text to sound proper and timeless, he wrote Middle Egyptian, sometimes with a few later features slipping in. The temples of the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, such as Edfu and Dendera, are still inscribed in a late form of it, with many new signs and spellings. The last dated hieroglyphic inscription, carved at Philae in AD 394, is part of the same tradition.
Middle Egyptian was also the language of the great literature: the Tale of Sinuhe, the Eloquent Peasant, the Teachings of the Middle Kingdom. New Kingdom schoolboys copied these works as classics, much as later Europeans studied Cicero and Virgil.
💡 Why it works
Why did a dead form of the language last so long? Writing on monuments was meant to last forever and to speak in the voice of tradition. The classical language carried prestige and connected a king or an official to the great past. Latin played the same role in medieval Europe, long after people spoke Italian, French or Spanish.
Middle Egyptian: spoken in the Middle Kingdom, written on monuments until the end of hieroglyphic writing.
⚠️ Common mistake
Expecting every text to be in the language of its own time. A temple wall carved under the Romans is not in Demotic or Coptic: it is in (a late form of) Middle Egyptian. Check the medium: formal hieroglyphic monuments use the classical language; everyday documents of the same date use the spoken stage.
✏️ Worked example: Why learn it first?
A student wants to read stelae of the Middle Kingdom, the hymns of the New Kingdom and the temple of Edfu. Which stage should she learn first?
All three are hieroglyphic monuments.
All three use Middle Egyptian (Edfu in a late form of it).
Old and Late Egyptian are then easy steps away.
Answer: Middle Egyptian
✏️ Worked example: How long after?
The Middle Kingdom ended about 1650 BC. The last hieroglyphic inscription is from AD 394. How long was the classical language carved after that?
From c. 1650 BC to AD 1: about 1,650 years.
Add 394 years: about 2,044 years.
Answer: about two thousand years
This course follows Gardiner’s Egyptian Grammar (1927), a classic that teaches Middle Egyptian through hieroglyphic texts. Later grammars (for example Allen’s) use slightly different terms in places; where it matters, the lessons say so.
Practice
Pass with 3 right answers, the last 2 in a row. Each right answer earns 1 XP.