Middle Egyptian IThe Language and Its Script

The Stages of Egyptian

Egyptian changed over time: Old, Middle and Late Egyptian, then Demotic and Coptic.

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In What Egyptian Is you saw that Egyptian was written for more than 4,000 years. No language stays the same that long. Egyptologists divide its history into stages, each with its own grammar and spelling habits. The dates are approximate, because languages change gradually, and the written language always lagged behind the spoken one.

The five stages (dates as on Wikipedia’s "Egyptian language"; earlier, "Archaic Egyptian" covers the first inscriptions).
StageAbout whenWhat it is
Old Egyptianc. 2600–2000 BCthe language of the Old Kingdom: the Pyramid Texts, the first autobiographies
Middle Egyptianc. 2000–1350 BCthe language of the Middle Kingdom, and the classical language of later monuments
Late Egyptianc. 1350–700 BCthe everyday language of the New Kingdom: letters, stories, business
Demoticc. 700 BC–AD 450the language of the Late, Ptolemaic and Roman periods (also the name of its script)
Copticfrom c. AD 200the last stage, written in an alphabet made from Greek letters plus a few from Demotic

Key idea

Old, Middle, Late, Demotic, Coptic: the names are stages in time. "Middle Egyptian" is the middle stage of the language, not the speech of a region.
Where each stage begins, against the periods of Egyptian history.

Stages and scripts are different things

A stage is a form of the language; a script is a way of writing it. Hieroglyphs were used for monuments in every stage up to the Roman period. Hieratic, a quick, joined-up form of the signs written with a brush, was used beside them from the beginning for everyday writing. Demotic is confusingly both: the name of a stage of the language and of the very cursive script it was written in. Coptic is written in its own alphabet. So a Middle Egyptian text may be written in hieroglyphs or in hieratic; it is the same language either way.

Language stages (top) and scripts (bottom). Hieratic and Demotic are described in words: there is no accurate digital form of them.

Common mistake

Reading "Middle Egyptian" as the language of Middle Egypt, the region between the Delta and Thebes. The name refers to time: Old, Middle, Late. Egypt did have regional dialects, which show up clearly in Coptic, but the stage names are not about them. Check: Late Egyptian is not the language of "Late Egypt" either; it is simply later.

Worked example: Which stage?

A tax receipt on a potsherd is written around 200 BC in the everyday language of its time. Which stage of Egyptian is it?
  1. 200 BC falls between c. 700 BC and AD 450.
  2. That is the time of Demotic, the language (and script) of everyday documents in the Ptolemaic Period.

Answer: Demotic

Worked example: Script or stage?

Is "hieratic" a stage of the language?
  1. Hieratic is a way of writing, a cursive form of hieroglyphs.
  2. It was used for Old, Middle and Late Egyptian texts alike.

Answer: No: it is a script.

In this course you learn Middle Egyptian. The next lesson, Why Learn Middle Egyptian, shows why it is the right place to start.

Practice

Pass with 3 right answers, the last 2 in a row. Each right answer earns 1 XP.

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Sources and further reading

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