What Egyptian Is

Welcome to Middle Egyptian. Over two semesters you will learn to read the language of the pyramids’ successors, the stelae of Abydos, the Tale of Sinuhe and the temple walls of Karnak, sign by sign. We begin with the language itself: what kind of language it is, who its relatives are, and how long people wrote it.

Key idea

Egyptian is a language of the Afroasiatic family. It forms a branch of its own, beside Semitic (Hebrew, Arabic, Akkadian), Berber, Chadic and Cushitic. It was written for more than 4,000 years, from about 3200 BC to Coptic manuscripts of the Middle Ages.

A family of languages

Languages are related when they descend from one ancestor. Linguists show this the way a family historian would: not by a few look-alike words, which can be borrowed, but by regular matches in grammar and basic vocabulary. Egyptian shares such features with the Semitic languages and with the Berber languages of North Africa, the Chadic languages around Lake Chad (Hausa is the best known) and the Cushitic languages of the Horn of Africa (Somali, Oromo). Together they make the Afroasiatic family.

Two features you will meet in the first weeks show the family resemblance. Feminine nouns end in -t: zꜣ “son”, zꜣt “daughter”, much as in Semitic. And the independent pronoun “I”, jnk, looks like Akkadian anāku and Hebrew ʾānōkî. Such shared grammar points back to a common ancestor far older than writing.

Why it works

Why is Egyptian its own branch and not a Semitic language? Because its differences from Semitic are as deep as its likenesses: its verb system, much of its basic vocabulary and many sound correspondences go their own way. Egyptian and Semitic are cousins who split apart before either was written down.

The stages of Egyptian and its scripts on one time axis. You will meet the stages properly in the next lesson.

More than four thousand years of writing

The oldest Egyptian writing goes back to about 3200 BC, near the start of Egypt’s history as one kingdom. The language changed over the following millennia, and its scripts changed with it, but it was the same language throughout. Its last stage, Coptic, was written in an alphabet from the early centuries AD. Coptic gave way to Arabic as the everyday language during the Middle Ages, and it is still used in the worship of the Coptic Church. Few languages have a written record as long.

One word through the ages: ꜥnḫ “life” in hieroglyphs and in its Coptic descendant.

Common mistake

Thinking that Ancient Egyptian is an early form of Arabic, because Egypt speaks Arabic today. Arabic is a Semitic language that came to Egypt with the Arab conquest of the 7th century AD (Alexandria fell in AD 641). It slowly replaced Coptic, the last stage of Egyptian. Egyptian and Arabic are distant cousins in the Afroasiatic family, not parent and child. Check: Coptic, the descendant of Egyptian, was still being written centuries after Arabic arrived.

Worked example: Is it related?

Which of these is in the same family as Egyptian: Greek, Hausa, Persian?

Greek and Persian are Indo-European languages, like English.
Hausa is a Chadic language, one of the Afroasiatic branches.

Answer: Hausa

Worked example: How long?

Egyptian was first written around 3200 BC, and Coptic was still copied in the AD 1300s. About how many years is that?

From c. 3200 BC to AD 1: about 3,200 years (there is no year 0).
From AD 1 to AD 1300: 1,300 more years.
Total: about 4,500 years.

Answer: more than 4,000 years

Middle Egyptian is a stage of this language, not a different language. Learning it first is like learning classical Latin before medieval Latin or Italian: it is the form most of the monuments use.

What Egyptian Is

A family of languages

More than four thousand years of writing

Practice

Builds on

Leads to

Sources and further reading