Take a look at this sign in modern Cairo.
Now take a look at these hieroglyphs from Ancient Egypt. Aside from being written in completely
different scripts, these two are written in completely different languages. While Egypt
today is the largest Arabic-speaking nation in the world, Ancient Egypt used to have
their own completely different language, so what I want to know is, what happened
to the Egyptian language of antiquity? Does anyone still speak it? And how do you
change the language of an entire country? For over 3,000 years, Ancient Egypt spoke various
forms of a language simply known as... well, Egyptian, but for the last 1,000 or so years (which in Egyptian
terms is actually quite recent) the main language of the country has been Arabic. In fact, modern
Egypt primarily speaks its own dialect of Arabic, known as Egyptian Arabic… yeah, go figure.
Now Arabic and Egyptian are both related, but they’re not the same thing. While both languages
are part of the Afro-Asiatic language family, they belong to two separate branches. Of the six
branches of the Afro-Asiatic languages, Arabic is a Semitic language– budding up with languages
like Hebrew, Aramaic, Amharic, and Akkadian– while Egyptian does its own thing and makes up
its own branch. Maybe it had closer relatives, but considering how far back this language
goes, it’s honestly too hard for us to tell. Granted, it helps that Egypt was one of the
first places in the world to develop writing, with… things resembling records going as
far back as the 33rd century BC– or about 1,500 years before mammoths went completely
extinct. In general, the Egyptian language’s long history can be divided into six distinct
phases; Archaic, Old, Middle, Late, Demotic, and Coptic– and it’s actually the last two that
are crucial for answering our titular question. One thing you have to know about Ancient Egypt is
that the society in general was very conservative. I mean you can see it in their art style, as
not much changed from the Old Kingdom all the way up to Ptolemaic Egypt (I mean Akhenaten
of course tried to change things around, but wow did people *not* like what he did).
While the language itself evolved, as all languages do when spoken by people as their native
everyday language, official legal and religious inscriptions were generally written in older
dialects. This was the case with Old Egyptian when Middle Egyptian first started to form, and then
Middle Egyptian until late into the Roman era. It is perhaps also worth pointing out the nature
of the hieroglyphics that made up their writing system. You could never just quickly jot down
a series of hieroglyphs on a piece of paper, and that’s because that’s not what they were
meant for. It was really only the priests, the ruling class, and scribe class who
knew how to read and write in this massive system of logograms– which could number
anywhere from 700 symbols to nearly 10,000, depending on which point of Egyptian history
you look at– and so hieroglyphics were meant to be written on important legal
papyri or grandiose temple walls. The hieroglyphic script was what is known
as a logography– think Chinese characters, where each glyph represents a word or an idea
rather than an individual sound– but increasingly, some of these symbols could also be used as
consonants, in a move which would be incredibly helpful to Egyptologists 3,000 years in
the future, but more on that in a bit. In the 15th century BC, the New Kingdom of Egypt
reached new heights that it never had before, but with new heights came new
lows. The negative-12th century saw the beginning of a centuries-long
decline in Egyptian power and influence as different dynasties from within vied
for power. This continued until 754 BC, when Egypt was conquered by the Nubian Kingdom
of Kush, installing what historians today know as the 25th dynasty (but was probably
called something different back then). As Egypt spent the next few hundred years under
rule of the Nubians, then the Achaemenids, Middle Egyptian still remained in use
for governmental and religious affairs, while the language of the locals evolved into
Demotic, from the Greek “δημοτικός”, meaning “common”– and not be confused with demotic Greek,
which is the modern version of the Greek language. It was by this point the writing system had
also begun to simplify. Over the centuries, a sort of cursive form of hieroglyphics
called hieratic began to develop, and by the 1st millennium BC this hieratic
had evolved further into the Demotic script. Speaking of Greek however, in 332 BC Egypt was
conquered from the Persians by Alexander the Great, before he went on to conquer Persia
from Persia. When Alexander died in 323 BC, his general Ptolemy Soter called dibs on the
former Egyptian satrap, installing his own dynasty and beginning the Ptolemaic Kingdom.
Like the Kingdom of Kush with Merotic and the Achaemenids with Aramaic, the Ptolemaic
Kingdom proclaimed Koine Greek as the language of government. Demotic meanwhile remained in
common use among the everyday folk of Egypt, with Middle Egyptian still used for religious
affairs. This trilingualism can be seen today in perhaps the most famous document written in
the Egyptian language, the Rosetta Stone; Middle Egyptian on the top in hieroglyphics, Demotic
in the middle, and Ancient Greek on the bottom, which was of course what helped people translate
this giant tax document 2,000 years later. Under the Roman era, things remained much the
same linguistically, with Greek used as the language of government, as was actually the case
across much of the eastern half of the Empire, meaning Latin never made much of
an impact on Egypt like it did in Northwestern Africa. Under Roman rule, the
Egyptian language gradually evolved into a form known as Coptic (from the same
stem which we get the word ‘Egypt’), a language which actually survives to this
day within the Coptic Church of Alexandria. During this time, Egypt saw the
gradual decline of its old beliefs, and the rise of Christianity. However,
as the 3rd century was generally a bad time to be a Christian within
sight of the Mediterranean– as confirmed by the persecutions overseen by
Emperor Diocletian– many Egyptian Christians established monasteries out in the desert (many of
which are still in operation 1,700 years later), where important texts were translated from Greek
into the new Coptic dialect by Saint Shenouda. Coptic evolved hand-in-hand with the Coptic
alphabet, a modified version of the Greek alphabet, with a few extra letters borrowed from
simplified hieroglyphs for certain sounds that Greek letters just couldn’t imitate, like /x/,
/h/, /t͡ʃ/, this one’s pronounced differently depending on dialect, /tiː/, and numbers.
Eventually, being Christian in Egypt went from being more or less banned, to being more or less
enforced, with the old Egyptian religion dwindling down, symbolically ending when Justinian I
ordered the Temple of Isis at Phylae to be closed. [Justinian: Ha! I’ve closed your building!
Now go to a church, or something! Actually, forget the something, just go to a church.]
Thus, Middle Egyptian faded out entirely, with Coptic assuming the same role for
the new faith– especially after 451, when the Council of Chalcedon split the
churches of Constantinople and Alexandria. But in order to learn the full story of
[ra ni-kumat], we have to look at the arrival and the development of [masri]. By 642,
Egypt had been absorbed into the rapidly growing Rashidun Caliphate. For the first 100 or so years,
Arabic was mostly the language of the rulers, military, and recently arrived Arab
immigrants. By the 8th-9th centuries Arabic had grown significantly in Egypt
due to Arab migration and mass conversion to Islam (for which Arabic is of course the
important liturgical language). Basically, throughout this time, Arabic became the language
of government *and* religion (coincidentally the two things you do NOT bring up when traveling to a
new place) and over time it became increasingly so that learning Arabic was just, like, a good idea
for your average Egyptian to learn, especially those living in the shiny new capital Cairo.
By the 11th century, even many texts within the Coptic Church were being translated into Arabic.
This trend continued, and eventually accelerated with the periodic persecution of Copts
and Christians– with Caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah banning the language in literally
every context, even going so far as to personally walk the streets of Cairo and eavesdrop
on people’s homes to hear if they were speaking the language– and by 1200 Coptic had
become little more than a classical language. While isolated communities further up the
Nile in Upper Egypt may have still spoken the language throughout the Mamluk and
Ottoman periods– and even into the 19th century– Egypt had more or less completely
transitioned into an Arabic-speaking nation, with Coptic relegated to the ceremonial
language of the Orthodox minority. No surprise, speakers of Coptic also played an
important role in helping decipher the Rosetta Stone, and through that its ancient ancestors and
the hieroglyphs they wrote in– especially with figuring out where the vowels went, because
y’all know no Afro-Asiatic language ever be writing vowels! I mean I guess Coptic literally
does, but you ever tried learning Arabic or Hebrew? Ancient Egyptian does the same thing. It's
frustrating if you're so Indo-European-brained! In fact, if you want the full story on how
we were able to reconstruct Ancient Egyptian, I would highly recommend this video from
NativLang. Actually, that wasn’t a recommendation, that was an order. This is your homework now, I
expect a 600-page essay on my desk by Thursday! While the Egyptian language may be extinct today,
save for a distant descendant in one specific church, you don’t get to be the language
of one of the most important civilizations in history and not have some sort of influence
today! English words like barge, natron, oasis, and possibly even paper and elephant can all be
traced back to the Egyptian language… and oh yeah, Egyptian hieroglyphs are the ancestor of
most of the writing systems used around the world to this day, from Latin to Arabic
to (potentially) Devanagari and Thai. Quite the influence for a language that first
evolved over 5,000 years ago, I’d say!
