The ancient Egyptian language: what they spoke, who wrote it, and its five stages

Egyptian changed through five stages

Egyptologists split the language into stages by its grammar and words, each with its own texts:

• Old Egyptian, c. 2600 to 2000 BC: the Old Kingdom, the age of the pyramids, and the Pyramid Texts, first carved in the pyramid of Unas around 2350 BC
• Middle Egyptian, c. 2000 to 1350 BC: the classic language of the Tale of Sinuhe and the teachings, still used on temple walls until the 4th century AD
• Late Egyptian, c. 1350 to 700 BC: closer to speech, from Akhenaten's time on, in letters, court records and tales
• Demotic, c. 700 BC to AD 400s: the language and script of contracts, tax receipts and stories
• Coptic, from the 1st to 3rd centuries AD: Egyptian in Greek letters, spoken into early modern times and still used in Coptic Church services

Read a Middle Egyptian classic, the Teaching for Merikare

Written Egyptian lagged behind the spoken language

Scribes went on writing the classic language long after people stopped speaking it, as medieval Europe wrote Latin. A priest carving a temple wall under the Ptolemies wrote a form of Middle Egyptian that no one had spoken for over a thousand years, while a clerk in the same town wrote his receipts in Demotic, close to the speech of the street.

Before 2600 BC writing records only names, titles and short labels on seals and jars. The first full sentences come from the Old Kingdom.

Only a few percent of Egyptians could read

Estimates put readers at 1 to 5 percent of the population, though the evidence is thin, and in a town of officials such as Lahun, around 1800 BC, the share may have reached 15 percent. The word for scribe, sš (sesh), was written with the scribe's kit (Y3): a palette with two ink wells, a water pot and a reed brush.

Boys trained as scribes copied texts on flakes of limestone and boards. They learned hieratic first, and only a small minority went on to learn hieroglyphs. Scribes kept the accounts of temples and estates, wrote letters, contracts and court records, and counted the harvest for tax. Priests copied the religious books. At Deir el-Medina, the village of the royal tomb builders, so many workmen could write that thousands of their notes, lists and letters survive.

Read Deir el-Medina, the writers' village

Hieratic was hieroglyphs written fast

Hieratic is the joined-up handwriting of hieroglyphs, written in ink with a reed brush on papyrus, pottery, wood and stone flakes. It appears around 3200 to 3000 BC, almost as early as hieroglyphs themselves, and for daily business it was always the more common script. A sign that took a carver minutes took a scribe a flick of the brush.

Hieroglyphs, which the Egyptians called mdw nṯr, "the god's words", stayed on monuments, tombs and objects meant to last. The name hieratic, Greek for "priestly", was first used by Clement of Alexandria in the 2nd century AD, when it had become a script for religious books. From about 1100 to 650 BC Thebes used an even faster form for leases and letters, now called abnormal hieratic.

Demotic became the everyday script

Around 650 BC a still faster script grew out of the hieratic of the Nile Delta. Under Amasis II, in the 26th Dynasty, it became the official script of government and law. The Egyptians called it document writing. Herodotus called it demotic, "popular", and the name stuck for both the script and the stage of the language it wrote.

The Rosetta Stone, a decree of 196 BC, shows the three scripts side by side: hieroglyphs for the gods, Demotic for Egyptians, and Greek for the Ptolemaic government.

Read what the Rosetta Stone says

Roman Egypt still wrote in three Egyptian scripts

After Cleopatra VII died in 30 BC, Egypt became a Roman province. Latin was used by the army and top Roman officials, Greek by the government and the cities, and Egyptian by most people in the villages. The temples carried on. At Esna priests carved emperors' names in hieroglyphic cartouches until about AD 250.

A temple library found at Tebtunis in the Fayum in 1931 shows all three scripts in use in the 2nd century AD: some 300 papyri in Demotic, about 100 in hieratic, about 50 in hieroglyphs and about 50 in Greek. Hieratic lasted in religious books into the 3rd century. The last dated hieroglyphs were carved at Philae in AD 394 and the last dated Demotic graffito in AD 452.

Read Philae, where hieroglyphs ended

Coptic carried the spoken language to its end

From around the 1st century AD Egyptians began writing their language in the Greek alphabet, with a few extra letters taken from Demotic for sounds Greek lacked. Christians took it up for the Bible, and Coptic became the written form of ordinary Egyptian speech. It is the only stage that shows vowels: ꜥnḫ, "life", the word written with the ankh, is ōnh in Coptic.

After the Arab conquest of 639 to 642, Arabic spread first through government, then the church, then homes. Coptic was spoken in villages of Upper Egypt for centuries more, and the last reported speakers lived in the 17th century. It survives in the Coptic Church's services, a direct descendant of the language of the pyramids.

Read how the Egyptian language died

Questions

Where to see it

• Deir el-Medina site
• Philae Temple site

More to read

• How to read hieroglyphs How to read hieroglyphs: find the way the signs face, sound out the alphabet signs, spot the silent ones. A king's name read sign by sign.
• Which way do you read hieroglyphs? Which way do you read hieroglyphs? Toward the faces: birds, snakes and people look at the start of the line. Rows, columns and the odd exceptions.
• The hieroglyph alphabet: 24 signs and their sounds The hieroglyphic alphabet: the 24 one-consonant signs Egyptologists list, with the picture, the sound and how to spell an English name with them.