How the Egyptian language died: from hieroglyphs to Coptic to Arabic

Greek kings built Egyptian temples

Alexander the Great took Egypt in 332 BC, and after his death his general Ptolemy founded a dynasty that ruled for three centuries. Greek was the language of the court in Alexandria, of the army and of the tax offices. Plutarch, praising Cleopatra VII's gift for languages, adds that "the kings of Egypt before her had not even made an effort to learn the native language".

In the temples the Ptolemies ruled as pharaohs. They built or rebuilt Edfu, Dendera and Philae in the old style and had themselves carved on the walls in Egyptian crowns before the gods. When the priests met in synod, their decrees went up in three scripts: hieroglyphs, Demotic for everyday Egyptian, and Greek for the government. The Canopus Decree of 238 BC, under Ptolemy III, is one. The Rosetta Stone in the British Museum carries another, passed in 196 BC in honour of Ptolemy V.

From 206 to 186 BC two Egyptian rival pharaohs held Thebes and much of the south against the Ptolemies, in what historians call the Great Theban Revolt. It began when rebels seized the temple at Edfu, then still being built.

Read what the Rosetta Stone decree says

Roman emperors appeared in cartouches

After Cleopatra VII died in 30 BC, Egypt became a Roman province. Rome valued it above all for grain and taxes. Its governor, a prefect of equestrian rank, organised the grain shipments, including the annona that fed the city of Rome.

Temple life went on. Priests at Dendera, Esna and Philae wrote the emperors' names in cartouches, as they had for the Ptolemies, and showed them offering to the gods like any pharaoh. At Esna the series reaches Decius, around AD 250. In the villages people spoke Egyptian, and Greek remained the language of the cities and the government.

The Gallus stela from Philae, dated 29 BC and now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, is written in hieroglyphs, Latin and Greek. Cornelius Gallus, the first Roman prefect, set it up after crushing a revolt in the Thebaid. The Latin and Greek list his victories, and the hieroglyphic text praises Horus, Osiris, Isis and the gods of the First Cataract.

Coptic wrote Egyptian in Greek letters

From around the first century AD some Egyptians wrote their own language in the Greek alphabet, with a handful of extra letters taken from Demotic for sounds Greek lacked. By the third century Christians were copying biblical texts in it. That script and the language it records are called Coptic.

Coptic is the same language, late in its life. The word ꜥnḫ, "life", written with the ankh sign, became ōnh in Coptic. The Greek letters spell out vowels that hieroglyphs never showed.

Hieroglyphs ended with the temples

Egyptians called hieroglyphs mdw nṯr (medu netjer), "the god's words", and by Roman times only temple priests still learned them. As Egypt became Christian in the fourth century, the temples closed one by one and the script went with them, more than two centuries before the Arabs came.

The last dated hieroglyphic inscription was carved at Philae on 24 August 394 by the priest Esmet-Akhom. The last Demotic graffito there is dated 11 December 452, and Justinian had the temple closed between 535 and 537.

See the last inscription at Philae

Arabic entered through the government

Arab armies under ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ took Egypt between 639 and 642. For two generations the new rulers kept the old offices, and documents went on in Greek and Coptic. In 705 or 706, according to the Egyptian historian al-Kindī, the governor ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAbd al-Malik, a son of the caliph ʿAbd al-Malik, made Arabic the only language of the central chancery. Bilingual and trilingual papyri show the change spreading through the eighth century.

Arabic was the language of the rulers and of the new religion, and Egyptians who converted, or who sought office and trade, took it up. Ibn Khaldun, the North African historian who ended his life as a judge in Cairo, described the pattern across the Muslim world. In Franz Rosenthal's 1958 translation of his Muqaddimah, "the vanquished always want to imitate the victor in his distinctive mark(s), his dress, his occupation, and all his other conditions and customs." Of speech he wrote that "the dialects of the urban population follow the language of the nation or race that has control of (the cities in question) or has founded them".

Staying Christian cost a poll tax

Under Muslim rule Christians and Jews were dhimmis, protected subjects who paid the jizya, a poll tax levied only on non-Muslims, and accepted limits on public worship and on office. Converting to Islam lifted the tax, and the History of the Patriarchs itself names fiscal pressure as a reason Copts converted.

Heavy taxes and harsh governors set off a run of revolts in the Nile Delta, in 749, 767 and 831 to 832. The caliph al-Ma'mun crushed the last one, among the Bashmurians of the northern marshes. Many men were executed, women and children were deported or sold as slaves, and their district was laid waste. In translation, the historian al-Kindī wrote that God "made the Copts small throughout the country of Egypt and destroyed their power".

Pressure on Christians came in waves. The Fatimid caliph al-Hakim banned Christian festivals in 1004 and in 1005 ordered Christians to wear black turbans and a heavy iron cross, before easing his rules in his last years. Emile Maher Ishaq, writing in the Coptic Encyclopedia, says al-Hakim forbade the use of Coptic everywhere and that those who disobeyed could lose their tongues, and the church's oral tradition tells of cut-out tongues left in the street as a warning. No document from al-Hakim's own reign confirming the ban has been found. Christians remained a large part of the population for centuries, and are usually thought to have lost their majority only after the fourteenth century.

Coptic left everyday speech over centuries

The church changed language from the top. Severus ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, bishop of al-Ashmunayn in the tenth century, wrote his books in Arabic, and in the early eleventh century the patriarchs moved to Cairo and made Arabic the church's official language. The History of the Patriarchs, the church's own chronicle, survives in Arabic. Word lists called scalae, setting Coptic words beside Arabic and Greek ones, were still being made in the fifteenth century.

Speech lasted longest in the south. The historian al-Maqrīzī, who died in 1442, wrote that Christian women and children in Upper Egypt spoke hardly anything but Sahidic Coptic, though some scholars think he copied an older source. Johann Michael Vansleb, travelling in Upper Egypt in 1672 and 1673, recorded a Muʿallim Athanasius as the last Copt who could still speak it. Arietta Papaconstantinou places the end of Coptic as a spoken language in the later Middle Ages. James Allen has it surviving as a first language for a minority until at least the seventeenth century.

Coptic is still read and sung in the services of the Coptic Orthodox and Coptic Catholic churches, mostly in the Bohairic dialect, beside Arabic.

Questions

People in this article

• Alexander the Great c. 332–323 BC
• Cleopatra VII c. 51–30 BC
• Ptolemy V c. 205–180 BC

Where to see it

• Temple of Edfu site
• Dendera Temple Complex site
• Philae Temple site
• Rosetta Stone object
• British Museum, London museum
• Egyptian Museum, Cairo museum

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