Afro-Asiatic, Egyptian · Egyptian hieroglyphs
Ancient Egyptian
𓆎𓅓𓏏𓊖 km.t, “Kemet, the Black Land (Egypt)”
- Spoken
- c. 3200 BC – AD 300 (before Coptic)
- Written
- last hieroglyphs AD 394, last Demotic AD 452
- Where
- The Nile valley and delta, today Egypt
Egyptian hieroglyphs look like pictures, but most of them spell sounds. An owl writes m, a mouth writes r, a wavy line of water writes n. The language behind them was spoken along the Nile for more than three thousand years, changing from the Old Egyptian of the pyramid builders to the Demotic of Cleopatra's clerks. Its last stage, Coptic, still survives in church. Only the vowels slipped through history's fingers: the script never wrote them.
Where and when
Egyptian was the language of the Nile valley from the first cataract at Aswan to the Mediterranean, a strip of farmland rarely more than a few dozen kilometres wide. The earliest readable inscriptions date to around 3200 BC, roughly the same time as the first Sumerian writing. Almost everyone lived within sight of the river.
Scholars divide its history into Old, Middle, Late Egyptian, Demotic and Coptic. Middle Egyptian, spoken around 2000 BC, became the classical language, copied for monuments long after it had changed in the street. Hieroglyphs were for stone; hieratic and later Demotic were fast ink scripts for letters, contracts and literature.
How it fell silent
The language did not die so much as lose its scripts and then its speakers. Greek became the language of power after Alexander's conquest in 332 BC, and under Roman rule hieroglyphs shrank into a temple specialty. Christianity sealed their fate: from the third century AD Egyptians wrote their language in Greek letters as Coptic, and the old pagan scripts lost their purpose.
The last known hieroglyphic inscription was carved at the temple of Philae on 24 August AD 394, and the last Demotic graffito there dates to AD 452. After Theodosius closed pagan temples and Justinian shut Philae around AD 535, no one could read hieroglyphs until Champollion's breakthrough in 1822. The spoken language lived on as Coptic for another thousand years.
How it may have sounded
-
𓋹𓍑𓋴
ꜥnḫ wḏꜣ snb
Say it roughly AHNKH WED-ja SEH-neb
“Life, prosperity, health!”
A wish written after the pharaoh's name; the e vowels are a modern Egyptological convention to make the consonants pronounceable, and Coptic ōnh, 'life', hints that the first vowel was really an o-like sound.
-
𓄤
nfr
Say it roughly NEH-fer
“good, beautiful”
Only the consonants n-f-r are written; Coptic noufe, 'good', and Greek spellings of names like Nefertiti suggest how the vowels may once have sounded.
Your name, set in stone
Your name is spelled with one-consonant hieroglyphs, the closest thing Egyptian had to an alphabet, inside a cartouche, the oval rope reserved for royal names. Vowels are only hinted, usually with the reed leaf, the arm or the quail chick.
A playful transcription, not a scholarly one: the people who used this script never heard your name, and would have spelled it in more than one way.
Three things
- The last dated hieroglyphic inscription, at Philae, was carved on 24 August AD 394.
- English 'ebony' and 'oasis' come from Egyptian words, and 'adobe' probably does too, through Coptic and Arabic.
- Egyptian is recorded for about 4,500 years if Coptic is included, one of the longest written histories of any language.