Middle Egyptian

Middle Egyptian is the classical literary stage of the Egyptian language, used from roughly the twenty-first through seventeenth centuries BCE during the Middle Kingdom and remaining in use as a prestige literary and religious register for over a thousand years afterward even as everyday spoken Egyptian moved on to Late Egyptian, a situation comparable to Latin's continued literary and liturgical use in medieval Europe long after Vulgar Latin had evolved into the Romance vernaculars.

Middle Egyptian belongs to the Egyptian branch of the Afroasiatic language family, and its religious literary output expanded considerably beyond Old Egyptian's royally restricted Pyramid Texts to include the Coffin Texts, a large corpus of funerary spells inscribed on the coffins of non-royal elite Egyptians, reflecting what scholars term the democratization of the afterlife, in which access to elaborate funerary religious provisions previously reserved for pharaohs spread to a wider, though still wealthy, segment of Egyptian society. Middle Egyptian remained the language Egyptian scribes studied and used for religious and monumental inscriptions well into the Greco-Roman period, long after it had ceased to be anyone's native spoken tongue.

The Coffin Texts, composed in Middle Egyptian and inscribed on the interior surfaces of non-royal wooden coffins from the Middle Kingdom onward, expanded considerably on the earlier royal Pyramid Texts, incorporating new spells addressing the deceased's transformation into various divine and animal forms, protection from dangers in the underworld, and inclusion of an early version of the Book of Two Ways, a kind of illustrated guide to underworld topography that anticipated the later, more elaborate New Kingdom Book of the Dead.

Middle Egyptian religious and wisdom literature also produced significant non-funerary texts, including instructional wisdom literature offering ethical and practical guidance framed as advice from a father or sage figure, genres that carried implicit theological assumptions about maat, the Egyptian concept of cosmic and social order, truth and justice that pharaohs and ordinary Egyptians alike were understood to be responsible for upholding. Middle Egyptian's grammar and vocabulary, having been fixed as a classical literary standard, continued to be taught and used by Egyptian priests and scribes for monumental temple inscriptions throughout the later Ptolemaic and Roman periods of Egyptian history.