Ancient Egyptian Language

Ancient Egyptian is an extinct branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family that was spoken in Egypt. It is one of the earliest known written languages, first recorded in hieroglyphic script in the late fourth millennium BC, and the longest-attested human language, with a written record spanning over 5,000 years. Its classical form, Middle Egyptian, was the vernacular of the Middle Kingdom and remained the literary language of Egypt until its Christianisation during the Roman period. By classical antiquity the spoken language had evolved into Demotic, which later diversified into Coptic dialects written in the Greek alphabet and was eventually supplanted by Arabic, although Bohairic Coptic remains the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox and Coptic Catholic churches. In this atlas the general entry stands for records that name Egyptian without a stage; Old, Middle and Late Egyptian, Demotic and Coptic have their own entries.