Ancient Near Eastern and Iranian Languages of Sacred Text

Begin with the classical literary stage of Egyptian, used for monumental inscriptions, religious hymns and much of the Book of the Dead tradition. It stayed the preferred register for formal religious writing long after speech had moved on, much as Latin later did in Europe.

Next comes the stage of Egyptian closer to the spoken language of the New Kingdom, written in hieratic for everyday and literary use and in hieroglyphs on monuments. Its religious texts show how Egyptian religious vocabulary kept developing after the classical period.

Demotic is a heavily cursive script and the late stage of Egyptian written in it. It carries the Demotic magical papyri, ritual texts that sit beside the Greek magical papyri, and it is one of the three scripts on the Rosetta Stone.

The Egyptian thread ends with Coptic, written in Greek letters plus signs taken from Demotic. It is the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church and the main surviving language of the Nag Hammadi Gnostic texts found in 1945.

Turn to Mesopotamia with the Semitic language of Babylon and Assyria, written in cuneiform. Its texts include the Enuma Elish, portions of the Epic of Gilgamesh and a large body of temple ritual, omen and divination literature.

In Bronze Age Anatolia, Hittite is an extinct Indo-European language known from cuneiform texts, chiefly the archives of Hattusa between the seventeenth and thirteenth centuries BC. Among the texts written in it are prayers.

Aramaic links the earlier worlds to Jewish and Christian ones. Parts of Daniel and Ezra were composed in it, it carries the discursive commentary of the Talmud, and Syriac tradition churches still use it in liturgy.

Moving east to Iran, Avestan is the language of the Avesta, the core scripture of Zoroastrianism. It has two stages, Old Avestan and Younger Avestan, and priests still recite it among Zoroastrian communities in Iran and the Parsi community of India.

Finish with Middle Persian, also called Pahlavi, the language of Sasanian era Zoroastrian literature. It holds commentaries on the Avesta and theological and cosmological works such as the Bundahishn, which interpret the older Avestan scriptures.