Late Egyptian is the stage of the

Egyptian language The Egyptian language or Ancient Egyptian ( ) is a dead language, dead Afroasiatic languages, Afro-Asiatic language that was spoken in ancient Egypt. It is known today from a large Text corpus, corpus of surviving texts which were made acces ...

that was written by the time of the

New Kingdom of Egypt The New Kingdom, also referred to as the Egyptian Empire, is the period in ancient Egyptian history between the sixteenth century BC and the eleventh century BC, covering the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth dynasties of Egypt. Radioca ...

around 1350 BC (the

Amarna Period The Amarna Period was an era of History of Ancient Egypt, Egyptian history during the later half of the Eighteenth dynasty of Egypt, Eighteenth Dynasty when the royal residence of the pharaoh and his queen was shifted to Akhetaten ('Horizon of the ...

). Texts written wholly in Late Egyptian date to the

Twentieth Dynasty of Egypt The Twentieth Dynasty of Egypt (notated Dynasty XX, alternatively 20th Dynasty or Dynasty 20) is the third and last dynasty of the Ancient Egyptian New Kingdom period, lasting from 1189 BC to 1077 BC. The 19th and 20th Dynasties furthermore toget ...

and later. Late Egyptian succeeded but did not fully supplant

Middle Egyptian The Egyptian language or Ancient Egyptian ( ) is a dead Afro-Asiatic language that was spoken in ancient Egypt. It is known today from a large corpus of surviving texts which were made accessible to the modern world following the deciphe ...

as a

literary language A literary language is the form (register) of a language used in written literature, which can be either a nonstandard dialect or a standardized variety of the language. Literary language sometimes is noticeably different from the spoken langu ...

Late Egyptian literature

Late Egyptian is represented by a large body of religious and secular

literature Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially prose fiction, drama, and poetry. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to include ...

, comprising such examples as the ''

Story of Wenamun The Story of Wenamun (alternately known as the Report of Wenamun, The Misadventures of Wenamun, Voyage of Unamūn, or nformallyas just Wenamun) is a literary text written in hieratic in the Late Egyptian language. It is only known from one incomp ...

'', the love poems of the Chester–Beatty I papyrus, and the ''

Instruction of Any ''The Instruction of Any'', or ''Ani'', is an Ancient Egyptian text written in the style of wisdom literature which is thought to have been composed in the Eighteenth Dynasty of the New Kingdom, with a surviving manuscript dated from the Twenty-Fir ...

''.

Instructions Instruction or instructions may refer to: Computing * Instruction, one operation of a processor within a computer architecture instruction set * Computer program, a collection of instructions Music * Instruction (band), a 2002 rock band from Ne ...

became a popular literary genre of the New Kingdom, which took the form of advice on proper behavior. Late Egyptian was also the language of New Kingdom administration.

Differences between Middle and Late Egyptian

Late Egyptian is not completely distinct from Middle Egyptian, as many "classicisms" appear in historical and literary documents of this phase. However, the difference between Middle and Late Egyptian is greater than the difference between Middle and Old Egyptian. Originally a

synthetic language A synthetic language uses inflection or agglutination to express Syntax, syntactic relationships within a sentence. Inflection is the addition of morphemes to a root word that assigns grammatical property to that word, while agglutination is the ...

, Egyptian by the Late Egyptian phase had become an

analytic language In linguistic typology, an analytic language is a language that conveys relationships between words in sentences primarily by way of ''helper'' words (particles, prepositions, etc.) and word order, as opposed to using inflections (changing the ...

. The relationship between Middle Egyptian and Late Egyptian has been described as being similar to that between Latin and Italian.Christidēs et al. ''op.cit.'', p.811 * Written Late Egyptian was seemingly a better representative than Middle Egyptian of the spoken language in the New Kingdom and beyond: weak consonants ''ꜣ, w, j'', as well as the feminine ending ''.t'' were increasingly dropped, apparently because they stopped being pronounced. * The demonstrative pronouns ''pꜣ'' (masc.), ''tꜣ'' (fem.), and ''nꜣ'' (pl.) were used as definite articles. * The old form ''sḏm.n.f'' (he heard) of the verb was replaced by ''sḏm-f'' which had both prospective (he shall hear) and perfective (he heard) aspects. The past tense was also formed using the auxiliary verb ''jr'' (make), as in ''jr.f saḥa.f'' (he has accused him). * Adjectives as attributes of nouns are often replaced by nouns.

Developments during the first millennium BC

Hieroglyphic

orthography An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation. Most transnational languages in the modern period have a writing system, and mos ...

saw an enormous expansion of its graphemic inventory between the Late Period and the Ptolemaic Kingdom. Middle Egyptian had a renaissance after the

Third Intermediate Period The Third Intermediate Period of ancient Egypt began with the death of Pharaoh Ramesses XI in 1077 BC, which ended the New Kingdom, and was eventually followed by the Late Period. Various points are offered as the beginning for the latt ...

(1070–664 BCE), when it was often used in

hieroglyphic Egyptian hieroglyphs (, ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt, used for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with some 1,000 distinct characters.There were about 1,00 ...

and hieratic texts in preference to Late Egyptian.

Grammars

* J. Cerny, S. Israelit-Groll, C. Eyre, ''A Late Egyptian Grammar'', 4th, updated edition – Biblical Institute; Rome, 1984

References

Footnotes

Sources

* Kathryn A. Bard, ''Encyclopedia of the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt'', Routledge 1999, * Martin Haspelmath, ''Language Typology and Language Universals: An International Handbook'', Walter de Gruyter 2001, * Antonio Loprieno, ''Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction'', Cambridge University Press 1995, * Anastasios-Phoivos Christidēs, Maria Arapopoulou, Maria Chritē, ''A History of Ancient Greek: From the Beginnings to Late Antiquity'', Cambridge University Press 2007, * Eric M. Meyers, ''The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East'', 1997 {{Ancient Egypt topics Egyptian languages Ancient Egyptian language