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The Egyptian language, or Ancient Egyptian (r n kmt; [1] [note 3] "speech of Egypt") is an extinct branch of the Afro-Asiatic languages 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 decipherment of the ancient Egyptian scripts in the early ...
Egyptian language, extinct language of the Nile valley whose ancient form is known especially for its logographic writing, known as hieroglyphics. It constitutes a branch of the Afro-Asiatic language phylum.
The ancient Egyptians believed that writing was invented by the god Thoth and called their hieroglyphic script "mdju netjer" ("words of the gods"). The word hieroglyph comes from the Greek hieros (sacred) plus glypho (inscriptions) and was first used by Clement of Alexandria.
Ancient Egyptian Writing is known as hieroglyphics ('sacred carvings') and developed at some point prior to the Early Dynastic Period (c. 3150 -2613 BCE). According to some scholars, the concept of the written word was first developed in Mesopotamia and came to Egypt through trade.
The Egyptian hieroglyphic script was one of the writing systems used by ancient Egyptians to represent their language. Because of their pictorial elegance, Herodotus and other important Greeks believed...
The name hieroglyphic (from the Greek word for “sacred carving”) is first encountered in the writings of Diodorus Siculus (1st century bce). Earlier, other Greeks had spoken of sacred signs when referring to Egyptian writing.
The Ancient Egyptian language belongs to the Afro-Asiatic linguistic family, sometimes classified under the Semito-Hamitic language family, which predominately emerged from the Arabian Peninsula and settled in the regions of Southwest Asia and North Africa.
Egyptian language, Extinct Afro-Asiatic language of the Nile River valley. Its very long history comprises five periods: Old Egyptian (c. 3000– c. 2200 bce), best exemplified by a corpus of religious inscriptions known as the Pyramid Texts and a group of autobiographical tomb inscriptions; Middle Egyptian (c. 2200– c. 1600 bce), the ...
The ancient Egyptians used the distinctive script known today as hieroglyphs (Greek for "sacred words") for almost 4,000 years. Hieroglyphs were written on papyrus, carved in stone on tomb and temple walls, and used to decorate many objects of cultic and daily life use.
Ancient Egyptian is the oldest and longest continually attested of the world's languages. Recent discoveries have demonstrated the existence of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing with phonograms as well as ideograms around 3250 bc, roughly contemporary with the comparable development in Mesopotamian cuneiform, and the last documents composed in ...