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Late Egyptian is the stage of the
Egyptian language 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 ...
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 Egyptian history during the later half of the Eighteenth Dynasty when the royal residence of the pharaoh and his queen was shifted to Akhetaten ('Horizon of the Aten') in what is now Amarna. It was marked by 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 as a literary language.


Late Egyptian literature

Late Egyptian is represented by a large body of religious and secular
literature Literature is any collection of Writing, 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 ...
, comprising such examples as the '' Story of Wenamun'', the love poems of the Chester–Beatty I papyrus, and the '' Instruction of Any''. Instructions 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 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 combi ...
, 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 th ...
. 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 ...
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 (1070–664 BCE), when it was often used in hieroglyphic 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