Extinct Afro-Asiatic language of the Nile River valley.
Its very long history comprises five periods: Old Egyptian ( 0441; 3000 0441; 2200 BC), best exemplified by a corpus of religious inscriptions known as the Pyramid Texts and a group of autobiographical tomb inscriptions; Middle Egyptian ( 0441; 2200 0441; 1600 BC), the classical literary language; Late Egyptian (1300700 BC), known mainly from manuscripts; Demotic ( 0441; 700 BC 0441; AD 400), used in the periods of Persian, Greek, and Roman dominance and differing from Late Egyptian chiefly in its graphic system; and Coptic ( 0441; AD 300at least the 17th century), the language of Christian Egypt, gradually supplanted as a vernacular by Arabic from the 9th century on but still preserved to some degree in the liturgy of the Coptic Orthodox Church . Egyptian was originally written in hieroglyph s, out of which evolved hieratic, a cursive rendering of hieroglyphs, and demotic, a kind of shorthand reduction of hieratic. Coptic was written in a modified form of the Greek alphabet, with seven signs added from the demotic script for sounds that did not occur in Greek.