Extinct
Its very long history comprises five periods: Old Egyptian (с 3000–с 2200 BC), best exemplified by a corpus of religious inscriptions known as the Pyramid Texts and a group of autobiographical tomb inscriptions; Middle Egyptian (с 2200–с 1600 BC), the classical literary language; Late Egyptian (1300–700 BC), known mainly from manuscripts; Demotic (с 700 BC–с AD 400), used in the periods of Persian, Greek, and Roman dominance and differing from Late Egyptian chiefly in its graphic system; and Coptic (с AD 300–at 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 {{link=Coptic Orthodox Church">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.