Egyptian (hieroglyphic)

The Egyptian language in its hieroglyphic dress, from the earliest Old Kingdom writing through the last Ptolemaic temple texts: Old Egyptian, the classical Middle Egyptian of the great literature, and the Late Egyptian of the imperial New Kingdom, all written in the same monumental script and treated here as one entry in the atlas’s inventory, with each form’s stage named in its own prose. Middle Egyptian, in use from roughly 2000 to 1300 BCE, remains the reference stage: it is the language of Sinuhe and the classical stelae, and the stage most reconstructions of vocalization describe. Demotic and Coptic, the language’s later lives in other scripts, stand as their own entries in this atlas.