THE HISTORY AND LITERATURE OF
THE ANCIENT EGYPTIAN & COPTIC LANGUAGES
-The Origin of the Coptic Language-
The Ancient Egyptian Writing:
The ancient Egyptian writing began to be abandoned following the fourth
and fifth century A.D. but it was used side by side with the Coptic language
until the fifth century A.D. The Byzantine occupation of Egypt in the
fourth century A.D. and the Arab conquest of Egypt in the seventh century
A.D., followed by the widespread use of Arabic, caused the ancient Egyptian
language (in Hieroglyphics, Hieratic, and Demotic) to be totally forgotten,
along with its scripts.
After many centuries, writers, scholars, and amateurs began the attempt to find
an explanation for the Hieroglyphic writing and to decipher the ancient Egyptian
language. One of these pioneers was the Jesuit priest, Athanasius Kircher, of
the 17th Century. In the 15th Century and after Horapollo tried to interpret
the Hieroglyphic symbols, others copied the Hieroglyphic inscriptions from the
Egyptian monuments, such as P. Lucas, R. Pococke, C. Niebuhr and other visitors
to Egypt such as F.L. Norden. Through the 18th Century, few scholars succeeded
Father Kircher. Among those were: A. Gordon, N. Freret, P.A.L. D’Origny, J.D.
Marsham, C. de Gebelin, J.H. Schumacher, J.G. Koch, T.Ch. Tychsen and P.E. Jablonski.
Also, few scholars in the 18th Century could identify the meaning of the oval
as J.J. Barthélemy, de Guignes and F. Zoega.
Towards the 18th century, Napoleon Bonaparte in 1798 envaded Egypt. Pierre Françoise-Xavier
Bouchard, an engineer and one of Napoleon’s officers, was engaged in cleaning
the ruined Fort Rashid. In 1799 he discovered the Rosetta Stone, a slab made
of basalt, which measures 3 feet 9 inches long by 2 feet 4 ½ inches wide by 11
inches thick. A copy of the inscriptions of the stone was sent by Bonaparte to
Paris but the Rosetta Stone itself became the property of the British and was
later housed in the British Museum in 1802. The slab was inscribed in 196 B.C.
in Hieroglyphics, Demotic and Greek, during the time of Ptolemy V Epiphanies.
Sylvestre de Sacy in 1802 could read some of the names mentioned on the slab
but he failed to recognize an alphabet. De Sacy was followed by J.D. Akerbald,
who read the inscriptions unsuccessfully but identified a few words in addition
to the names written in Demotic and their equivalent in Greek.
Others showed their interest in deciphering the lab but they failed to read it
until Thomas Young, who studied the inscriptions on the slab and finally “was
able to compile a Greek-Demotic vocabulary containing eighty-six groups, most
of them correct.” “…This effort, however, was based largely on guesswork.”
The last scholar who deciphered the Ancient Egyptian language and its symbols
successfully was Jean François Champollion, who recognized “that the Hieroglyphics
were neither exclusively phonetic, nor wholly symbolic, but a combination of
the two.” According to this he was able to read many of the names of the kings
and queens of Egypt and he wrote a book about Egyptian grammar and an Egyptian
dictionary. After the death of Champollion in 1832, other scholars continued
the study of the Ancient Egyptian language and made a lot of progress, among
those were: Lespsius, Ludwig Stern, Adolph Erman, K. Sethe, W. Speigelberg, H.
Thompson, H. Grapow, H.K. Brugsch, L. Griffith, E. Revillout and S. de Buck.5
As a result of such decipherment, we know that the ancient Egyptian language
was written with different syllables and began with pictures borrowed from nature,
such as drawings of human beings (men, women, and children), animals, plants,
houses and palaces, water, hills, the sun, moon, and sky, wind, and ships. All
of these signs number about 721 syllables. Every sign was first written as a
picture of one of the syllables in its complete form, which is called a pictograph
or “ideogram, or pictures for whole words; phonograms, or pictures for syllables;
alphabetic signs, or pictures for individual letters.”6
In many words, written with syllabic signs, the last letter of the syllable is
written out. This letter is called the phonetic complement. It is not to be pronounced
separately, but it is used in order that the reader may know how the syllable
should end.7
Moreover, the ancient Egyptian writing had what we call determinatives, which
usually attached to the end of the word and were silent. To some extent, these
gave the meaning or the general idea of the word as well as a picture. When one
reads a text, there are no spaces between the words as the texts were written
as one sentence with syllables or alphabetic signs, but those who can read the
ancient Egyptian language know the end of each word from the determinatives.
Some words express abstract ideas; in these cases, they used the picture of a
roll of papyrus. Thus, determinatives are useful in knowing the meaning of some
words but in other instances, they indicate just a general idea. Still other
words have no determinatives and their meaning is known through practice in reading
Hieroglyphics.8