alphabet was adopted to write Coptic, the fi nal stage of Egyp-
tian. Th e last person who could read hieroglyphic writing
probably lived in the sixth or seventh century c.e. Long aft er,
in 1822, the French Egyptologist Jean-François Cham pol lion
(1790–1832) began to decipher the hieroglyphic script.
Th e rise of Christianity had been the principal cause of
the demise of the hieroglyphic tradition. In the fourth cen-
tury c.e. Christianity became the offi cial religion of Egypt.
Hieroglyphics remained exclusively linked with the native
pagan religion; there is no such thing as Christian hiero-
glyphic writings. Th e end of hieroglyphic writing, therefore,
coincided with the end of the worship of the ancient Egyptian
gods. Th e end came soon aft er 550 c.e., a century or so aft er
the latest dated hieroglyphic inscription and about a century
before the Muslim conquest of Egypt. Around 550 c.e. the
Byzantine emperor Justinian (r. 527–565) ordered the last na-
tive Egyptian religious compound at Philae in the deep south
of Egypt to be closed down.
Aft er hieroglyphic writing died out, the Egyptian lan-
guage lived on in its latest stage, Coptic. Around 640 c.e. Is-
lam came to Egypt. From then on, the Coptic language was
g radu a l ly replaced by A rabic a s t he spoken la ng uage of Eg y pt.
Probably sometime between 1000 and 1500 c.e. Coptic ceased
to be spoken. Th e knowledge of the Coptic language and of
Coptic writing, however, did not vanish. Coptic manu scripts
contin ued to be read, copied, and understood for liturgi cal
purposes. Th us, while the knowledge of hieroglyphic writing
became extinct, the language itself never did. Egyptian lived
on in an evolved stage, as the liturgical Coptic used in the
Coptic Christian church. Th e term Coptic therefore has two
meanings. It denotes the last stage of the Egyptian language,
and it is also a synonym for Christian Egyptian. Today, Chris-
tian Egyptians, or Copts, are a minority in Egypt.
If not for the surviving liturgical Coptic, ancient Egyp-
tian might have remained undeciphered. It had long been as-
sumed that hieroglyphic Egyptian was a form of early Coptic,
which gave linguists some sense of the language they were
trying to decipher from the hieroglyphic script.
THE MIDDLE EAST
BY JUSTIN CORFIELD
Many languages were spoken in the Near East during ancient
times. Th e earliest to have survived in transcribed form is Su-
merian. It is known only through inscribed texts, mainly on
clay tablets, that show a simple pictograph system known as
Archaic Sumerian. Th e oldest tablets date to about 3300 b.c.e.
and were found at the city of Uruk. On them a pictograph
represents an object or idea. Around 3000 b.c.e. the picto-
graphs changed to become a more coherent script in which
the inscription came to represent a sound. Th is allowed for a
greater variety of new words and ideas to be expressed.
Th e language of Sumerian rapidly seems to have devel-
oped into Akkadian, a Semitic language to which Hebrew
and Arabic both are related. Akkadian fi rst arose in south-
ern Mesopotamia and gradually started supplanting Sume-
rian. Surviving texts in Akkadian date to about 2400 b.c.e.;
the language, an infl ected one, in which words take diff erent
forms to refl ect grammatical information, remained in use
until about 75 c.e. From 1800 until 1200 b.c.e. Akkadian
was clearly the major written language in western Asia for
trade and diplomacy. Subsequently, it was overtaken by two
variants or dialects, Babylonian and Assyrian. Babylonian,
starting in southern Mesopotamia, by the ninth century
b.c.e. quickly became the lingua franca, or common lan-
guage, of the region. It varied from Akkadian, but Akkadian
was still used by the Babylonians. At Susa, King Hammurabi
(d. ca. 1750 b.c.e.) erected a stela (a monumental stone slab)
on which he wrote his laws for the whole of the Babylonian
Empire. Th e inscription was in Akkadian, with many Sume-
rian terms incorporated into it. Akkadian would have gained
some loanwords from Hebrew when the Jews were held in
exile in Babylon from 587 to 538 b.c.e. Th e Assyrian dialect
arose in northern Mesopotamia and is oft en called Assyrian
Neo-Aramaic.
Gradually the cuneiform script, a wedge-shaped form
of writing used by the Babylonians and the Assyrians, came
to be the basis of other languages of the ancient Near East,
such as Eblaite, Elamite, Hittite, and Hurrian. Th is common
descent allowed Akkadian cuneiform, in all its variations,
to remain the major script used for administration and also
for diplomatic correspondence and regional trade until the
emergence of the use of Greek in the region in the late seventh
century b.c.e.
Th e Achaemenid Persian Empire (538–331 b.c.e.) was
polyglot, speaking diff erent languages. Th ree languages were
used for the administration of the empire, and surviving ste-
lae show inscriptions in Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian.
Persian represented the major language of the government,
with a new writing system used for offi cial proclamations. It
was always the fi rst language for any offi cial inscriptions, fol-
lowed by Elamite, showing the Persian support for the former
“underclass” in Assyria. Th e oldest surviving inscriptions
in Elamite come from 2200 b.c.e. and were found in mod-
ern-day Khūzestān and Fārs in Iran. Elamite rulers exerted
signifi cant control over much of Mesopotamia until the Bab-
ylonians and Assyrians insisted on the sole use of their own
languages on stelae. By 600 b.c.e. Elamite had developed very
diff erently from Babylonian and Assyrian. Th e language of
the Elamites gradually fell into disuse during Assyrian rule
but was revived by the Persians to harness goodwill from the
surviving Elamites as well as to demonstrate that the empire
extended far beyond the borders of modern-day Persia. Simi-
larly, t he Persia ns a lso used A k kadia n, t hough only on offi cial
Achaemenian inscriptions in the empire; Akkadian was used
only rarely by ordinary people outside Mesopotamia.
Th e Phoenician alphabet, with 22 letters, was introduced
in about the 11th century b.c.e., with the oldest inscription be-
ing the epitaph at the tomb of King Ahiram at Byblos (Jubayl
in modern-day Lebanon). Th e 22-letter alphabet gradually612 language: The Middle East