Old Egyptian is the language of the Early Dynastic Period and the Old Kingdom. This includes the language of the so-called Pyramid Texts, which displays some peculiarities of its own. Most texts of this period are official or religious, with funerary inscriptions and some biographical texts.

The earliest samples are dated to about 3.200 BC, seveal generations before the reign of Narmer, who is to be considered as the first king of the 1st Dynasty. These samples are nothing more than simple words and names of places. By Narmer's time, the texts become a bit more verbose, but it would take until the 3rd Dynasty before longer texts were written.

Middle Egyptian is a more evolved form of Old Egyptian. This language became the classical language of the Egyptian texts and it was used from the 1st Intermediate Period to the Greek-Roman Period. After the Middle Kingdom, however, it was only used in monumental and religious texts, contaminated with some popular elements.

The grammar of Middle Egyptian is well known and understood, thanks to the larger variety of texts, which include religious inscriptions, medical and scientific texts as well as literature and wsidom texts. Works of literature include the story of Sinuhe, the Shipwrecked Sailor, the Eloquent Peasant and the Conversation of a Man with his Ba.

Late Egyptian (or New Egyptian) was the vernacular used from the 18th Dynasty on, which found its way in writing, mainly in business documents and letters. From the 19th Dynasty on, however, it is also used in monumental inscriptions, literary texts, ... The difference between Late Egyptian and Middle Egyptian is far greater than the difference between Old and Middle Egyptian. This is possibly due to the fact that Late Egyptian is closer to the spoken language than Old and Middle Egyptian ever were. There is a larger variey of verbal constructions that are used to distinguish past, present and future tenses.

Demotic is an ambiguous word that refers to the language of the Late Dynastic Period as found in several documents and books as well as to the writing used for many texts from the 25th Dynasty on. Texts using the demotic grammar are not always written in demotic writing, and texts written in demotic writing do not always use the demotic grammar.

The Demotic grammar is a further evolution of Late Egyptian, which, by the Late Dynastic Period, must have been as archaic as Middle and Old Egyptian.

Coptic is the last stage of the Ancient Egyptian language. It was written using the Greek alphabet, with some additional characters for sounds unknown to Greek, and was mainly used by the Egyptian Christians. Next to the writing, Coptic was also influenced by Greek in its vocabulary. It was gradually replaced as a spoken language by Arabic from the Arab conquest of Egypt in 640 AD on and is now only used as a liturgical language (such as Latin in Europe was during the Middle-Ages). The language used by modern Egyptians is Arabic.

More Language

Our knowledge of ancient Egyptian is the result of modern scholarship, for since the Renaissance, a symbolical and allegorical interpretation was favored, which proved to be wrong.

The learned Jesuit antiquarian Athanasius Kircher (1602 - 1680) proposed nonsensical allegorical translations (Lingua Aegyptical restituta, 1643). Thomas Young (1773 -1829), the author of the undulatory theory of light, who had assigned the correct phonetical values to five hieroglyphic signs, still maintained these alphabetical signs were written together with allegorical signs, which, according to him, formed the bulk. The final decipherment, starting in 1822, was the work of the Frenchman Jean-François Champollion, 1790 - 1832, cf. Précis du système hiéroglyphique des anciens égyptiens par M.Champollion le jeune, 1824.

Champollion, who had a very good knowledge of Coptic (the last stage of Egyptian), proved the assumption of the allegorists wrong. He showed (especially aided by the presence of the Rosetta Stone) that Egyptian (as any other language) assigned phonetical values to signs. These formed consonantal structures as in Hebrew and Arabic. He also discovered that some were pictures indicating the category of the preceding words, the so-called "determinatives".

After Champollion's death in 1832, the lead in egyptology passed to Germany (Richard Lepsius, 1810 - 1884). This Berlin school shaped Egyptian philology for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in particular scholars such as Adolf Erman (1854 - 1937), Kurt Sethe (1869 - 1934), who, together with Francis Griffith (1862 - 1934), Battiscombe Gunn (1883 - 1950) and Alan Gardiner (1879 - 1963) in England, laid the systematic basis for the study of Egyptian. Later, Jacob Polotsky (1905 -1991) established the "standard theory" of Egyptian grammar.

These efforts finally made the historical record available to scholars of other disciplines, so that through interdisciplinarity, the impact of Pharaonic Egypt on all Mediterranean cultures of antiquity could be weighed. The result being, that Ancient Egypt is no longer neglected in the history of the formation of the Western intellect.

In order of difficulty, the reader may study the following recent books & dictionaries to be able to read classical Egyptian, i.e. hieroglyphic Middle Egyptian. When this is acquired, a large section of the literature can be directly addressed. Middle Egyptian was first introduced in the Middle Kingdom and used in religious contexts until the Late Period (italics refer to the presence of outdated entries or grammar) :

The first hieroglyphs of the Egyptian language, often attached as labels on commodities, were written down towards the end of the terminal predynastic period (end of the fourth millennium BCE). There is a continuous recorded until the eleventh century CE, when Coptic (the last stage of the language) expired as a spoken tongue and was superceded by Arabic.

Egyptian knew six stages : Archaic Egyptian (first two Dynasties), Old Egyptian (Old Kingdom), Middle Egyptian (First Intermediate Period & Middle Kingdom), Late Egyptian (New Kingdom & Third Intermediate Period), Demotic Egyptian (Late Period) and Coptic (Roman Period).

In the last two stages, new scripts emerged and only in Coptic is the vocalic structure known, with distinct dialects. Archaic Egyptian consists of brief inscriptions. Old Egyptian has the first continuous texts. Middle Egyptian is the "classical form" of the language. Late Egyptian is very different from Old and Middle Egyptian (cf. the verbal structure). Although over 6000 hieroglyphs have been documented, only about 700 are attested for Middle Egyptian (the majority of other hieroglyphs are found in Graeco-Roman temples only).

Egyptian hieroglyphs is a system of writing which, in its fully developed form, had only two classes of signs : logograms and phonograms. logogram (word writing)

A logogram is the representation of a complete word (not individual letters of phonemes) directly by a picture of the object actually denoted (cf. the Greek "logos", or "word"). As such, it does not take the phonemes into consideration, but only the direct objects & notions connected therewith.

phonogram (sound writing)

Egyptian phonography (a word is represented by a series of sound-glyphs of the spoken sounds) was derived through phonetic borrowing. Logograms are used to write other words or parts of words semantically unrelated to the phonogram but with which they phonetically shared the same consonantal structure.

For example : The logogram , signifies "mouth". It is used as a phonogram with the phonemic value "r" to write words as "r", meaning "toward" or to represent the phonemic element "r" in a word like "rn" or "name".

"rn" or "name" : the logograms of mouth and water

This pictoral phonography is based on the principle of the rebus : show one thing to mean another. If, for example, we would write English with the Egyptian signary, the word "belief" would be written with the logograms of a "bee" and a "leaf" ... The shared consonantal structure allows one to develop a large number of phonograms. They are the solid architecture of the language. In Egyptian, the consonantal system was present from the beginning.

Three main categories of phonograms prevailed :

The last two categories are often accompanied by uniconsonantal hieroglyphs which partly or completely repeat their phonemic value. This to make sure that the complemented hieroglyph was indeed a phonogram and not a logogram and/or to have some extra calligraphic freedom in case a gap needed to be filled ...

This phonography allowed a word of more than one consonant to be written in different ways. In Egyptian, economy was exercized and spellings were relatively standardized, allowing for variant forms for certain words only. ideogram or semogram (idea writing)

Logograms are concerned with direct meaning and sense, not with sound. Likewise, Egyptian used so-called "determinatives", derived from logograms, and placed them at the end of words to assist in specifying their meaning when uncertainty existed.

A stroke for example was the determinative indicating that the function of the hieroglyph was logographic. The determinative specified the intended meaning. Some were specific in application (closely connected to one word), while others identified a word as belonging to a certain class or category (the generic determinatives or taxograms). Determinatives of a word would be changed or varied to introduce nuance. The same hieroglyph can be a logogram, a phonogram and a determinative.

For example : The logogram , depicting the sun, signifies : "sun" (in continuous texts, a stroke would be put underneath the hieroglyph to indicate a purely logographic sense). Placed at the end of words, it is related to the actions of the sun (as in "rise", "day", "yesterday", "spend all day", "hour ", "period") and so the hieroglyph is a determinative. In the context of dates however, it is a phonogram with as phonetic value "sw".

Besides these purely semantical functions, the determinatives also marked the ends of words and hence assisted reading. They helped to identify the "word-images" in a text. Once established, these were slow to change, causing, as early as the Middle Kingdom, great divergences between the written script, becoming increasingly "historical", and the spoken, contemporary pronunciations.

Logograms and determinatives are both ideograms. Pictoral ideography (a variety of hieroglyphs representing idea's, notions, contexts, categories, modalities or nuance's) conveys additional meaning. Ideograms are purely semantical (or semograms). To the objective sound-glyph (the phonetics, in this case, being the consonantal structures with no vocalizations) an ideogram is added changing the overall meaning.

Hieroglyphic writing remained a consonantal, pictoral system, allowing for both phonograms and ideograms to convey meaning.

Economy

There are many aspects to the Ancient Egyptian economy. The Egyptians traded, educated, and farmed. The Egyptian society has had many great achievements. But the question is, “What was the Ancient Egyptian economy like?” Let’s dig a little deeper and find out!

Trade started to happen in the fourth century B.C. The Egyptians traded with countries around the Mediterranean Sea, Aegean Sea, and the Red Sea. Items brought from other countries were goods like silver, iron, cedar logs, horses, ivory, copper, cattle, leopard skins, and spices. The main products brought from Egypt were gold and other minerals, wheat, barley, and papyrus sheets. One of the more famous trade expeditions in Ancient Egypt was when Queen Hatshepsut sent an expedition down the Red Sea where they got frankincense, trees, elephants’ tusks, ebony, gold, spices, and foreign animals like panthers. Sailors on the trading ships were paid in grain. When their ships stopped to unload, they were able to visit dockside shops to exchange their grain for clothes, fresh fruit, and vegetables.

Egyptians did not have coin money like we do today. When shopping in Ancient Egypt you would have to bargain on a price. Although there were no fixed prices, Egyptians were good at figuring out how much an item would cost. Cost was measured in a deben (a copper weight of .5 ounces). For goods like razors or shoes the cost would be one or two deben, but for four pigs it would cost more like twenty deben which they would trade for something that was worth the same amount.

Jobs in Ancient Egypt included government officials, soldiers, scribes, doctors, merchants, dancers, fishermen, hunters, bakers, carpenters, coffin-makers, spinners, weavers, jewelers, pyramid builders, Egyptian artists, and farmers. Most Egyptians were farmers. The main crops grown in Egypt were wheat, barley, lettuce, beans, onions, figs, dates, grapes, melons, and cucumbers. The pharaoh was the controller of the jobs .

Between the ages of four and fourteen children attended school. Little boys started learning their father’s job when they were four. When they were older they were expected to do the same occupation as their father. Girls and boys both attended school together. They studied reading, writing, and math. Children who were going to be lawyers, scribes, or doctors went to a special school were they studied hieroglyphics. When girls grew up they took to tending the home.

There were castes of people by wealth. The social pyramid went like this, at the very top of the pyramid was the pharaoh who ruled all. The upper class was filled with the pharaoh’s royal family, scribes, government officials, priests, and soldiers. The middle class was the crafters, artists, and other skilled workers like painters, carpenters, jewelers, and brick makers. Farmers were also in the middle class. The lower class consisted of slaves and servants. There was slavery in Ancient Egypt. Sometimes people would be given to the pharaoh as a gift but most were slaves because they could not pay the money they owed or to escape being poor. Many rich Egyptian families hired servants to work for them.

Over all, the Ancient Egyptian civilization had a pretty advanced economy. With trade, the many different jobs, and the weight of the deben, the Egyptians had many great accomplishments.

The economy of pharaonic Egypt has been called an ancient command economy, but one should always remember that such modern definitions are not as apt as one would hope for.[2] Still, there was a specialized bureaucracy which monitored or controlled much of its activity, one of the hallmarks of planned economies. On the other hand, in general the officials—as state employees and not as private landowners or managers of state farms—probably did not tell farmers what to grow and these continued to do what their predecessors had done. But they remeasured and reassigned the land after every inundation based on past assignments, assessed the expected crops, collected part of the produce as taxes, stored and redistributed it to those on the state's pay lists. Storage and redistribution were generally done on a local basis. Regional facilities provided produce in case there was a shortfall in one of the local centres.

Bureaucrats were also in charge of public works which were mostly religious in character and involved at times tens of thousands of workers and administrators.

Egypt was a patchwork of mostly autarkic households and domains. After the taxes were paid, domain administrators and successful householders stored surpluses for future use or exchanged them by barter on the market, an institution the nature of which is remarkably badly understood. The percentage of produce and even manufactured goods which reached markets was probably small. It may have been of marginal importance to the survival of the individual producer, but provided part of the economic base for the developing Egyptian high culture.

Much of the trade beyond local exchanges is thought to have been in the hands of wholesale merchants acting for the crown or the great temple estates. The extent to which private individuals were involved in trading cannot be estimated. Market forces seem to have played a role above all during the periods when the administration broke down.

Major changes to the early barter system began to occur only with the influx of foreigners and the introduction of coined money in the Late Period. The population

The vast majority of the population, probably more than nine tenths during the first two millennia of Egypt's history, lived on the land [1] in mostly self sufficient village communities and, in early times at least, in a state close to serfdom. The land they worked belonged in theory to the gods, Osiris and after his demise to Horus and his earthly incarnation, the pharaoh. In practice a virtual ownership evolved, a development which culminated in the Late Period, when land could be freely bought and sold.

Apart from the tenant peasants, a large section of the population worked as farm labourers on the estates of noblemen and of the temples. During the New Kingdom perhaps a third of the land was in the hands of the Amen priesthood, with a proportionally large number of workers and slaves.

Administrators, priests, traders and craftsmen lived mostly in the cities along the Nile, which could be supplied with victuals relatively easily and cheaply by boat.

Sources of wealth

Agriculture created most of Egypt's wealth. Grain, vegetables, fruit, cattle, goats, pigs and fowl were grown, and fish from the Nile were caught, and eventual surpluses, after deduction of the various taxes, were sold on the markets.

Thanks to the yearly inundations the soil remained fertile. But agricultural techniques were not very efficient. Improvements were rare, implements remained primitive and the breeding of better livestock was haphazard. Pisciculture appears to have have existed on a very small scale. But practically all the fish consumed were caught in the Nile. Hunting, a leisure activity to the rich, and gathering played a small economic role over all, but may have been crucial to the survival of the poorest.

A large part of the manufactured goods came from the families which produced the raw materials. Labour was divided according to gender, with the processing generally left to the women. While the men grew flax, their women spun it into thread and wove the linen. A sizable proportion of the grain produced was used for beer production. The fish caught by the men had to be cleaned and dried, which was generally done by women, to be of much use in the hot climate of Egypt, unless they were consumed immediately.

In the towns small factories appeared, often financed by rich noblemen: bakeries, breweries, carpentry workshops and the like with a few dozen employees. In these manufactories weaving, for instance, became a largely male occupation with the introduction of upright looms during the New Kingdom. Mining

Most of the things mined were of little interest to anyone but a small number of rich people. Precious metals were not in general circulation until the Late Period and even then remained in the hands of few. The metals used for tools - copper, bronze and, from the Late Period onwards, iron - were expensive and the implements fashioned from them were beyond the reach of many. Poorer people continued to use stone and wooden tools for most purposes well into the Bronze and even beyond into the Iron Age. Gems too remained in the possession of a wealthy minority and the stone quarried for temples and tombs served the same class of people and profitted only the craftsmen involved in building.

Natron needed for the embalming process, was mined in the Wadi Natrun. Embalming was too expensive for all but a few.

Most of the produce was consumed by the producers themselves. What was left after landlords and tax-collectors had taken their share, could be sold by barter on the free market either directly to consumers or to professional traders. Little is known about these merchants. It is generally assumed that they were, at least until the Late Period, for the most part agents of the crown or the great estates.

Some of the wheat harvested and belonging to private owners was stored in state warehouses. So was much of the grain collected as taxes. Written withdrawal orders by owners of lots of grain were used as a kind of currency. These grain banks continued to serve growers and traders even after the introduction of coined money in the latter half of the first millennium BCE. Under the Ptolemies a central bank at Alexandria recorded all accounts of the granary banks dotting the country. Payments were transferred from account to account similar to the modern giro system. Credit entries were recorded with the owners name being in the genitive or possessive case and debit entries in the dative case.

Since the second half of the first millennium BCE gold, silver, and copper in specie were used mostly in dealings with foreigners, be they mercenaries or merchants.

High interest rates did not encourage commerce and during the first millennium BCE they may well have put Egyptian merchants at a disadvantage vis-á-vis foreign traders who were funded from abroad. During the Saite Period monthly interest rates could reach 10%.

The main energy source of ancient times was muscle power provided to a large extent by humans, but domesticated animals played an important role. The animals used in agriculture were donkeys for transporting produce and cattle for ploughing and other heavy work. Harnessing was inefficient. The yoke resting on the animals' shoulders was unknown, and the shafts of the ploughs were fastened to the horns of the cows.

Horses were introduced into Egypt during the Second Intermediary Period and never achieved economic importance. Expensive to keep, they were only employed by the aristocracy and the military for pulling chariots and later for riding. Vehicles with light spoked wheels came into use during the New Kingdom and served mostly for warfare and sport. Laden donkeys Anything transported by land, even in arid desert regions, was either carried by humans or donkeys, or dragged on wooden sledges.

Laden donkeys Source: Lionel Casson, Ancient Egypt - Time-Life Books

Wind energy was exploited only by ships and even there quite inefficiently: The square sails used enabled only sailing before the wind. The Egyptians were fortunate in that the Nile flowed from south to north. The prevailing winds were northerly and sufficed to blow the ships upriver. They were let to drift downriver with furled sails. But often a destination could only be reached through rowing which required large crews.

Fire was needed for cooking and baking food, smelting and casting metal, glassmaking, burning pottery and very rarely for making bricks. For the working of metals high temperatures had to be achieved and this was done quite possibly with charcoal. No coal was available in ancient times and wood was not very plentiful. One suspects that ordinary fires were fed with any dry vegetable or animal matter that was at hand.

The heat of the sun on the other hand was put to very good use in the production of mud bricks, which were the perfect building material in a practically rainless country like Egypt. Warfare

Military ventures can be a source of income - as long as one is successful. Egypt was fortunate in this respect until the Late Period, when it came under the domination of foreign powers. What began with relatively benign occupations by the Libyans, Kushites, Assyrians and Persians, would become oppressive under the Roman Empire, which exploited its provinces ruthlessly. The attempts of Cleopatra VII to retain independence were unsuccessful and the country fell prey to Octavian. For as long as Rome ruled the Mediterranean, Egypt was little more than its bread basket.

Unlike the much vaunted empire of the New Kingdom in the Levant, which was mostly a string of subject states in Lower Retenu run by local potentates, Nubia and Kush, the important conquests in the south, were closely integrated into the Egyptian culture. Lower Nubia at least was directly ruled and exploited by the Egyptians for most of the second millennium BCE. Its importance as supplier of gold, slaves and luxury goods was underlined by the appointment of vice-roys to rule Kush directly. No other region conquered by Egypt was economically and culturally as dependent, nor retained this affinity for centuries after Egypt's power had declined in the first millennium BCE.

Tribute brought before Ramses II, excerpt, Source: British Museum website Bravery in battle was rewarded with appointments, decorations in the form of golden necklaces and bracelets, and gifts of land and slaves, part of the booty plundered from vanquished enemies. Tribute was imposed on defeated nations and the 'exchange' of gifts between the pharaohs and the kings of client states was generally in Egypt's favour.

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