When and how did Egyptian stop being the dominant language of Egypt?
For thousands of years hieroglyphics was the writing system that the ancient Egyptians used to express For thousands of years, hieroglyphics was the writing system that the ancient Egyptians used to express their feelings, emotion, love and hatred. They used them to declare war; they used them to make peace; they used them to boast of their military conquest. These pictures inscribed on temple walls, painted on tomb walls, written on papyrus encapsulated everything that made them who they were.
To them, hieroglyphs were magical; they were alive and could exert power. They were so powerful and alive that even hieroglyphs that describe certain Demons had to be cut in half to stop their magic.
For millennia, hieroglyphs remained the only form of written communication in Egypt. However, when the country fell under a foreign yoke, its dominance was challenged, and it had to deal with new scripts. First was the Persians, followed by the Greeks and finally by the Christians. However, the major decline started under the Greeks led by a Macedonian Alexander the Great.
When Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332 BCE, there was a steady influx of Greeks into Egypt. As with all immigrants, they brought their language and culture with them. The Greeks were in the prime position to get their native language into power and slowly push out the native Egyptian tongue and written language. There was then an increase of people reading and speaking in Greek instead, thus began the long goodbye of the Ancient Egyptian tongue and written word.
This new introduced foreign language served with the Demotic script as the administrative medium. It began to appear with hieroglyphic text on several monumental decrees, such as the Rosetta Stone and the decree of Canopus. Still, at this time, all wasn’t lost for hieroglyphs and the Egyptian tongue; they were still preserved alive within the temples. The temples still needed the hieroglyphs and the language to function. So that order could reign in the life of the Egyptians end in the afterlife. It can be likened to how Latin became the working language for the Catholic Church. Latin today is only used within the Vatican in the Catholic Church as a language; ancient Egyptian and hieroglyphs had the same fate. They were only used within the temples and religious services.
In time, the temples could no longer protect and preserve the language and the hieroglyphs. The temples themselves faced increased pressure from a new and upstart religion, the Christian faith. In 312 A.D., the first of two fatal blows were delivered against the ancient language and hieroglyphs; after centuries of persecution, Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire and all other pagan religions, and their practices were banned. For 82 years after that, hieroglyphs and the ancient language of the Egyptians was quietly seeing out its final days on the isle of Philae, a priest and scribe crudely carved into the walls of the temple the last known recorded hieroglyphs. The final words that were written in hieroglyphs were:
He also carved a demotic inscription that said:
Not long after Nesmeterakhem carved his inscription, there would be no people who could still read its hieroglyphs.
In 553 A.D., the temple was finally closed. With that, the last place that the language was spoken and those magical words were written. After it closed, the temple was converted into a church named after Saint Stephen.
Two centuries after this sad ending, the language was completely forgotten as Arabic, introduced by the Muslim conquest, became the official language.
Ghosts of the language live on in what is known as Coptic Egyptian. However, even now is seeing at its final days as the Coptic Egyptian speaking population is dwindling in size. A few Demotic glyphs are still used with the Greek alphabet, added over time to the original Coptic alphabet.
So when and how did Egyptian stop being the dominant language of Egypt? After successive foreign invasions and a new religion, the ancient written language and spoken tongue saw its final days on an island in the middle of the Nile.
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