Middle Egyptian

Middle Egyptian
The Egyptian Language is an Afro-Asiatic language that was spoken predominantly in present-day Egypt and Sudan, but may have been used alongside Semitic Languages during the Egyptian occupation of the Levant and parts of the Near East as an administrative language. The oldest recorded form of the Egyptian language is known as Old Egyptian, and was spoken from c. 2600 BC to c. 2000 BC. This form of the language was succeeded by the form of the language known as Middle Egyptian, that was spoken from the end of the First Intermediate Period c. 2000 BC to the start of the Second Intermediate Period c. 1300 BC as the lingua franca of all Egyptian-speaking populations. Middle Egyptian was written using various writing systems, such as the Hieroglyphic system and the Hieratic system.

After the fall of the Hyksos dynasty at the end of the Second Intermediate Period, Middle Egyptian ceased being spoken and was only used as a liturgical language for the majority of the 18th Dynasty. During the Amarna Revolution, however, Middle Egyptian was replaced with the more contemporary, and also more colloquial, Late Egyptian, which continued to be used in inscriptions on public buildings and stelae well into the Ptolemaic Dynasty and even into the Imperial Roman Occupation. Hieroglyphic and Hieratic Egyptian (which had changed writing systems to an even simpler shorthand known as Demotic) both died out during Roman times, but the Egyptian Language lives on today as the Coptic language, a liturgical language for the Coptic Eastern Orthodox Church in Egypt.

Linguistic Properties
Middle Egyptian does not derive from the same dialect of Egyptian as its predecessor, Old Egyptian.