Middle Egyptian: The Classical Language of Egyptian Literature

Middle Egyptian is the classical literary stage of the Egyptian language, used from roughly the twenty-first through seventeenth centuries BCE during the Middle Kingdom and remaining in use as a prestige literary and religious register for over a thousand years afterward even as everyday spoken Egyptian moved on to Late Egyptian, a situation comparable to Latin's continued literary and liturgical use in medieval Europe long after Vulgar Latin had evolved into the Romance vernaculars.

Middle Egyptian belongs to the Egyptian branch of the Afroasiatic language family, and its religious literary output expanded considerably beyond Old Egyptian's royally restricted Pyramid Texts to include the Coffin Texts, a large corpus of funerary spells inscribed on the coffins of non-royal elite Egyptians, reflecting what scholars term the democratization of the afterlife, in which access to elaborate funerary religious provisions previously reserved for pharaohs spread to a wider, though still wealthy, segment of Egyptian society. Middle Egyptian remained the language Egyptian scribes studied and used for religious and monumental inscriptions well into the Greco-Roman period, long after it had ceased to be anyone's native spoken tongue.