Late Egyptian

Late Egyptian is the everyday spoken and increasingly written stage of the Egyptian language current from roughly the fourteenth through seventh centuries BCE during the New Kingdom and its aftermath, gradually displacing Middle Egyptian as the vernacular even as Middle Egyptian retained prestige for formal monumental and religious inscription for centuries longer, a linguistic split scholars compare to the coexistence of spoken vernacular Latin and written Classical Latin in the later Roman world. Late Egyptian belongs to the Egyptian branch of the Afroasiatic language family, and its grammar shows significant simplification and restructuring relative to Middle Egyptian, including changes to verb conjugation patterns that make Late Egyptian noticeably more accessible to modern students of Egyptian than the more conservative Middle Egyptian literary standard.

The New Kingdom's Book of the Dead, though drawing heavily on earlier Middle Egyptian funerary formulas from the Coffin Texts and Pyramid Texts, was compiled and further expanded during a period when Late Egyptian was the living spoken language, and individual copies commissioned for private burial increasingly incorporated the vernacular alongside inherited classical formulas.

The Book of the Dead, more accurately titled the Book of Coming Forth by Day in ancient Egyptian, is a collection of funerary spells assembled from earlier Pyramid and Coffin Text material alongside newly composed New Kingdom content, individually customized and copied onto papyrus scrolls for private burial with the deceased to guide them safely through the dangers of the underworld toward a favorable afterlife judgment. Its most famous section, the weighing of the heart ceremony, describes the deceased's heart being weighed against Maat's feather of truth before the god Osiris and forty-two assessor deities, with a favorable outcome granting entry into the fields of Aaru, a paradisiacal afterlife realm, while failure meant consumption by the monstrous devourer Ammit, a moral and theological framework combining Egyptian conceptions of ethical judgment with elaborate ritual magic intended to ensure the desired outcome regardless of the deceased's actual conduct in life. Late Egyptian's role as the living vernacular during this period meant scribes producing Book of the Dead copies for paying clients could draw on contemporary spoken idiom alongside inherited archaic formulas from earlier Middle Egyptian funerary tradition.