Late Egyptian: The Vernacular Behind the Book of the Dead

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.