Language



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__Ancient Egypt__:
Written records of the ancient Egyptian language have been dated from about 3200 BC. Egyptian is part of the Afro-Asiatic group of languages and is related to Berber and Semitic (languages such as Arabic, Amharic and Hebrew). The language survived until the 5th century AD in the form of Demotic and until the Middle Ages in the form of Coptic. Thus it had a lifespan of over four millennia. Egyptian is one of the oldest recorded languages known. The national language of modern day Egypt is Egyptian Arabic, which gradually replaced Egyptian and its descendant, the Coptic language, as the language of daily life in the centuries after Egypt was conquered by Arab Muslims. Coptic is still used as a liturgical language in the Coptic Church.



__Ancient Mesopotamia__:
The people of ancient Mesopotamia spoke a number of languages, including Akkadian, Eblaite, Elamite, Phoenician, Semitic, and Sumerian. The script that was used to write many of the ancient Mesopotamian languages was called cuneiform, that wedgeshaped writing on clay tablets you may be familiar with. Cuneiform was used to write several languages just as the alphabet we use to write English is also used to write French, Spanish, German, etc.