Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that can help answer the question.
Query: What do modern day Egyptians speak?
Amongst certain groups within Egypt's elite, Egyptian Arabic enjoyed a brief period of rich literary output. That dwindled with the rise of Egyptian Arab nationalism, which had gained wide popularity in Egypt by the final years of the Muhammad Ali dynasty, as demonstrated vividly by Egypt's involvement in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War under King Farouk of Egypt. The Egyptian revolution of 1952, led by Mohammed Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser, further enhanced the significance of Arab nationalism, making it a central element of Egyptian state policy. The importance of Modern Standard Arabic was reemphasised in the public sphere by the revolutionary government, and efforts to accord any formal language status to the Egyptian vernacular were ignored. Egyptian Arabic was identified as a mere dialect, one that was not spoken even in all of Egypt, as almost all of Upper Egypt speaks Sa'idi Arabic. Though the revolutionary government heavily sponsored the use of the Egyptian vernacular in films, plays, television programmes, and music, the prerevolutionary use of Modern Standard Arabic in official publications was retained.
An important factor in the mixing or changing of Arabic is the concept of a prestige dialect. This refers to the level of respect accorded to a language or dialect within a speech community. The formal Arabic language carries a considerable prestige in most Arabic-speaking communities, depending on the context. This is not the only source of prestige, though. Many studies have shown that for most speakers, there is a prestige variety of vernacular Arabic. In Egypt, for non-Cairenes, the prestige dialect is Cairo Arabic. For Jordanian women from Bedouin or rural background, it may be the urban dialects of the big cities, especially including the capital Amman. Moreover, in certain contexts, a dialect relatively different from formal Arabic may carry more prestige than a dialect closer to the formal language—this is the case in Bahrain, for example.
Because knowledge of the hieroglyphs were lost from 6th century until 1822 when Jean-François Champollion deciphered the Rosetta Stone, the memory of ancient Egypt was that of an impressive civilization which built various monuments whose precise meaning had been long since been lost, limiting the extent of popular identification with it. Mohammad Ali the Great, the Albanian tobacco merchant turned Ottoman "vali" (governor) of Egypt and who ruled the country with an iron hand from 1805 until his death in 1849, had no interest in the ruins of ancient Egypt except as a source of gifts for foreign leaders. Likewise, Mohammad Ali had a permissive attitude towards Europeans taking ancient Egyptian relics with them, allowing much plundering of various sites such as by the Italian Giovanni Battista Belzoni while a diplomatic posting in Cairo was highly sought after owing to opportunities for looting. One of Mohammad Ali's officials, Rifa'a al-Tahtawi, persuaded him in 1836 to embark on preserving Egypt's heritage by ending the plundering of sites in Egypt and to create a museum to display Egypt's treasures instead of letting them be taken to Europe. Tahtawi later published a history of ancient Egypt in 1868, which took advantage of the discoveries of archaeologists and the deciphering of the hieroglyphs, which marked the first time that the heritage of ancient Egypt was used as a symbol of national pride in modern Egypt.
The oldest of the texts have been dated to c. 2400–2300 BC. Unlike the later Coffin Texts and Book of the Dead, the pyramid texts were reserved only for the pharaoh and were not illustrated. Following the earlier Palermo Stone, the pyramid texts mark the next-oldest known mention of Osiris, who would become the most important deity associated with afterlife in the Ancient Egyptian religion.
Because the Achaemenid Empire or "First Persian Empire" was the successor state to the empires of Assyria and Babylonia based in Iraq, and because Elam is part of Iran, the ancient people of Iran were ruled by ancient Mesopotamians, which explains the close proximity between the people of south western Iran and the Iraqis even in modern days, in fact, the people of that part of Iran speak Mesopotamian Arabic and were put under the rule of modern Iran by the British. The ancient Persians adopted the Babylonian cuneiform script and modified it to write their language, along with adopting many other facets of ancient Iraqi culture, including the Aramaic language which became the official language of the Persian Empire.
There are many varieties of Arabic (also called dialects of Arabic or vernacular languages) in existence. Arabic is a Semitic language within the Afroasiatic family that originated on the Arabian Peninsula. It is classified as a macrolanguage comprising 30 modern varieties, including its standard form. The largest divisions occur between the spoken languages of different regions. Some varieties of Arabic in North Africa, for example, are not easily comprehensible to an Arabic speaker from the Levant or the Persian Gulf. Within these broad regions further and considerable geographic distinctions exist, within countries, across country borders, even between cities and villages.
The phoneme represented by the Arabic letter "" () has many standard pronunciations: in most of the Arabian Peninsula and as the predominant pronunciation of Literary Arabic outside the Arab world, in most of Egypt and some regions in southern Yemen and southwestern Oman. This is also a characteristic of colloquial Egyptian and southern Yemeni dialects. In Morocco and western Algeria, it is pronounced as in some words, especially colloquially. In most north Africa and most of the Levant, the standard is pronounced , and in certain regions of the Persian Gulf colloquially with . In some Sudanese and Yemeni dialects, it may be either or as it used to be in Classical Arabic.
Cuneiform law is generally classified separately from later Middle Eastern law, but has been viewed as a predecessor of Biblical and Jewish law. The communities of the Middle East that made use of cuneiform law were generally all in contact with one another, and developed similar cultures. Akkadian, a cuneiform language, was used throughout the entire area, and even as far as Egypt, for diplomatic communications during the Amarna Period.
The phonology of Samaritan Hebrew is very similar to that of Samaritan Arabic, and is used by the Samaritans in prayer. Today, the spoken vernacular among Samaritans is evenly split between Modern Israeli Hebrew and Palestinian Arabic, depending on whether they reside in Holon (Israel) or in Shechem (i.e. Nablus, in Palestine’s Area A).
The precise number of creole languages is not known, particularly as many are poorly attested or documented. About one hundred creole languages have arisen since 1500. These are predominantly based on European languages such as English and French due to the European Age of Discovery and the Atlantic slave trade that arose at that time. With the improvements in ship-building and navigation, traders had to learn to communicate with people around the world, and the quickest way to do this was to develop a pidgin, or simplified language suited to the purpose; in turn, full creole languages developed from these pidgins. In addition to creoles that have European languages as their base, there are, for example, creoles based on Arabic, Chinese, and Malay. The creole with the largest number of speakers is Haitian Creole, with almost ten million native speakers, followed by Tok Pisin with about 4 million, most of whom are second-language speakers.
The Mitanni, a people known in eastern Anatolia from about 1500 BC, were of mixed origins: a Hurrian-speaking majority was dominated by a non-Anatolian, Indo-Aryan elite. There is linguistic evidence for such a superstrate, in the form of:
In particular, Kikkuli's text includes words such as "aika" "one" (i.e. a cognate of the Indo-Aryan "eka"), "tera" "three" ("tri"), "panza" "five" ("pancha"), "satta" "seven", ("sapta"), "na" "nine" ("nava"), and "vartana" "turn around", in the context of a horse race (Indo-Aryan "vartana"). In a treaty between the Hittites and the Mitanni, the Ashvin deities Mitra, Varuna, Indra, and Nasatya are invoked. These loanwords tend to connect the Mitanni superstrate to Indo-Aryan rather than Iranian languages – i.e. the early Iranian word for "one" was "aiva".
The oldest inscriptions and texts referring to the population of the Aksumite kingdom and its neighbors do not know the term Tigray yet; they show an ethnic diversity, which has partially disappeared today. A variant of the term Tigray, first appears in a 10th-century gloss to "Cosmas Indicopleustes", i.e. after the Aksumite period; according to this source important groups of the region were the "" and the "" (i.e. the Agʿazi), the latter being the Aksumites. The toponym Tigray is probably originally ethnic, the "" then meant "the tribes near Adulis". They correspond to the Tigre groups living in the same area today; however, a historical identity between today's sub-groups and the 10th century groups cannot be supposed, as this could not explain the existence of the toponym "Tigray" for the Aksum-Adwa area. It should be concluded that Tigray groups lived along the main route between Aksum and the coast, and later separated, both ethnically and linguistically. There is no indication that the term Tigray could be explained through Ge'ez ("subdue"), with the meaning "the submitted" (in supposed contrast to the "free" Agaziyan linked with the rulers of Aksum), as this could not explain why the most important province took the name Tigray. The term might even not be Ethiosemetic and predate the Sabaen presence in Ethiopia. It is not excluded that the term ("Tekaru") from a list of southern peoples and countries allegedly subdued by Pharaonic Egypt in the 15th century BC may already be linked with the term Tigray; in this case it should mean a region within or in the vicinity of Punt.
Over 100 different languages are spoken in Tanzania, making it the most linguistically diverse country in East Africa. Among the languages spoken in Tanzania are all four of Africa's language families: Bantu, Cushitic, Nilotic, and Khoisan. Swahili and English are Tanzania's official languages. Swahili belongs to the Bantu branch of the Niger-Congo family. The Sandawe people speak a language that may be related to the Khoe languages of Botswana and Namibia, while the language of the Hadzabe people, although it has similar click consonants, is arguably a language isolate. The language of the Iraqw people is Cushitic. Other languages are Indian languages and Portuguese (spoken by Goans and Mozambicans).
The invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age in the late 4th millennium BC. The Sumerian archaic cuneiform script and the Egyptian hieroglyphs are generally considered to be the earliest writing systems, both emerging out of their ancestral proto-literate symbol systems from 3400–3200 BC with the earliest coherent texts from about 2600 BC. It is generally agreed that Sumerian writing was an independent invention; however, it is debated whether Egyptian writing was developed completely independently of Sumerian, or was a case of cultural diffusion. A similar debate exists for the Chinese script, which developed around 1200 BC. The pre-Columbian Mesoamerican writing systems (including among others Olmec and Maya scripts) are generally believed to have had independent origins.
Several Oxyrhynchus Papyri fragments were found to contain parts of the Republic, and from other works such as Phaedo, or the dialogue Gorgias, written around 200-300 CE. Fragments of a different version of Plato's Republic were discovered in 1945, part of the Nag Hammadi library, written ca. 350 CE. These findings highlight the influence of Plato during those times in Egypt.
Like other European languages, English contains many words derived from Arabic, often through other European languages, especially Spanish. Among them is every-day vocabulary like "sugar" ("sukkar"), "cotton" ("quṭn") or "magazine" (""). More recognizable are words like "algebra" ("al-jabr"), "alcohol" ("al-kuhūl"), "alchemy" ("al-kimiya"), "alkali", "cypher" and "zenith" (see list of English words of Arabic origin).
Erich von Däniken puts forward many beliefs about the Great Pyramid of Giza in his 1968 book Chariots of the Gods, saying that the ancient Egyptians did not have the most advanced tools to actually build the Pyramid, there is no evidence of workers, and there is too much 'intimate' knowledge about the Earth and its geography for the Egyptians to build the pyramid in that exact location. However, the technique of construction is well understood, the tools the Egyptians used are known, marks left in the quarries by those tools are still visible, and many examples of the tools are preserved in museums. Von Däniken claims that it would have taken the Egyptians too long to cut all the blocks necessary and drag them to the construction site in time to build the Great Pyramid in only 20 years; but a Nova documentary demonstrates how quickly a block of stone can be cut with the available tools and shows examples of the rollers used in their transportation. von Däniken also said that there were too many problems with their tools, and, according to him, the Egyptians had no prehistory so they could not have possibly built these large pyramids, even though there are pyramids in Egypt that were built before the Great Pyramid. Because he believed that there was no prehistory, von Däniken put forward that there is nothing known about how, when, or why these pyramids were built. Von Däniken also claims that Egyptians built perfect pyramids from the beginning, but numerous pyramid precursors survive, showing the errors made, and corrected, by Egyptian architects while they were perfecting the technique. These include simple mastabas, the Step Pyramid of Djoser, and the so-called Bent Pyramid. Not only that, but in his book, he says that there is no evidence of Egyptian workers so they had to have outside help; however, archaeologists have found evidence of buildings that workers would have resided in. Not only that, but there are also bakeries and sewer systems that the workers had in their living areas as well. There are also tombs that the workers had been buried in as well, and some of the skeletons had been found to have medical care, which helps prove that the workers were well taken care of; because of this, they were most likely Egyptian or they might not have been as well taken care of if they were not native Egyptians. Von Däniken claims that the height of the Cheops pyramid multiplied by one million is the distance to the Sun. In fact the calculation produces a figure of only 91,000 miles. Not only that, but he notes that the Great Pyramid is located on the Median line, divides the continents, and that the Egyptians could not align the edges so perfectly to true North without advanced technology that only aliens could give them. Egyptian builders, however, knew of simple methods to find North via star observation. The ancient Egyptian astronomers and, possibly, farmers spent a lot of their time studying the stars because that helped them to know how much time had passed, which they needed to know so they knew when to begin planting their crops in order to have food. Modern day Egyptologists have found artifacts and drawings of an object called a merkhet, which enabled the ancient Egyptians to determine which way was North. They figured this out just based upon the North Star and also locate other stars when they came into alignment with the merkhet. von Däniken did note in his book that the Egyptians did have plenty of time to study the stars. The ancient Egyptians were incredibly aware of the passage of time because they knew how to study the stars, so they would not have needed outside forces such as von Däniken's ancient astronauts to help them understand the relationship between stars and time.
In 1831, Tahtawi returned home to be part of the statewide effort to modernize the Egyptian infrastructure and education in what became an Egyptian renaissance ("Nahda") that flourished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, later moving to Ottoman-ruled Arabic-speaking regions including Lebanon, Syria and others. He founded the School of Languages (also known as School of Translators) in 1835, which become part of Ain Shams University in 1973. Upon his return, Al-Tahtawi became an advocate of parliamentarian, the rights of citizens to political participation, and the rights of women to education. The School of Languages graduated the earliest modern Egyptian intellectuals, who formed the basis of the emerging grassroots mobilization against British colonialism in Egypt. Three of his published volumes were works of political and moral philosophy. They introduced his Egyptian audience to the liberal ideas of the Enlightenment such as secular authority and political rights and liberty, his ideas regarding how a modern civilized society ought to be and what constituted by extension a civilized or "good Egyptian", and his ideas on public interest and public good.
Sumer () is the earliest known civilization in the historical region of southern Mesopotamia, modern-day southern Iraq, during the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze ages, and one of the first civilizations in the world along with Ancient Egypt and the Indus Valley. Living along the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, Sumerian farmers were able to grow an abundance of grain and other crops, the surplus of which enabled them to settle in one place. Prehistoric proto-writing dates back before 3000 BC. The earliest texts, from c. 3300 BC, come from the cities of Uruk and Jemdet Nasr; early cuneiform script emerged around 3000 BC.
The Pyramid Texts were the first religious spells to be carved into the walls of royal ancient Egyptian pyramids. Beginning in the Old Kingdom period, these texts were used exclusively by the Egyptian pharaohs to decorate the walls of their tombs. However, Egyptian Queens and high-ranking government officials soon began to use Pyramid Texts in their burial tombs as well. The purpose of these texts were to help the pharaoh successfully complete his journey through the afterlife, by conveying knowledge to the deceased about the paths he should take and the dangers he might face along the way.
Although accurate, shadow clocks relied on the sun, and so were useless at night and in cloudy weather. The Egyptians therefore developed a number of alternative timekeeping instruments, including water clocks, and a system for tracking star movements. The oldest description of a water clock is from the tomb inscription of the 16th-century Egyptian court official Amenemhet, identifying him as its inventor. There were several types of water clocks, some more elaborate than others. One type consisted of a bowl with small holes in its bottom, which was floated on water and allowed to fill at a near-constant rate; markings on the side of the bowl indicated elapsed time, as the surface of the water reached them. The oldest-known waterclock was found in the tomb of pharaoh Amenhotep I (1525–1504), suggesting that they were first used in ancient Egypt. Another Egyptian method of determining the time during the night was using plumb-lines called merkhets. In use since at least 600, two of these instruments were aligned with Polaris, the north pole star, to create a north–south meridian. The time was accurately measured by observing certain stars as they crossed the line created with the "merkhets".
A 2015 study by Dobon et al. identified an ancestral autosomal component of West Eurasian origin that is common to many modern Afroasiatic-speaking populations in Northeast Africa. Known as the "Coptic" component, it peaks among Egyptian Copts who settled in Sudan over the past two centuries. Copts also formed a separated group in PCA, a close outlier to other Egyptians, Afroasiatic-speaking Northeast Africans and Middle East populations. The Coptic component evolved out of a main Northeast African and Middle Eastern ancestral component that is shared by other Egyptians and also found at high frequencies among other Afroasiatic-speaking populations in Northeast Africa (~70%). The scientists suggest that this points to a common origin for the general population of Egypt. They also associate the Coptic component with Ancient Egyptian ancestry, without the later Arabian influence that is present among other Egyptians.
The Egyptian Army or Egyptian Ground Forces ( "al-Quwwāt al-Barriyya al-Miṣriyya") is the largest service branch within the Egyptian Armed Forces. The modern army was established during the reign of Muhammad Ali Pasha (1805–1849), widely considered to be the "founder of modern Egypt". Its most significant engagements in the 20th century were in Egypt's five wars with the State of Israel (in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1967–1970, and 1973), one of which, the Suez Crisis of 1956, also saw it do combat with the armies of Britain, and France. The Egyptian army was also engaged heavily in the protracted North Yemen Civil War, and the brief Libyan-Egyptian War in July 1977. Its last major engagement was Operation Desert Storm, the liberation of Kuwait from Iraqi occupation in 1991, in which the Egyptian army constituted the second-largest contingent of the allied forces.
Other genetic studies show much greater levels of sub-Saharan African ancestry in the current-day populations of southern as opposed to northern Egypt, and anticipate that mummies from southern Egypt would contain greater levels of sub-Saharan African ancestry than Lower Egyptian mummies. A National Geographic DNA analysis genographic project showed that 68% of modern day Egyptians are ethnically North African, with foreign invasions having little effect on the majority of modern Egyptians's genetics. Other ethnic groups that rounded out modern Egyptians were from Southwest Asia and the Persian Gulf at 17%, Jewish diaspora at 4%, Asia Minor at 3%, Eastern Africa at 3%, and Southern Europe at 3%.
In 1963, "The Egyptian" became known as the "Daily Egyptian" (or "DE" for short), publishing five days a week. It is a student-run newspaper and they have the ability to determine what stories will appear in the paper. The students also work as editors, photographers, reporters, page designers, graphic artists, advertising sales representatives, production technicians, and circulation drivers. "The Daily Egyptian", one of a handful of student newspapers to do so, owns and operates, with students, its own web press. Roughly, 15,000 copies of "The Daily Egyptian" are freely distributed at nearly 200 locations across campus, throughout Carbondale, and other surrounding communities. "The Daily Egyptian" has the second largest circulation of any newspaper in southern Illinois, and the most of any college newspaper in the state.