Ancient Languages
Speak with the ancients
Resources and guides for learning the major languages of the ancient world. Focus areas include Middle Egyptian, Akkadian, Attic Greek, and Classical Latin.
Afroasiatic (Egyptian branch)
Middle Egyptian
The classical language of ancient Egypt — the prestige literary and monumental language from the Middle Kingdom onward, written in hieroglyphs and hieratic.
Old Egyptian
The earliest stage of the Egyptian language, preserved in the Pyramid Texts and archaic inscriptions of the Old Kingdom.
Coptic
The final stage of the Egyptian language, written in a Greek-based alphabet — the liturgical language of Egyptian Christianity and the key to deciphering hieroglyphs.
Afroasiatic (Semitic branch)
Akkadian
The lingua franca of the ancient Near East for nearly two millennia — a Semitic language written in cuneiform on clay tablets.
Aramaic
The lingua franca of the Near East for over a millennium — from the Neo-Assyrian Empire through the Persian and Roman periods, and the language of parts of the Bible.
Phoenician
The language of Tyre, Sidon, and Carthage — creators of the alphabet that became the ancestor of Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew scripts.
Indo-European (Hellenic branch)
Attic Greek
The dialect of Athens during its golden age — the language of Plato, Sophocles, Thucydides, and Athenian democracy.
Koine Greek
The common dialect of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds — the language of Alexander's successors, the Septuagint, and the New Testament.
Ionic Greek
The dialect of Herodotus and the Hippocratic corpus — spoken in the Aegean islands and the coast of Asia Minor.
Doric Greek
The dialect of Sparta, Pindar's victory odes, and the Doric colonies — known for its archaic features and distinct vowel system.
Homeric Greek
The literary dialect of the Iliad and the Odyssey — an artificial composite of Ionic, Aeolic, and archaic forms spanning centuries of oral tradition.
Linear B (Mycenaean Greek)
The earliest attested form of the Greek language, written in a syllabic script on clay tablets — deciphered by Michael Ventris in 1952.
Indo-European (Italic branch)
Classical Latin
The language of Cicero, Virgil, and the Roman Republic and Empire — and the ancestor of the Romance languages.
Vulgar Latin
The spoken Latin of common people across the Roman Empire — the ancestor of French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian.
Language Isolate
Sumerian
The world's first written language — a language isolate of ancient Mesopotamia, preserved in hundreds of thousands of cuneiform tablets.
Elamite
The language of ancient Elam (southwestern Iran) — a language isolate known from cuneiform tablets spanning nearly two millennia.
Indo-European (Anatolian branch)
Hittite
The oldest attested Indo-European language, written in cuneiform and preserved in the archives of the Hittite capital Hattusa.
Luwian
An Anatolian Indo-European language written in both cuneiform and a unique hieroglyphic script — the sister language of Hittite.