Egyptian is one of the oldest recorded languages known. 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 (Arabic, Amharic and Hebrew).
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Ancient Egypt was a civilization located in Africa, along the upper Nile, reaching from the Nile Delta in the north to as far south as Jebel Barkal at the Fourth Cataract of the Nile at the time of its greatest extension (15th century BC). It lasted for three millennia, from circa 3200 B.C. to 30 BC, arguably ending when Octavian, of the Roman Republic, conquered Egypt. As a civilization based on irrigation it is the quintessential example of a hydraulic empire. Along the Nile, in 10th millennium BC, a grain-grinding culture using the earliest type of sickle blades had been replaced by another culture of hunters, fishers, and gathering peoples using stone tools.
| The ancient Egyptians (before 2600 BC) themselves traced their origin to a land they called Punt, or "Ta Neteru" ("Land of the Gods"), which most Egyptologists locate in the area encompassing the Ethiopian Highlands. The Ethiopian Highlands are a rugged mass of mountains in Ethiopia and Eritrea in northeastern Africa. The highlands are divided into northwestern and southeastern portions by the Great Rift Valley, which contains a number of salt lakes. Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile, lies in the northwestern portion. Studies based on the maternal lineages closely links modern Egyptians with people from modern Ethiopia. The history of Ancient Ethiopia cannot be separated from that of Ancient Yemen, whose recorded history stretches back over 3,000 years. Successive civilisations of Mineans, Sabaeans and Himyarites interacted closely with their counterparts in Ethiopia. | 
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| The close proximity of the Ethiopian highlands to the Red Sea has always provided the main line of external communication. South along the Rift Valley, West along the Sub-Sharan Corridor, East across the Red Sea to Yemen and beyond, and North along the Nile Valley to the Mediterranean and beyond. | |
Sheba, or the Kingdom of the South, could equally refer to either Yemen or Axum. The Sabaeans united southern Arabia into a single political entity by the third century BC. By the time of the birth of Jesus Christ, they had expanded their empire to include Ethiopian lands across the Red Sea. With Sabaean power waning in the fifth and sixth centuries AD, their empire was conquered by the Ethiopians in 525.
The Egyptians slowly adopted the Arabic language following the Arab-Muslim conquest of Egypt in the 7th century AD. Up till then, they were speaking Egyptian in its Coptic form. For more than three centuries, there existed a period of Coptic-Arabic bilingualism in Lower Egypt. This trend would last for many more centuries in the south. Coptic is still the liturgical language of the Egyptian Coptic Church.
The traditional division between Lower and Upper Egypt and their respective dialectal differences go back to ancient times. Egyptians today commonly refer to the people of the north as baharwa and to those of the south as sa'ayda. The Egyptian variants spoken in central and southern Egypt, referred to collectively as Sa'idi (Upper Egyptian), are mainly descended from the northern Egyptian dialect but are distinct from the Cairene sociolect in their phonology due to early contacts with Bedouin Arab dialects. Second and third-generation southern Egyptian migrants are monolingual in Cairene Arabic, but maintain cultural and familial ties to the south. The dialect of western Alexandria is different from all other forms of Egyptian, as linguistically it forms part of the Maghrebi group of dialects. The same was formerly true of the Egyptian form of Judaeo-Arabic.
The Sabaean civilisation endured for 14 centuries lasting from around 800 BC to 600 AD. With the rise of Islam in the seventh century AD, Axum lost Yemen and the once flourishing empire shrunk back to its original core region of the northern Ethiopian highlands. Axum began to decline in the early decades of the 7th century following the rise and rapid expansion of the Muslim Arabs throughout the Middle East. Both Byzantium and the Persian Empire fell to the Arabs. Little is known of what became of the Axumite kingdom between the 8th and 11th centuries.
Egyptian uses two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine, similarly to Romance languages and Irish Gaelic; it also uses three grammatical numbers: like many other Afro-Asiatic languages, it contrasts singular, dual and plural forms. There are few words in English that universally contain a glottal stop. The best known examples are the interjections "uh-oh" and "uh-uh". The early stages of Egyptian possessed no articles, no words for "the" or "a"; later forms used the words /p3/, /t3/ and /n3/ for this purpose (where 3 represents a glottal stop.) A "received pronunciation" of the names of ancient Egyptian words has formed. By and large, this pronunciation is acceptable for most consonants and utterly wrong for the vowels. The Egyptian vernacular is normally written in the Arabic alphabet is commonly transcribed into Latin letters in textbooks aimed at teaching non-native learners. The same is true to varying degrees in Sudan, the Levant (Palestine) and in Libya.