ABSTRACT
Before the 1720s nobody knew much about any of this because nobody could read the Ancient Near Eastern languages. All except Aramaic had died out as spoken languages, and Aramaic had followed its own course to change and innovate from the language spoken in the first millennium bce. The written languages lingered longer, but the cuneiform system gave way to the more alphabetic systems and Egyptian just changed its writing from the age-old systems to a new one, based on the Greek alphabet with some additions. We call the result Coptic, referring to the people of Egypt who remained Christian when Islam came.
