The final text from antiquity to have been written in Egyptian hieroglyphs would be poignant enough per se, but the latest known text also includes its author’s name and the phrase “linear and cyclical time” – or “forever and ever”.

Composed on the now-drowned island of Philae, the brief hieroglyphic inscription identifies its author as a priest for the holy site’s ancient deities, such as Isis, Osiris and the Nubian god Mandulis. His name was perhaps Nesmeterakhem, otherwise transliterated as Esmet-Akhom, and he belonged to a priestly family serving the temple on Philae; keeping up the ancient traditions of Egyptian religion was therefore a personal matter of profession and identity.

“Before Mandulis, son of Horus, by the hand of Nesmeterakhem, son of Nesmeter, the Second Priest of Isis, for all time and eternity. Words spoken by Mandulis, lord of the Abaton, great god.”

(Ph. 436, translation from Parkinson 1999: 178)

Nesmeterakhem complemented the hieroglyphs with an almost matching text in Demotic, a derived Egyptian script that survived a few decades longer than hieroglyphs. Thanks to the Demotic, we can, mirabile dictu, precisely date his writing to the 24th of August, in the year 394 AD.

This situates the inscriptions from Philae in the Roman era of Egypt, specifically during the Christianisation of the empire – a gradual process punctuated by actions like the decrees of Theodosius I in 389–391 AD, which suppressed public acts of  ‘pagan’ worship. Being on the edge of the Roman orbit, traditional religion on Philae could withstand these societal forces for a while. The final samples of Demotic (from 452 AD) also come from Philae, clearly a remote bastion of culture and belief that continued to reverence the old ways until c. 545.

While this was by no means the end of the Egyptian language, we have no more (authentic) Egyptian hieroglyphs after 394. It’s not hard to sympathise with Nesmeterakhem, if we presume that he could see the end of the eternal tradition coming, rather than enduring for all “linear and cyclical time”. After around 3,600 years of employment for Egyptian, the signs fell silent soon after him. They would remain so until their decipherment in the early 19th century.

References:

• Houston, S., Baines, J., & Cooper, J. (2003). Last writing: script obsolescence in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 45(3), 430-479.

• Parkinson, R. (1999). Cracking Codes: the Rosetta Stone and Decipherment. University of California Press.

Images from Wikimedia.