The Egyptian language, or ancient Egyptian, is a dormant branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family that was spoken in Egypt. It is one of the earliest known written languages, first recorded in the hieroglyphic script in the late 4th millennium BC, and the longest-attested human language with a written record spanning over 5,000 years. Its classical form, known as "Middle Egyptian," was the vernacular language of the Middle Kingdom of ancient Egypt, and remained the literary language of Egypt until its Christianisation during the Roman period. It is known today from a large corpus of surviving texts, which were deciphered in the early 19th century.