I was in a waiting room for a couple of hours last week. I overheard an Ethiopian gentleman on his phone and immediately equated his language with ancient Egyptian. Days later I googled this... Ancient Ethiopian was spoken down to 1600 A. D., when it broke up into the modern dialects. These modern dialects are still the most primitive Semitic languages, and the closest thing existing to ancient Egyptian, Egyptian's direct descendant, Coptic, having become extinct.