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Demotic (from Ancient Greek: δημοτικός dēmotikós, 'popular') is the ancient Egyptian script derived from northern forms of hieratic used in the Nile Delta. The term was first used by the Greek historian Herodotus to distinguish it from hieratic and hieroglyphic scripts.
As the latest stage of pre-Coptic Egyptian, demotic texts have long been transliterated using the same system(s) used for hieroglyphic and hieratic texts. However, in 1980, Demotists adopted a single, uniform, international standard based on the traditional system used for hieroglyphic, but with the addition of some extra symbols for vowels and ...
Ancient Egyptians used three forms of writing: Demotic, Hieratic, and Hieroglyphic. Demotic writing was easier for medieval Arabic scholars to decipher because materials in more than one script and language were available to read (Demotic, Coptic, Greek). Demotic writing was known as the common script and was similar to the late Coptic language ...
Hieratic (/ h aɪ ə ˈ r æ t ɪ k /; Ancient Greek: ἱερατικά, romanized: hieratiká, lit. 'priestly') is the name given to a cursive writing system used for Ancient Egyptian and the principal script used to write that language from its development in the third millennium BCE until the rise of Demotic in the mid-first millennium BCE.
[Note 1] Demotic became the most common system for writing the Egyptian language, and hieroglyphic and hieratic were thereafter mostly restricted to religious uses. In the fourth century BC, Egypt came to be ruled by the Greek Ptolemaic dynasty , and Greek and demotic were used side-by-side in Egypt under Ptolemaic rule and then that of the ...
The later hieratic and demotic Egyptian scripts were derived from hieroglyphic writing, as was the Proto-Sinaitic script that later evolved into the Phoenician alphabet. [5] Egyptian hieroglyphs are the ultimate ancestor of the Phoenician alphabet, the first widely adopted phonetic writing system.
The majority of the writings consist of demotic and hieratic texts, most of Roman date, with several hundred manuscripts belonging to the Tebtunis temple library. [2] The collection claims that: "As of August 2015, 925 individual manuscripts have been inventoried, some of which have been pieced together from dozens or even hundreds of fragments.
The demotic inscriptions at Philae are also considerably later than other known demotic writings. The latest known example of demotic from outside Philae is a text probably from Sohag, dated to 290. [8] The demotic inscription accompanying Nesmeterakhem's hieroglyphs is the last known demotic inscription written by a priest to mention Osiris.