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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.
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 scribes used rush pens which had stems thinner than that of a reed (2 mm). The end of the rush was cut obliquely and then chewed so that the fibers became separated. The result was a short, stiff brush which was handled in the same manner as that of a calligrapher. [19]
This may have also been assisted by the eventual availability of papyrus as well as the evolution of the hieroglyphs into the more comprehensible forms of Hieratic (from the Greek 'hieros' meaning 'sacred' and coined by Herodotus (c. 484-424 BCE)) and Demotic.