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The writing systems used in ancient Egypt were deciphered in the early nineteenth century through the work of several European scholars, especially Jean-François Champollion and Thomas Young. Ancient Egyptian forms of writing, which included the hieroglyphic , hieratic and demotic scripts, ceased to be understood in the fourth and fifth ...
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.
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).
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.
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 used for Egyptology, transliteration of Ancient Egyptian is the process of converting (or mapping) texts written as Egyptian language symbols to alphabetic symbols representing uniliteral hieroglyphs or their hieratic and demotic counterparts. This process facilitates the publication of texts where the inclusion of photographs or drawings of ...
However, there is a certain degree of influence from hieratic in the visual appearance of some signs. One significant difference is that the orientation of cursive hieroglyphs is not constant, reading right to left or left to right depending on the context, whereas hieratic is always read right to left. [ 2 ]
In 1984 a committee was charged with the task to develop a uniform system for the encoding of hieroglyphic texts on the computer. The resulting Manual for the Encoding of Hieroglyphic Texts for Computer-input (Jan Buurman, Nicolas Grimal, Jochen Hallof, Michael Hainsworth and Dirk van der Plas, Informatique et Egyptologie 2, Paris 1988) is generally shortened to Manuel de Codage.