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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.
[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 ...
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.
Demotic writing was known as the common script and was similar to the late Coptic language, which was widely spoken throughout the ancient Middle East. Hieratic writing was described as the script of the elite/priests (cursive). This writing seems to have been commonly used along with other types of writings in many scripts and books ...
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.
Of the hieroglyphic versions, there are both illustrated and un-illustrated forms. Some of the hieratic copies contain demotic notations, but no purely demotic form of the text has been found. [4] Most primary sources for the text are un-illustrated hieratic copies on papyri. However, as aforementioned, other sources are available.
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.