Hieratic

Hieratic is the name for a special kind of writing used by Ancient Egyptians. It started around the third millennium BCE and was used until around the middle of the first millennium BCE when another writing style called Demotic became more common. People wrote in hieratic with a reed brush and ink, usually on papyrus.

Hieratic is different from cursive hieroglyphs, even though they looked similar at first. During the Old Kingdom, they were not very different, but later, during the First Intermediate Period, they became two separate ways of writing. This cursive style made writing faster and easier for everyday use.

Etymology

Long ago, around the second century, a Greek scholar named Clement of Alexandria first used the word hieratic to talk about an ancient way of writing used by Egyptians. The word comes from Greek and means 'priestly writing' because, for a very long time, this writing was mostly used for religious books and stories.

The word hieratic can also describe things that are connected to sacred or special people and their roles.

Development

Hieratic started as a quicker way to write hieroglyphic script around 3200–3000 BCE in Ancient Egypt, during the Naqada III period. While formal handwritten printed hieroglyphs were still used for special books like the Egyptian Book of the Dead, most big carvings used the older style.

Later, around 650 BCE, a new writing style called Demotic script came from hieratic. This new style was used in northern Egypt for everyday things like letters and business papers. But hieratic kept being used by priests for religious books and stories until around the third century CE.

Uses and materials

Hieratic was mainly used for writing important documents like records, laws, and letters. It was also used for math, medicine, stories, and religious writings. Even when other scripts like Demotic and Greek became popular for everyday use, hieratic was still used for religious texts. It was the most common writing style in ancient Egypt and was the first script taught to students.

Hieratic was usually written with ink using a reed brush on papyrus, but it was also written on wood, stone, pottery, and leather. During the Roman time, people used reed pens called calami. Some hieratic writings were found on cloth, like linen used for mummification, and on stone stelae from the twenty-second dynasty. In the late sixth dynasty, hieratic was sometimes carved into mud tablets with a stylus, similar to cuneiform. These tablets, found in places like Ayn Asil and Ayn al-Gazzarin in the Dakhla Oasis, contained inventories, name lists, accounts, and letters.

Characteristics

Hieratic script, unlike manuscript hieroglyphs, reads from right to left. At first, it could be written in columns or horizontal lines, but after the twelfth dynasty during Amenemhat III's reign, horizontal writing became the usual way.

Hieratic is known for its flowing style and uses special joins for some letters. It also has a more consistent way of writing words compared to hieroglyphs, which sometimes needed to look nice or match religious ideas. There are also some signs only found in hieratic. Experts have created matching forms for these when writing hieroglyphs.

Hieratic often appeared in two different styles: a very quick, connected style for official papers and a clearer style for books, science, and religious texts. These two styles could look quite different. Letters, especially, used very quick forms with many short cuts for common phrases, much like shorthand.

A special, very quick form of hieratic called "Abnormal Hieratic" was used in the Theban area from the second half of the twentieth dynasty until the start of the twenty-sixth dynasty. It came from the writing used in official papers from Upper Egypt and was mainly for legal documents, land rentals, letters, and other texts. This style was later replaced by Demotic—a writing style from Lower Egypt—during the twenty-sixth dynasty when Demotic became the standard writing across all of Egypt.

Influence

Hieratic influenced many other writing systems. The most clear example is Demotic, which came directly from it. This also connects to the writing signs used in the Meroitic script, as well as the borrowed letters in the Coptic alphabet and Old Nubian.

Beyond the area around the Nile River, some signs from the Byblos syllabary seem to have come from hieratic writing used in the Old Kingdom. We also know that early Hebrew used numbers based on hieratic writing hieratic numerals.

Unicode

The Unicode standard treats hieratic characters as special versions of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Hieroglyphs were added to Unicode in October 2009 with version 5.2.

Because hieratic is a flowing style based on hieroglyphs, experts usually write hieratic text as hieroglyphs instead. It would be possible to create a special font for hieratic, but it would need many complex designs because of the large number of hieroglyphic symbols. Right now, experts change hieratic text into hieroglyphs before they type it and translate it.