Ancient Egypt

Egyptian Hieroglyphs and Writing

The Three Types of Egyptian Writing: Hieroglyphic, Hieratic, Demotic

A comparison of hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic — the three scripts of the Egyptian language, when they were used, how they looked, and how they differ.

The Three Types of Egyptian Writing: Hieroglyphs, Hieratic, and Demotic

For most of its long history, the Egyptian language was written in three different but closely related scripts: hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic. Each had its own visual character, its own set of conventions, and its own preferred uses. The broader context is laid out in The Hieroglyphic Writing System.

A short orientation before the details. Most treatments of this subject want to begin with hieroglyphs and end with demotic, presenting demotic as a late, decayed form of the older scripts. That is wrong, and I want to put the correction in the foreground. Demotic is a fully developed cursive of its own, with its own internal evolution, and for roughly a thousand years, the entire Late and Ptolemaic periods: it was the primary script of the Egyptian state, of contracts, of literature, and of everyday correspondence. Treating it as a footnote is a hieroglyphic-centric bias that comes from the fact that the monuments that survive from pharaonic Egypt are the ones carved in stone, not the ones written on papyrus.

Hieroglyphic: The Sacred Script

Hieroglyphic writing (medu netjer, “the gods’ words”) is the most visually striking and the most formal of the three scripts. It was used from around 3200 BCE to the fourth century CE, primarily in monumental inscriptions on temple walls, tomb chapels, statues, and stelae. Its most distinctive feature is the use of carefully drawn pictorial signs: owls, seated gods, water ripples, baskets, carved in relief or painted in flat color.

The system is a mixed script combining logograms (signs for whole words), phonograms (signs for consonants), and silent determinatives that classify the meaning of a word. Most signs could be used for multiple purposes: the scarab beetle, for example, was both the logogram for “to come into being” (ḫpr) and a determinative for that verb.

Hieroglyphs were reserved for formal, often sacred, contexts. A single pharaoh might have his names and titles inscribed in hieroglyphs on the walls of Karnak, on the doorjambs of his palace, on the bottom of his sarcophagus, and on the scarabs he distributed as royal gifts. The script was also used, more rarely, in papyrus copies of religious texts, for example, the funerary texts of the New Kingdom are sometimes written in hieroglyphs in a careful cursive, but the great majority of papyrus texts use hieratic.

One small but persistent mistake in popular books is the idea that hieroglyphs were “for the priests” and the cursive scripts “for the people.” It is the other way around, in a sense. Hieroglyphs were the script of public display, the script of monuments and tombs, and they were read aloud by temple priests for ordinary Egyptians who could not read the signs themselves. The cursive scripts were the working tools of the scribal class. The distinction is between visibility and use, not between sacred and profane.

Hieratic: The Scribe’s Hand

The cursive script that Egyptian scribes used for everyday writing on papyrus and ostraca is called hieratic (from Greek hieratika grammata, “priestly letters”). The term is a misnomer: the script was not used only by priests, but by the entire scribal class, but the name has stuck.

Hieratic emerged in the early dynastic period, almost as early as hieroglyphs themselves. The earliest examples, dating to the late fourth millennium BCE, are found in the royal tombs of Abydos and in the labels of the Narmer palette. The script was derived from a simplified form of hieroglyphs, but the relationship between the two was not strictly linear: the hieratic forms developed their own conventions, and a hieratic sign might be drawn quite differently from its hieroglyphic equivalent. The word “to go,” for example, was written in hieroglyphs as a pair of walking legs, but in hieratic the legs were abbreviated to a small stroke.

Hieratic was the workhorse of Egyptian administration and literature for nearly two and a half thousand years. Scribes used it for:

  • Letters and administrative documents.
  • Tax records, accounts, and court proceedings.
  • Medical and mathematical papyri.
  • Religious texts that were intended for practical use, such as the Book of the Dead and the medical papyri of the New Kingdom.

Hieratic changed considerably over the centuries. Middle Kingdom hieratic (c. 2055–1650 BCE) is conservative and closely related to its hieroglyphic origins; New Kingdom hieratic (c. 1550–1070 BCE) is more fluid and abbreviated; Late Period and Ptolemaic hieratic is sometimes difficult to distinguish from demotic. The hieratic script used at the time of the Rosetta Stone was already archaic in the sense that it was no longer the everyday script of administration.

The third Egyptian script, demotic (demotika grammata, “popular letters,” a name coined by the Greek writer Herodotus and applied to the script by the 5th-century bishop Horapollo), emerged in the seventh century BCE, in the Late Period. It was a further cursive development of hieratic, with still more abbreviated sign forms and a more fluid, less formal appearance.

Demotic was the script of everyday life in Egypt from the late seventh century BCE until the fifth century CE. It was used for:

  • Administrative documents of all kinds, contracts, tax receipts, court records, and legal codes.
  • Letters, both official and private.
  • Literary works, including the stories of Setne Khamwas and the demotic versions of older mythological texts.
  • Religious and scientific texts, including the demotic Book of the Dead and the medical papyri of the Roman period.
  • Graffiti and short inscriptions, including the demotic and Greek texts of the Rosetta Stone.

Demotic was the script in which the Egyptian language was last written in its native form. The latest dated demotic document, a graffito from the island of Philae dated 12 December 452 CE, marks a symbolic end. After that, Egyptian was written in Coptic, a modified Greek alphabet with additional letters borrowed from demotic for sounds that Greek did not have. Coptic, in turn, gave way to Arabic in the centuries after the Arab conquest of the seventh century, but Coptic survives liturgically in the Coptic Orthodox Church to this day.

Comparing the Three Scripts

The three scripts shared a common linguistic core: an essentially identical vocabulary, grammar, and orthography. The differences were visual and functional, not linguistic. A scribe trained in the early Middle Kingdom could read a demotic text of the Ptolemaic period with effort, just as a Latin reader can read Italian, although the spelling conventions would be unfamiliar. Modern Egyptologists typically use hieroglyphic transliterations as the reference form of Egyptian words, but the same words can be written in any of the three scripts.

In terms of usage, the three scripts followed a clear progression. Hieroglyphic was the monumental script, used for temple and tomb walls, statues, and royal monuments. Hieratic was the everyday script, used for documents, letters, and literary papyri. Demotic was a later, more cursive form of hieratic that became the dominant script of administration and literature in the Late and Ptolemaic periods. After the fourth century CE, hieroglyphs, hieratic, and demotic fell out of use, and Egyptian was written in the modified Greek alphabet of Coptic.

Why the Differences Matter

The three scripts were not just different ways of writing the same language; they were also different media with different purposes. Hieroglyphic was slow to write, and each sign had to be carefully carved or painted. The format was rigidly structured, and individual signs were arranged in horizontal registers, vertical columns, or square blocks. The aesthetic was monumental and formal. Hieratic and demotic, by contrast, were written quickly, with brush or reed on papyrus or on chipped limestone ostraca, the ancient equivalent of a writing tablet. The format was fluid, and scribes could vary the size of individual signs to fill a line or emphasize a particular word.

The development of the three scripts reflects a tension that runs through the entire history of Egyptian writing. On one hand, the Egyptians wanted their sacred and royal inscriptions to be readable, clearly written, and visually impressive. On the other hand, they needed a fast, flexible medium for the everyday business of administration and correspondence. The solution was to maintain three scripts at the same time, each with its own conventions and its own specialists. A few scribes, particularly in the late periods, were trained in all three; most specialized in one. The system worked for three thousand years.