Ancient Egyptian was written in different scripts, depending on the media and the time period. Hieroglyphs are the pictographic signs that appeared from the earliest times when writing was invented in Egypt. Hieroglyphic signs never became abstract and were the most formal script, of symbolic importance for all monumental texts, both religious and mortuary. Hieroglyphic texts were carved on the walls, ceilings, and columns of stone temples, and on many types of artifacts. They were also painted or carved on the walls of tombs, and were used to record many religious texts on papyrus.
At the same time that early hieroglyphs were used, a more cursive and informal script now called hieratic developed. Written in ink and not carved, hieratic was easier to write than the pictographic hieroglyphs, and is a more abstracted form of these signs (see Figure 2.3). Both hieratic and cursive hieroglyphs were used to write texts on papyrus.
Figure 2.3 Fragmentary papyrus in hieratic about the Battle of Qadesh, fought by Rameses II in the 19th Dynasty (E. 4892). The Art Archive/Musee du Louvre Paris/Dagli Orti
Records were also written in hieratic on ostraca, broken pieces of pottery or fragments of limestone. Plastered wooden boards were another writing medium, and administrative letters with hieroglyphs written vertically on clay tablets, using a bone stylus, have been excavated in the late Old Kingdom governor’s palace at Balat, in Dakhla Oasis (see 6.12).
The demotic script, which developed in the 1s* millennium bc, was a more cursive form of writing than hieratic. It contains many abbreviations, and has to be read in word groups more than individual signs. The middle text on the famous Rosetta Stone is in demotic, with a hieroglyphic text at the top and Greek at the bottom (see Figure 1.1).
World History
