Hieratic

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Hieratic
Logographic
with consonants
Time period
c. 3200 BC – 3rd century AD
DirectionMixed
LanguagesEgyptian language
Related scripts
Parent systems
Child systems
Demotic
possibly inspired
Unicode range
U+13000–U+1342F (unified with Egyptian hieroglyphs)
 This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

Hieratic (

Demotic in the mid-first millennium BCE. It was primarily written in ink with a reed brush on papyrus.[1]

Etymology

In the second century, the term hieratic was used for the first time by the Greek scholar

Koinē Greek
: γράμματα ἱερατικά) because at that time, for more than eight and a half centuries, hieratic had been used traditionally only for religious texts and literature.

Hieratic can also be an adjective meaning "[o]f or associated with sacred persons or offices; sacerdotal."[3]

Development

Hieratic developed as a cursive form of

Egyptian Book of the Dead
, noncursive hieroglyphic script became largely restricted to monumental inscriptions.

Around 650 BCE, the even more-cursive Demotic script developed from hieratic.[1] Demotic arose in northern Egypt and replaced hieratic and the southern shorthand known as abnormal hieratic for most mundane writing, such as personal letters and mercantile documents. Hieratic continued to be used by the priestly class for religious texts and literature into the third century AD.

Uses and materials

One of four official letters to vizier Khay copied onto fragments of limestone, an ostracon

Through most of its long history, hieratic was used for writing administrative documents, accounts, legal texts, and letters, as well as mathematical, medical, literary, and religious texts. During the Græco-Roman period, when Demotic, and later, Greek, had become the chief administrative script, hieratic was limited primarily to religious texts. In general, hieratic was much more important than hieroglyphs throughout Egypt's history, being the script used in daily life. It was also the writing system first taught to students, knowledge of hieroglyphs being limited to a small minority who were given additional training.[5] It is often possible to detect errors in hieroglyphic texts that came about due to a misunderstanding of an original hieratic text.

Most often, hieratic script was written in

twenty-second dynasty
.

During the late

cuneiform. About five hundred of these tablets have been discovered in the governor's palace at Ayn Asil (Balat),[6] and a single example was discovered from the site of Ayn al-Gazzarin, both in the Dakhla Oasis.[7][8][9] At the time the tablets were made, Dakhla was located far from centers of papyrus production.[10]
These tablets record inventories, name lists, accounts, and approximately fifty letters. Of the letters, many are internal letters that were circulated within the palace and the local settlement, but others were sent from other villages in the oasis to the governor.

Characteristics

eighteenth dynasty reign of Amenhotep I
, c. 1514–1493 BC) reads: "Be on your guard against all who are subordinate to you... Trust no brother, know no friend, make no intimates."

Hieratic script, unlike inscriptional and

twelfth dynasty (specifically during the reign of Amenemhat III
), horizontal writing became the standard.

Hieratic is noted for its cursive nature and use of

Egyptologists have invented equivalent hieroglyphic forms for hieroglyphic transcriptions and typesetting.[11]
Several hieratic characters have diacritical additions so that similar signs could easily be distinguished.

Hieratic is often present in any given period in two forms, a highly ligatured, cursive script used for administrative documents, and a broad

bookhand used for literary, scientific, and religious texts. These two forms can often be significantly different from one another. Letters, in particular, used very cursive forms for quick writing, often with large numbers of abbreviations for formulaic phrases, similar to shorthand
.

A highly cursive form of hieratic known as "Abnormal Hieratic" was used in the

twenty-sixth dynasty.[12][13]
It derives from the script of Upper Egyptian administrative documents and was used primarily for legal texts, land leases, letters, and other texts. This type of writing was superseded by Demotic—a Lower Egyptian scribal tradition—during the twenty-sixth dynasty, when Demotic was established as a standard administrative script throughout a re-unified Egypt.

Influence

Hieratic has had influence on a number of other writing systems. The most obvious is that on

Old Nubian
.

Outside of the Nile Valley, many of the signs used in the

Old Kingdom hieratic signs.[14] It is also known that early Hebrew used hieratic numerals.[15][16]

Unicode

The Unicode standard considers hieratic characters to be font variants of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the two scripts have been unified.[17] Hieroglyphs were added to the Unicode Standard in October 2009 with the release of version 5.2.

See also

References

  1. ^ a b McGregor 2015, p. 306.
  2. ^ Goedicke (1988, p. vii); Wente (2001, p. 2006). The reference is made in Clement's Stromata 5:4.
  3. ^ Definition of hieratic, Free Online Dictionary. Retrieved 2011-10-23.
  4. ^ Friedhelm Hoffmann (2012), Hieratic And Demotic Literature, OUP.
  5. ^ Baines 1983, p. 583.
  6. ^ Soukiassian, Wuttmann & Pantalacci 2002.
  7. ^ Posener-Kriéger 1992.
  8. ^ Pantalacci 1998.
  9. ^ Scribes and craftsmen: the noble art of writing on clay. Archived 2016-05-29 at the Wayback Machine Feb 29, 2012; UCL Institute of Archaeology
  10. ^ Parkinson & Quirke 1995, p. 20.
  11. ^ Gardiner 1929.
  12. ^ Wente 2001, p. 210.
  13. ^ Malinine 1974.
  14. ^ Hoch 1990.
  15. ^ Aharoni 1966.
  16. ^ Goldwasser 1991.
  17. ^ The Unicode Standard, Version 5.2.0, Chapter 14.17, Egyptian Hieroglyphs [1]

Bibliography

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Hieratic.
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