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When did hieratic writing start?
Why is hieratic a misnomer?
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The earliest known use of the adjective hieratic is in the mid 1600s. OED's earliest evidence for hieratic is from 1656, in the writing of Thomas Blount, antiquary and lexicographer.
Oct 17, 2021 · As it turns out, the name Philadelphia ultimately comes from a nickname given to an ancient Greek ruler of Egypt who gained notoriety for marrying his own full sister. The “brotherly love” in the name originally referred to literal incest.
- Overview
- Hieratic script
- Demotic script
- Decipherment of hieroglyphic writing
- Kircher’s attempts at decipherment
1.Hieratic was written in one direction only, from right to left. In earlier times the lines were arranged vertically and later, about 2000 bce, horizontally. Subsequently the papyrus scrolls were written in columns of changing widths.
2.There were ligatures in hieratic so that two or more signs could be written in one stroke.
3.As a consequence of its decreased legibility, the spelling of the hieratic script tended to be more rigid and more complete than that of hieroglyphic writing. Variations from uniformity at a given time were minor; but, during the course of the various historical periods, the spelling developed and changed. As a result, hieratic texts do not correspond exactly to contemporary hieroglyphic texts, either in the placing of signs or in the spelling of words.
4.Hieratic used diacritical additions to distinguish between two signs that had grown similar to one another because of cursive writing. For example, the cow’s leg received a supplementary distinguishing cross, because in hieratic it had come to resemble the sign for a human leg. Certain hieratic signs were taken into the hieroglyphic script.
1.Hieratic was written in one direction only, from right to left. In earlier times the lines were arranged vertically and later, about 2000 bce, horizontally. Subsequently the papyrus scrolls were written in columns of changing widths.
2.There were ligatures in hieratic so that two or more signs could be written in one stroke.
3.As a consequence of its decreased legibility, the spelling of the hieratic script tended to be more rigid and more complete than that of hieroglyphic writing. Variations from uniformity at a given time were minor; but, during the course of the various historical periods, the spelling developed and changed. As a result, hieratic texts do not correspond exactly to contemporary hieroglyphic texts, either in the placing of signs or in the spelling of words.
4.Hieratic used diacritical additions to distinguish between two signs that had grown similar to one another because of cursive writing. For example, the cow’s leg received a supplementary distinguishing cross, because in hieratic it had come to resemble the sign for a human leg. Certain hieratic signs were taken into the hieroglyphic script.
Demotic script is first encountered at the beginning of the 26th dynasty, about 660 bce. The writing signs plainly demonstrate its connection with the hieratic script, although the exact relationship is not yet clear. It appears that demotic was originally developed expressly for government office use—that is, for documents in which the language was extensively formalized and thus well suited for the use of a standardized cursive script. Only some time after its introduction was demotic used for literary texts in addition to documents and letters; much later it was employed for religious texts as well. The latest dated demotic text, from December 2, 425, consists of a rock inscription at Philae. In contrast to hieratic, which is almost without exception written in ink on papyrus or other flat surfaces, demotic inscriptions are not infrequently found engraved in stone or carved in wood.
The demotic system corresponds to the hieratic and hence ultimately to the hieroglyphic system. Alongside the traditional spelling, however, there was another spelling that took account of the markedly altered phonetic form of the words by appropriate respelling. This characteristic applied especially to a large number of words that did not occur in the older language and for which no written form had consequently been passed down. The nontraditional spelling could also be used for old, familiar words.
With the possible exception of Pythagoras, no Greek whose writings have survived seems to have understood the nature of hieroglyphic writing, nor did the Greeks obtain guidance from their Egyptian contemporaries. Rather, the Greek tradition taught that hieroglyphs were symbolic signs or allegories. The Egyptian-born Greek philosopher Plotinus interpreted hieroglyphic writing entirely from the viewpoint of his esoteric philosophy. Only one of the numerous works on the hieroglyphic script written in late antiquity has been preserved: the Hieroglyphica of Horapollon, a Greek Egyptian who probably lived in the 5th century ce. Horapollon made use of a good source, but he himself certainly could not read hieroglyphic writing and began with the false hypothesis of the Greek tradition—namely, that hieroglyphs were symbols and allegories, not phonetic signs.
The Middle Ages neither possessed any knowledge of hieroglyphic writing nor took any interest in it. But a manuscript of Horapollon brought to Florence in 1422 stirred great interest among the humanists. Apparently without realizing that ancient Egyptian originals might be available in Rome, Renaissance artists designed hieroglyphs after Horapollon’s descriptions, as well as from their own imaginations. They used hieroglyphs as wisdom-laden symbols in architecture and also in drawings and paintings.
The great German scholar Athanasius Kircher (1602–80) began his attempts at decipherment with the Coptic language and with the correct hypothesis that the hieroglyphs recorded an earlier stage of this language. He also believed, again correctly, that the signs recorded phonetic values. In spite of this, he did not arrive at correct results—with the...
The meaning of HIERATIC is constituting or belonging to a cursive form of ancient Egyptian writing simpler than the hieroglyphic. How to use hieratic in a sentence.
Dec 6, 2023 · Like cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs were used for record-keeping, but also for monumental display dedicated to royalty and deities. The word hieroglyph comes from the Greek hieros ‘sacred’ and gluptien ‘carved in stone’. The last known hieroglyph inscription was 394 C.E.
Nov 16, 2016 · Ancient Egyptian Writing is known as hieroglyphics ('sacred carvings') and developed at some point prior to the Early Dynastic Period (c. 3150 -2613 BCE). According to some scholars, the concept of the written word was first developed in Mesopotamia and came to Egypt through trade .
This article discusses hieratic and Demotic script in Roman times, scribes, Egyptian literature in the Roman period, texts from the belles-lettres, scientific and scholarly texts, religious texts, and the end of pagan Egyptian literature.
