Hieratic

Lore & Background

Hieratic developed as a cursive form of hieroglyphic script during the Naqada III period, roughly 3200–3000 BCE. It was used for administrative documents, accounts, legal texts, letters, and mathematical, medical, literary, and religious texts. During the Greco-Roman period, hieratic became limited primarily to religious texts, while Demotic and Greek served as the chief administrative scripts. The term 'hieratic' was first used in the second century by the Greek scholar Clement of Alexandria, deriving from the Greek for 'priestly writing' because by then it had been used traditionally only for religious texts and literature for over eight and a half centuries.

Reader's Guide

Hieratic was the script of daily life in ancient Egypt, more important than hieroglyphs for most of its history. It was the first writing system taught to students, with knowledge of hieroglyphs limited to a small minority. Hieratic is noted for its cursive nature, use of ligatures, and standardized orthography. It influenced Demotic, Meroitic script, Coptic alphabet, Old Nubian, the Byblos syllabary, and early Hebrew numerals. The Unicode standard considers hieratic characters font variants of Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the two scripts have been unified. Hieratic continued in use by the priestly class for religious texts and literature into the third century CE.

Did You Know?

• Hieratic was used for writing administrative documents, accounts, legal texts, letters, and mathematical, medical, literary, and religious texts.
• During the late sixth dynasty, hieratic was sometimes incised into mud tablets with a stylus, similar to cuneiform.
• A highly cursive form known as 'Abnormal Hieratic' was used in the Theban area from the second half of the twentieth dynasty until the beginning of the twenty-sixth dynasty.
• The Unicode standard unified hieratic with Egyptian hieroglyphs, considering hieratic characters font variants.