Hieratic

Hieratic writing was a cursive script of simplified and connected characters used in ancient Egypt. It could be written quickly on papyrus, making it practical and very suitable for everyday use, unlike hieroglyphics, which took a long time to write. It was mainly used for religious, administrative and literary texts.

Hieratic was the everyday script of ancient Egypt, serving as the practical, "handwritten" counterpart to the formal hieroglyphs carved into temple walls and statues. While hieroglyphs were meant for eternity, hieratic was built for speed and efficiency. Hieratic is not a derivative of hieroglyphs that appeared much later but they actually evolved parallel to one another, appearing already in Protodynastic times as scribes began writing on portable surfaces like papyrus and pottery. Hieroglyphs were slow to write and needed full attention, so the need for a faster way than drawing detailed hieroglyphs was needed. This was accompished by simplifying the complex shapes of hieroglyphs into stylized strokes. For example, a detailed bird hieroglyph might be reduced to a few quick flicks of the brush in hieratic.

Hieratic was almost always written horizontally from right to left, unlike hieroglyphs that could also be written from the right or left, or even vertically from the top to the bottom. In its early stages, it was written in vertical columns, but transitioned to horizontal lines during the Twelfth Dynasty around 1800 BC. It was the primary script for government records, legal documents, tax accounts, and letters. The great stories of ancient Egypt, such as The Tale of Sinuhe, and scientific texts like the Medical Papyrus were written in hieratic.

Over its long history, hieratic itself slowly became more cursive and abbreviated. By the 7th century BC, a new, even more "shorthand" version, Demotic, emerged for daily life. This pushed hieratic into a more specialized role, primarily used by priests for religious texts, which is why the Greeks later gave it the name we use today While hieratic literally means "priestly" (from the Greek ἱερατικά, hieratika), this was true only in the later periods when the it was mostly used for religious papyri after the rise of Demotic. Demotic became so stylized and cursive that it was almost impossible to see the original hieroglyphs within it. In the Late Period, it was limited to administrative and legal documents, but slowly began to be used for literature and other documents, basically replacing hieratic.