Hieratic

The Greek name of this script, hieratikà grámmata, means ‘priestly characters’. It got that name at a time were it was only used in religious texts. Hieratic and hieroglyphic are graphic variants of each other: hieroglyphic script is the high-style calligraphic and even artistic variant, hieratic is the cursive everyday variant. Apart from a few exceptions, they can be mapped characterwise on each other.

Orientation

There are two orientations:

• lines from top to bottom, characters in a line from right to left,
• columns from right to left, characters in a column from top to bottom.

Bilaterals are almost always provided with a phonetic complement. “Polyphonous” signs are distinguished by diacritics. There is some punctuation by verse dots.

For example, the name PA-wjA-n-aDA that appears in col. 5 of the hieroglyphic specimen also appears in the hieratic text of the same papyrus, viz. at the end of l. 1, with the determinatives at the beginning of l. 2. This is it:

As may be seen, the similarity between the hieroglyphic and the hieratic representation is rather vague.

History of hieratic writing

There are hieratic texts from the predynastic period, thus no later (and possibly even earlier) than the earliest hieroglyphic texts. Hieratic writing is therefore not derivative on hieroglyphic writing. Instead, both developed in parallel.

In the beginning, profane texts are written hieratically. From the 26^th dynasty (-652) on, religious texts are thus written, too. Later, when Demotic writing comes into use, hieratic writing gets reserved to religious texts.

From -1500 on, Semitic alphabetic writing develops out of the hieratic script.