PALAEOGRAPHY Hieroglyphic.—The main division is into monumental or epigraphic hieroglyphs and written hieroglyphs. The former may be rendered by the sculptor or the painter in stone, on wood, etc., with great delicacy of detail, or may be simply sunk or painted in outline. When finely rendered they are of great value to the student investigating the origins of their values. Monumental hieroglyphic did not cease till the 3rd century A.D. (Temple of Esna). The written hieroglyphs, formed by the scribe with the reed pen on papyrus, leather, wooden tablets, etc., have their outlines more or less abbreviated, leading to the cursive scripts, hieratic and demotic, (q.v.). The written hiero glyphs were employed at all periods, especially for religious texts.
A kind of cursive hieroglyphic or hieratic writing is traceable even in the 1st Dynasty, and though few examples have survived on papyrus or elsewhere from the old kingdom, it was already well characterised in the 6th Dynasty. When it reappears in the Middle Kingdom it has changed considerably and in its most cursive form seems hardly to retain any definable trace of the original hieroglyphic pictures; there is again a great change of style about the time of Akhenaten. The most cursive forms of hieratic appear in accounts and memoranda, but, how ever cursive, the hieratic was intended to be a transcript of hiero glyphic rendered sign by sign. With the deterioration of ortho graphy at the end of the new kingdom this principle began to break down, and by the time of the 22nd Dynasty the cursive, at least of the conservative Thebais, had become very obscure. In the course of the reign of Amasis II. a better form from Lower Egypt drove this out completely and is the true demotic (q.v.), which, unlike hieratic, is something more than a variety of hieroglyphic. The employment of hieratic was thenceforth al most confined to the literal transcription of religious and tradi tional hieroglyphic texts in a clear and formal hand. Hieratic was at all times used for graffiti, whether in ink or cut in stone, until demotic appeared, and some formal engraved records, especially of the 22nd Dynasty, are in this script.
may be observed that demotic continued to be employed after hieroglyphic writing had ceased until the end of paganism in the 5th century, and that a few signs were taken to complete the Greek alphabet in its adaptation to Coptic. These last remnants of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic system thus live on in church use to the present day.
See A. H. Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar, Oxford, 1927, especially PP. 432-527 ; G. Moller, Hieratische Palaographie, 3 vols. Leipzig, 1909-12. (F. LL. G.)
