DEMOTIC LANGUAGE AND WRITING. The name demotic, "popular," is taken from Herodotus for the ordinary Egyptian handwriting of late times. The script first appears about the 6th century B.C. as an improvement on the particularly obscure and unsystematic style of hieratic writing employed in business documents for some centuries before that time. It arose probably in the commercial areas of Lower Egypt at Sais or Memphis, and by the time of Darius, who apparently encouraged the reorganiza tion of the writing schools, a neat script was everywhere in use for the above purposes. Before the Macedonian conquest the cursive ligatures of the early demotic gave birth to new symbols which were carefully and distinctly formed. In the Ptolemaic period an epigraphic variety appears, priestly decrees being engraved on stelae (such as the Rosetta Stone) in triple hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek versions; under the Romans, while religious texts con tinued to be written in hieratic, literary texts were in demotic, but Greek was almost universal for business documents. The use of demotic went out with or before paganism, but priests of Isis continued to use it in their graffiti at Philae as late as A.D. 452.
Demotic is written from right to left in horizontal lines ; the signs comprise phonograms, word-signs and determinatives, and a single demotic sign is often in origin a ligature of several hiero glyphic signs. It is difficult to transcribe with precision into hiero glyphic, and the result of such a transcription looks absurd on account of the unetymological spellings and the number of otiose signs included in the ligatures. The language of demotic may rep resent approximately the speech of the 26th dynasty ; it approxi mates to Coptic (q.v.), but employs fewer auxiliaries and peri phrastic forms, and even in its latest stages its loans from Greek are confined to a few technical words which do not affect the gram mar. In the Ptolemaic age it first distinguished l from r, and in very late texts vocalization may be indicated to some extent.
The chief literary compositions in demotic are stories (The Stories of Sethon Khamois, The Romance of King Petubastis, The Myth of the Eye of Re, etc.) ; a prophetic work, the so-called Demotic Chronicle; and collections of apophthegms. The Peti tion of Peteesi (temp. Darius I.) on a papyrus in the Rylands col lection takes the form of a long narrative of events covering more than a century and a half.
See F. Ll. Griffith, Catalogue of the Demotic Papyri in the John Rylands Library, Manchester, 3 yols. (19o9) ; Spiegelberg, Demotische Grammatik, Heidelberg (1925). (F. LL. G.)