The table below gives a list of such uniliteral signs along with their conventional transcription, their hieroglyphic origin, the Coptic letters derived from them, and notes on usage. Later (Roman Period) texts used these signs even more frequently. These are the most common signs in Demotic, making up between one third and one half of all signs in any given text foreign words are also almost exclusively written with these signs.
Like its hieroglyphic predecessor script, Demotic possessed a set of "uniliteral" or "alphabetical" signs that could be used to represent individual phonemes. The text simply reads "Petise, son of Petosiris" who Petise was is unknown. The last dated example of the Demotic script is a graffito on the walls of the temple of Isis at Philae, dated to December 12, 452. After that, Demotic was only used for a few ostraca, subscriptions to Greek texts, mummy labels, and graffiti. In contrast to the way Latin eliminated languages in the western part of the Empire, Greek did not replace Demotic entirely. 30 BC – 452 AD), especially from the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, though the quantity of all Demotic texts decreased rapidly towards the end of the second century. There are, however, a number of literary texts written in Late Demotic (c. Papyrus, Ptolemaic era.įrom the beginning of Roman rule of Egypt, Demotic was progressively less used in public life. By the end of the 3rd century BC, Koine Greek was more important, as it was the administrative language of the country Demotic contracts lost most of their legal force unless there was a note in Greek of being registered with the authorities.Ĭontract in Demotic writing, with signature of a witness on the verso. From the 4th century BC onwards, Demotic held a higher status, as may be seen from its increasing use for literary and religious texts. 400–30 BC) is the stage of writing used during the Ptolemaic Kingdom.
During this period, Demotic was used only for administrative, legal, and commercial texts, while hieroglyphs and hieratic were reserved for religious texts and literature. After the reunification of Egypt under Psamtik I, Demotic replaced Abnormal Hieratic in Upper Egypt, particularly during the reign of Amasis II, when it became the official administrative and legal script. It is generally dated between 650 and 400 BC, as most texts written in Early Demotic are dated to the Twenty-sixth Dynasty and the subsequent rule as a satrapy of the Achaemenid Empire, which was known as the Twenty-seventh Dynasty. Early Demotic Įarly Demotic (often referred to by the German term Frühdemotisch) developed in Lower Egypt during the later part of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty, particularly found on steles from the Serapeum of Saqqara. Parts of the Demotic Greek Magical Papyri were written with a cypher script. It is written and read from right to left, while earlier hieroglyphs could be written from top to bottom, left to right, or right to left. The Demotic script was referred to by the Egyptians as sš/sẖ n šꜥ.t, "document writing," which the second-century scholar Clement of Alexandria called ἐπιστολογραφική, "letter-writing," while early Western scholars, notably Thomas Young, formerly referred to it as " Enchorial Egyptian." The script was used for more than a thousand years, and during that time a number of developmental stages occurred. By convention, the word "Demotic" is capitalized in order to distinguish it from demotic Greek. The term was first used by the Greek historian Herodotus to distinguish it from hieratic and hieroglyphic scripts.
For the distinction between, / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.ĭemotic (from Ancient Greek: δημοτικός dēmotikós, 'popular') is the ancient Egyptian script derived from northern forms of hieratic used in the Nile Delta. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).
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