Egyptian Demotic

Script Details

Egyptian Demotic

A Demotic inscription praying to heal a man's blindness

By One dead president, David Liam Moran - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2736613

Data

ISO 15924 Egyd 070
Type Morphographic Syllabary
Family African
Direction RtL
Diacritics Yes
Contextual Forms Yes
Capitals Used No
Glyphs 24
Inventor Unknown
Earliest Location Egypt
Earliest Date 660 BCE
Latest Date 394 CE
Ancestry

Overview

“The Egyptian Demotic script was used from about 600 BC to about 400 AD for writing the Egyptian language. Demotic writing descended from Egyptian Hieratic writing, the manuscript writing system which was used alongside Hieroglyphics, and it was later used in place of both of these scripts. The development of the Demotic script is generally divided into three periods, Early, Middle (Ptolemaic) and Late (Roman). Demotic was mostly written on papyrus, embalming fabric and other soft surfaces, but was sometimes also inscribed in stone, the most famous example being the middle section of the Rosetta Stone. Initially the script was used primarily in an administrative context; later it came to be used for literary and religious texts also. It was gradually supplanted by the Coptic alphabet from 300 AD onwards.

Egyptian Demotic was a cursive script, written from right to left. It was similar in form to hieroglyphic and hieratic writing, in that it used a combination of logographic and phonetic signs. It reproduced many of the same shapes of the pictographs of the earlier scripts, in a more cursive form which no longer necessarily resembled the concepts/objects they represented. New words for which there was no pre-existing sign were spelled using phonetic symbols.“ - ScriptSource staff, Egyptian demotic, retrieved 13 June 2023

There is not currently a Unicode chart for Egyptian Demotic script. Unicode has included this with Egyptian Hieroglyphs. We will update this article in the future if any updates occur.

Bibliography

Author Year Publication Publisher
Coulmas, Florian 1999 The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems, 110-136 Blackwell Publishing
Johnson, Janet 1991 Thus Wrote 'Onchsheshonqy: An Introductory Grammar of Demotic, Lesson 1, 1-8 Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago
Ray, John David C. 1993 How demotic is Demotic?, Vol. 17, ACTA DEMOTIC: Acts of the fifth International Conference for Demotists: Pisa, 4th-8th September 1993 (1994), p. 251-264 Egitto e Vicino Oriente
Ritner, Robert 1996 The World's Writing Systems, Demotic, 82-84 Oxford University Press
The Unicode Consortium 2022 Chapter 11.4: Egyptian Hieroglyphs, The Unicode Standard, Version 15.0, p. 446-455 The Unicode Consortium