The ancient Egyptian writing system, used for a very long time - about 3500 years - has come a long way. From the first pictographic signs, it successively reached the appearance of cursive (cursive) writing, which is commonly called demotic. What it is, how it arose, developed and how it ceased to exist, we will consider in this article.
What is a “demotic letter”
The meaning of the word "demotic" - "folk" - reflects the origin and purpose of this type of writing. The fact that the Egyptians had a special cursive script was already known to Herodotus, who gave it the name "gramma demotic", which in ancient Greek means "folk writing". It is a fluent cursive. In paleography, a sub-historical discipline that studies various inscriptions, this type of writing is called cursive.
Quite a few monuments of demotic writing have come down to us. Records were made on papyrus or on ostraca - clay shards or suitable pieces of limestone (papyrus is a rather expensive material, and not everyone could afford to use it). Signs were applied from right to left.
First attempts at decryption
Scientists tried to approach the reading of demotic even before they achieved the first success in deciphering hieroglyphs. At first, it was demotic writing that seemed simpler. What it is, however, no one could understand for a long time.
The discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 was a great success for the codebreakers. An inscription made in Egyptian and Greek was found on the monument. The Egyptian hieroglyphic part of it was duplicated by the demotic text. Some success in reading the mysterious letters was achieved only by I. Okerblad and S. de Sacy, who managed to decipher individual signs. Thus, Åkerblad was able to read in the demotic text all proper names preserved in the Greek part, thanks to which he recognized 16 characters. However, the writing system remained a mystery.
Triumph of J.-F. Champollion
The French scientist, who is credited with the final decipherment of ancient Egyptian writing in 1822, worked in parallel on hieroglyphs and demotic inscription. But he was mistaken for quite a long time in assessing the nature and age of demotic. So, Champollion assumed that this is the most ancient Egyptianwriting, and also for a long time was of the opinion that, unlike hieroglyphs, it has a completely alphabetic character. It all turned out to be wrong.
Nevertheless, perseverance, a brilliant command of the Coptic language (it is the direct successor of Egyptian), the method of cross-analysis of different parts of the inscription and the intuition of a talented scientist eventually brought him well-deserved success.
History of Demotic writing
It turned out to be cursive script, the latest of all types of Egyptian writing. It originated around the 7th century BC. e. as a further simplification of hieratic cursive writing and retained basically the structure and method inherent in other types of Egyptian writing - hieratic and hieroglyphics. The language of "folk writing" has some distinctive features, reflecting the process of evolution: if in the early texts it is close to the so-called New Egyptian, then in the monuments of later times - the Roman and Byzantine periods - it is much closer to the Coptic language.
Demotic writing reached a special distribution in the Hellenistic period - during the reign of the Ptolemaic dynasty (the last third of the 4th century BC - 30 BC). Apparently, very many Egyptians were then literate.
During the Roman period, demotic texts gradually become less and less, while the number of documents written in Greek increases. Little by little, the Egyptian "folk script" began to fall into disuse. In the latest monuments, the signs of the Greek alphabet are often even embedded in the demotic notation. The last sample known to scienceDemotic text was written in 452. It has been used for over a thousand years.
Demotics features
The "folk cursive" of the ancient Egyptians has some features that reflect its transitional character while maintaining a generally conservative, very ancient writing tradition.
Firstly, the number of written characters has significantly decreased compared to hieratics, while the number of compound characters (so-called ligatures) has increased at the same time.
Secondly, the use of phonetic, alphabetic characters has become more frequent. In addition, attempts were noted to convey vowel sounds in writing using consonant signs (in Egyptian writing, there were no independent signs for conveying vowels, this is due to the peculiarities of its morphology and grammar; a similar tradition has developed in Arabic writing).
These trends have led to the ambiguity of a large number of individual characters and ligatures, and, conversely, to the plurality of spellings of the same phoneme. As a result, the demotic letter turned out to be extremely confusing and difficult to read. It is possible that it turned out to be difficult for the people who used it: it was not without reason that they inserted Greek letters into the Egyptian demotic text - probably, polysemy already interfered with the letter, causing doubts and hesitations in choosing one or another sign. The Greek alphabet was incomparably easier to use.
Where the "folk letter" was used
Of course, initially demotic was not intended for writing liturgical texts or royal decrees. It really was a folk letter used in private correspondence, registration of various transactions, business reports, sometimes legal documents and other "business papyri".
During the Persian conquest of Egypt, which lasted from 525 to 332. BC e., demotic goes beyond private life. Chronicles of Persian rule are known, such as the record of the dignitary Ujagorresent, who left a detailed account of the capture of Egypt by the Persians.
In the Hellenistic era, the scope of the use of demotic letters in Ancient Egypt expanded significantly. Using it, they began to write official documents, religious and magical texts, various works of medical and scientific content. Demotic literary works appeared, such as the famous Tales of Satni-Khemuas, the didactic Teaching of the priest Ankhsheshonk to his youngest son, or the Tales of Pharaoh Petubast (historical figure).
This system finally supplanted the ancient hieratic as a type of cursive writing. Demotic texts even began to be carved on stone - a vivid example of this is the Rosetta Stone. This thanksgiving stele from the priests, glorifying King Ptolemy V Epiphanes, dates back to 196 BC. e.
Legacy and prospects for learning
Egyptian demotic cursive failed to go beyond the millennial tradition of the archaic and cumbersome Egyptian writing system. It has been superseded by simple andconvenient Greek alphabet. However, demotic still did not disappear without a trace. It first spread south to Nubia and Northern Sudan, where it formed the basis for the creation of the Meroitic script, which was used for seven centuries. In addition, the six characters of the demotic script survived in the Coptic alphabet, as they conveyed sounds that could not be expressed using Greek letters.
Well, Egyptologists still have a lot of work to do on the study of Demotic writing. The number of finds is large, and not all of them are described. There are anthologies of texts in demotic, dictionaries, but at least a relatively complete paleographic collection is not yet available. So Egyptologists have a truly unplowed field ahead of them.
