#hieratic

[theancientwayoflife]

~ Vignette from funerary papyrus (Book of the Dead) from papyrus N 3149.

Period: Ptolemaic Period

Medium: Papyrus

[detroitlib]

Papyrus fragment from the temple library of Tebtunis in the Fayum. The hieratic text is a composition intended to protect pharoah; on the verso is a Greek tax list. Portion of a roll formerly owned by Rev. W.F. Good and later by William Randolph Hearst.

Rare Book Collection, Detroit Public Library

[hieroglyphicstext]

Ⲧⲉⲛϣⲉⲡϩⲙⲟⲧ ⲛⲧⲟⲧⲥ ⲛⲑⲛⲏⲃ Ⲏⲥⲉ

we thank the lady Isis

[yiddishlore]

Chonky crocodiles in the margins of the Book of the Dead of the Priest of Horus, Imhotep (Imuthes), on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I just love these heckin’ huge fellas and how much effort the artist clearly put into them.

[whencyclopedia]

The Tale of Sinuhe

The Middle Kingdom of ancient Egypt (2000 BCE – 1700 BCE) saw the start of more formal writing which included religious scripts, administrative notes, and more in-depth fictional writing. One of the most iconic pieces of writing to come out of the Middle Kingdom was The Tale of Sinuhe. Sinuhe was a courier and assistant to the King of Egypt, Amenhotep I. He fled Egypt and joined a Bedouin tribe to the east and started a new life near Syria. Once he reached old age he returned and finished out his life in Egypt. The importance of this story goes beyond the structure and writing techniques of the text as it provides insight into the cultural differences between Egypt and the Near East. Philologists are still analysing the text and acquiring new insight into the text today. This 4,000-year-old tale provides insight into the world and mind of an Egyptian and is just another example of Egyptian brilliance.

Learn more about The Tale of Sinuhe

[gentledilapidatrix]

conlang doodle dump!

[dedalvs]

Is there a High Valyrian cursive that someone could conveniently use to write swiftly with quill and ink?

The answer is almost assuredly there is, but I haven't sat down and tried to work it out. A real world analog is hieratic. You've probably seen a lot of Egyptian hieroglyphs in tomb inscriptions, and they're all quite precise:

And that's because scribes spent, you know, years on them. They could afford to be quite precise. These were tomb inscriptions, not notes jotted down to a friend. For that, there was a cursive form called hieratic, and it looked like this:

Quite different! Suddenly you can't actually figure out what the heck these are pictures of anymore. It also flows much better, and certainly could be written a lot faster.

Valyrian absolutely would have a form like this, but it would take a lot of figuring out. It's one thing with an alphabet or a similar system, given that there are so many characters, but with over 400 glyphs, you'd have to figure out each one, and make sure it all fit together and made sense... I haven't gotten there yet. But absolutely, such a form should exist, and would be used for most everyday written notes and letters, the full glyphs being reserved for inscriptions, books, proclamations, signs, etc.

Eventually I'll work it out, but if someone else wanted to give it a shot, I'd love to see it!

[ancientegyptdaily]

“Hieratic (lit. 'priestly') is the name given to a cursive writing system used for Ancient Egyptian and the principal script used to write that language from its development in the third millennium BC until the rise of Demotic in the mid-first millennium BC. It was primarily written in ink with a reed pen on papyrus.

In the second century, the term hieratic was used for the first time to describe this Ancient Egyptian writing system by the Greek scholar Clement of Alexandria. The term derives from the Greek for "priestly writing" because at that time, for more than eight and a half centuries, hieratic had been used traditionally only for religious texts and literature.” [X]