Demotic

Fragment of a linen mummy-wrapping with a funerary text in demotic: “May his soul live for ever and eternally before Osiris: Imhotep”. Late period or Ptolemaic. BM EA 73747 © The Trustees of the British Museum

Demotic, the cursive script derived from ancient Egyptian hieratic, was one of the scripts used to write the Egyptian language in the Late Period and Graeco-Roman times, alongside hieroglyphs, hieratic and Greek and it is one of the scripts inscribed on the trilingual Rosetta Stone.

It emerged in the 7th century BCE and remained in use until the 5th century CE. Hieratic had been used for administrative and literary purposes since the 3rd millennium BCE, and with time, it became increasingly cursive and developed into a distinct script known as demotic. Demotic was used for administrative and legal documents, as well as private letters, religious texts, magical and medical papyri and literary works, and it was written on papyri, ostraca and inscribed into stone. It was the script of choice for the native Egyptian population during the Late Period and Ptolemaic and Roman eras.

Sycomore fig wood mummy-label of Psonis son of Pashertasi and Taminis, early 2nd cent. AD, from Akhmim(?). BM EA20809 © The Trustees of the British Museum

Demotic sources provide invaluable insights into various aspects of life in the multicultural world of ancient Egypt, including administration, economy, law, religion, and literature. Today, demotic is studied by Egyptologists, Papyrologists, ancient historians and scholars interested in the history of law and medicine.

The undergraduate language course for Demotic covers a wide range of texts in terms of both time period and geographic origin. The curriculum includes literary narratives like the Setne story cycle, wisdom texts like Papyrus Insinger, marriage contracts, oracle questions, petitions, dream visions, and even letters to the dead and to gods.

Demotic can be studied by undergraduates at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies as a subsidiary language in the BA Egyptology degree, and in the BA Classics and Asian and Middle Eastern Studies within Egyptology as a main or subsidiary subject, and by graduate students in a wide range of subjects across the University including Theology and Religion, Classics, and History.