Ancient Egyptians mostly wrote in joined-up script, not hieroglyphs
Hieroglyphs fill museum walls, but everyday Egypt ran on hieratic, a flowing cursive brushed in ink on papyrus. For roughly three thousand years it carried tax receipts, letters, medical manuals and stories. Students learned it first; hieroglyphs were a specialist skill for a trained minority.
Hieratic grew out of hieroglyphs as a quicker hand in the Naqada III period, about 3200 to 3000 BCE. Full hieroglyphs increasingly retreated to monuments and formal manuscripts such as the Book of the Dead. Unlike them, hieratic always ran right to left, and after the reign of Amenemhat III in the twelfth dynasty it settled into horizontal lines. It joined signs together with ligatures, used more consistent spelling than decorative hieroglyphs, and in letters abbreviated stock phrases almost like shorthand. Scribes kept two styles: a rapid cursive for paperwork and a broader bookhand for literature, science and religion.
Its name is a misunderstanding frozen in time. In the second century the Greek scholar Clement of Alexandria called it priestly writing, because by then it had been confined to religious texts for more than eight and a half centuries. The cursive Demotic script, born from hieratic around 650 BCE in northern Egypt, had taken over daily business, and later Greek became the language of administration. Priests used hieratic for sacred texts into the third century CE.
Its surfaces were varied. Thousands of limestone flakes from Deir al-Madinah, the village of royal tomb builders, preserve notes that reveal ordinary workers' lives. In the Dakhla Oasis, far from papyrus supplies, late sixth-dynasty officials pressed hieratic into mud tablets with a stylus, like cuneiform; about five hundred have been found at the governor's palace at Ayn Asil, including around fifty letters. Scribes also wrote on wood, leather and mummy linen, and it was carved into stone as lapidary hieratic.
Its influence travelled. Demotic descends directly from it, some Coptic and Old Nubian letters come from Demotic, the Byblos syllabary apparently borrowed Old Kingdom hieratic signs, and early Hebrew used hieratic numerals. Modern technology has not caught up: Unicode treats hieratic as a font variant of hieroglyphs, no tradition of hieratic typefaces exists, and Egyptologists usually transcribe it into hieroglyphs before publishing.
Source: Hieratic
