Academic literature on the topic 'Hieratic Writing'

Hieratic is the name given to Egypt’s oldest cursive system of hieroglyphs, which was used primarily as handwriting and served as a multifunctional script for more than three millennia, until the third century BCE. As early as 1820, Champollion recognized the connection between hieroglyphics and hieratic. Hieratic was written in ink on papyrus and ostraca, as well as on wooden tablets, linen, stone surfaces, etc. The characters could also be carved or chiseled into clay, wood, rock surfaces, or stone objects. Unlike hieroglyphics, hieratic was always written from right to left, and the signs evolved from separate elements in single columns to horizontal lines of complete text, with increasing use of ligatures and abbreviations, especially in administrative contexts. In addition, most manuscripts reveal personal idiosyncrasies of the scribes. From 750 BCE on, hieratic was partially replaced by the abnormal hieratic script and later by Demotic. However, it remained in use until Roman times, primarily for ritual, funerary, and scholarly texts. Increasingly enhanced by digital methods, the study of hieratic is based on paleographic analysis and comparison, which aid our understanding of the texts and allow us to date a manuscript or identify an individual scribe. Writing practices, the social milieu of scribes, and the various scripts, text genres, and modes of transmission have become current research topics. In addition, the discovery, decipherment, adequate documentation, and interpretation of other testimonies to hieratic writing are of interest.

Abstract This essay presents the different kinds of Books of the Dead in use during the Third Intermediate Period. Most of the Books of the Dead are from the Theban area, belonging to the clergy of Karnak, and are on papyri, but some spells were also engraved in the tombs of Lower Egypt, such as in Tanis. At the beginning of the Twenty-first Dynasty, Book of the Dead papyri in hieroglyphs generally follow the Ramesside tradition, only they are a little bit shorter and show some innovations. At the same time, other kinds of papyri appear in both hieroglyphs and hieratic, with many innovations. While hieratic became the most frequently used writing on papyri after the pontificate of Pinedjem II, hieroglyphs for the Book of the Dead do not seem to have been used after the Twenty-first Dynasty.

Abstract How was a Book of the Dead manuscript ordered and designed? What do we know about the writing techniques and traditions? Who were the scribes and where did they work? Which different Egyptian handwriting systems were used and how did these change throughout time? Answering such questions is difficult because systematic research on the material and manual aspects of writing is still rare until now. This contribution can only deal with some examples and will concentrate on manuscripts which are written in ink on papyrus, mummy bandages, and a few other writing materials. Main subjects are the choice of material and the organization of longer manuscripts, the different habits of producing on personal order or on stock, the question of workshops and master copies, and the role of the scribes as individuals, skilled workers, and also reviewers. Concerning the layout, the various combinations of text lines or columns and large or small vignettes, as well as the writing styles of Hieratic and cursive hieroglyphs and the reading directions of the latter are important aspects within the following contribution.

Abstract The study is based on more than 160 BD sources. Apart from those manuscripts dated through text-external evidence, only text-internal criteria can date the majority of documents. After the first occurrences of Book of the Dead spells in the Thirteenth Dynasty and the Formative Phase, the reign of Hatshepsut/Thutmosis III marks an increase in the number and spread of Book of the Dead manuscripts. The cursive hieroglyphs are predominantly used in retrograde writing, while manuscripts written in hieratic are of minor importance. Two main text sequences are attested in manuscripts of the Formative Phase until the reign of Thutmosis III, but are no longer strictly applied afterward. There is no canon or ideal composition of a Book of the Dead scroll; the selection and arrangement of spells strongly depended on their customers’ wishes and financial means. The transformation spells represent the most popular group of spells and are not absent from any Book of the Dead manuscript; new transformation spells were even created. The Amarna Period saw the suspension of the Book of the Dead production, but it was soon revived and enriched by new spells and newly created solar hymns.

In Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness (2004; Giller Prize finalist; winner of Canada's Governor General's Award) Nomi Nickel, a sixteen-year-old Mennonite girl from southern Manitoba, Canada, tells the story of her short life before her excommunication from the closed community of the fictional East Village. East Village is based on a real town in southern Manitoba called Steinbach (where Toews was born), where Mennonite culture remains segregated from the rest of the world to protect its distinctive Anabaptist Protestantism and to keep its language, Mennonite Low German or Plattdeutsch, a living language, one which is both linguistically demotic yet ethnically hieratic because of its role in Mennonite faith. Since the Reformation, and more precisely the work of Menno Simons after whom this ethno-religious group was christened, Mennonites have used their particular brand of Low German to separate themselves from the rest of humankind. Toews constructs her novel as a multilingual narrative, to represent the cultural and religious tensions within. Set in the early 1980s, A Complicated Kindness details the events that lead up to Nomi’s excommunication, or shunning; Nomi’s exclusion is partly due to her embracing of the “English” culture through popular, mostly 1970s, music and books such as J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Insofar as Toews’s novel presents the conflict between the teenaged narrator and the patriarchal, conservative Mennonite culture, the books stands at the crossroads of negative and positive freedom. Put succinctly, since the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation, Mennonites have sought negative freedom, or freedom from persecution, yet its own tenets foreclose on the positive freedom of its individual members. This problem reaches its most intense expression in contemporary Mennonitism, both in Canada and in the EU, for Mennonite culture returns constantly to its founding precepts, even through the passage of time, coupled with diasporic history. Toews presents this conflict between this early modern religious subculture and postmodern liberal democracy through the eyes of a sarcastic, satirical Nomi, who, in this Bildungsroman, must solve the dialectic of her very identity: literally, the negative freedom of No Me or positive freedom of Know Me. As Mennonite writing in Canada is a relatively new phenomenon, about 50 years old, the question for those who call themselves Mennonite writers arises in terms of deciding between new, migrant, separate-group writing and writing as English-speaking Canadians.