Demotic

The penultimate stage of the Egyptian language and its associated cursive script, developed from late hieratic in the Saite period and remaining in use until Late Antiquity. Demotic served as the principal medium for administrative records, legal contracts, and a substantial body of literature, and carried much of the religious and ritual literature of the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. The latest dated Demotic inscription is a graffito at the temple of Isis on Philae, written in 452 CE, more than a century after the temple’s official closure under Theodosius I.

The Demotic script is highly cursive, with extensive use of ligatures and group writing that depart sharply from the hieroglyphic and hieratic forms from which it descended. Demotic was eventually superseded by Coptic, which adapted the Greek alphabet to write the same underlying language with the addition of seven letters for sounds Greek did not represent. Unicode allocates a Demotic block, but font support in modern browsers and operating systems is effectively nonexistent.

@misc{onomastikon-demotic,
  author = {Rajagopal, Shriram},
  title = {Demotic},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://onomastikon.org/languages/demotic}},
  note = {Onomastikon: A Digital Atlas of Ancient Names}
}