Edwards, Amelia B.: Pharaohs, fellahs and explorers (New York, NY, 1892)

HIEROGLYPHIC WRITING OF ANCIENT EGYPTIANS. 257

enth and Twelfth dynasties; that is to say, from about two
thousand eight hundred to two thousand five hundred years
before our era. Under the Eighteenth and Nineteenth dy-
nasties it lost something in the way of force, and gained
something in the way of elegance. Later still it became
small and cramped, and, if I may be permitted the use of a
word so unacademic, " niffsrling-."



HIKHATIC PAPYRUS OF PRINCESS NESIKHONSU.

Twenty-first Dynasty.

But even the hieratic—itself an abridgment—ceased by-
and-by to satisfy the demand for increased simplicity and
speed, and a third form of writing, which was an abridg-
ment of the hieratic, came into use. This abridgment of
an abridgment—which stands to hieratic as our short-hand
stands to ordinary running-hand — is called the '"demotic."
It makes its first appearance as a fully developed system
about the time of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty, some seven
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