Egyptian hieratic

Egyptian Hieratic was a writing system used for writing the Egyptian language. It developed alongside Hieroglyphic writing and was used for administrative and religious texts from approximately 3100 BC until 650 BC.

Hieratic writing was normally written in ink with a reed brush on papyrus, whereas Hieroglyphs were inscribed in stone. Although it used a combination of pictographic and phonetic symbols, it was more cursive in form, and many of the symbols were unrelated to those used in Hieroglyphic writing. It is not the same script as cursive hieroglyphics.

There were a number of concurrent forms of Hieratic writing, displaying varying degrees of cursiveness and defined by the era and the purpose for which they were written. The varieties can broadly be divided into two categories, a highly cursive \\\businesshand\\\" which employed a large number of ligatures and was used for administrative documents