I. Prelude
When the famous egyptologist Hermann Grapow characterized the Demotic script as being "the most evil of all evil Egyptian scripts" in 1939, he set the tone for the further study of Demotic and might have deterred many a student from any attempt at studying it properly. Indeed, there is some difficulty to be found in Demotic without a doubt, as hieroglyphs and hieroglyphic groups are very simplified (akin to modern shorthand scripts), regional scribal habits dominate what leads to almost every scribe having his own handwriting style and Demotic also can be viewed as a separate language level with own grammatical features.
Hermann Grapow (left) might have considered this religious text from Dimê (right: excerpt of P.Vienna D 6013 vs) even more evil due to complicated writings.
But since Grapow's days a lot has happened and some scholars were in fact not deterred. To the contrary: From overviews on the script and explanations of grammatical phenomena to specific dictionaries and paleographic online tools, there is now a great wealth of resources for learning Demotic. Although a modern grammar is still a desideratum, there is an introductory grammar of Demotic by Johnson that facilitates studying the language part of Demotic. Deciphering the script itself is still one of the major challenges and explains why there are still many Demotic texts that are not published, especially on the documentary side.
Some basic observations on the Demotic script and language will be described on the following pages. A previous knowledge of Egyptian is not required to follow this module, but for a further and in-depth study of Demotic it is advised to start with Middle-Egyptian first. Of course, the interested reader may wish to further their knowledge of Demotic by consulting the selected bibliography on the last page of this module.