An important phase in the development of the Egyptian scripts before Coptic for #NationalWritingDay2020: dealing with Greek words in demotic.

Here's an example from 192 CE from Narmouthis (Medinet Madi)

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Demotic is a cursive Egyptian script used in the Late Period to the Roman period. Like hieratic before it, it is written right-to-left. But Greek loanwords, not transcribed into demotic, were written left-to-right. This ostracon shows scribes dealt with words in the two scripts.

Here is a facsimile (i.e., hand drawn version) of the ostracon – I've highlighted the Greek words in red. We see four words mixed in with the demotic, and then the last 2 lines + final numeral are entirely in Greek.

The scribe switched from one script to the next: when moving from demotic to Greek, he had to leave a gap the length of the Greek word, writing the Greek word left-to-right. In this ostracon it's done really well, but other ostraca show that scribes sometimes struggled.

In these occasions, the Greek words are cramped or have to be written above the demotic at the right (which was written first).
Such a complicated system contributed to the radical change in how Egyptian was written.

This change – which didn't happen over night! – led to the development of Coptic, written in the Greek alphabet with additional letters, taken from demotic, which replicated Egyptian sounds that Greek didn't have.

The above ostracon was published by Menchetti and Pinaudi in Chronique d'Égypte 82 (2007) and is known by the papyrological siglum O.Narm II 24 (for these sigma, see http://papyri.info/docs/checklist ).

For a v. nice intro to language contact in multicultural Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, check out the essay by Luigi Prada in 'Beyond the Nile: Egypt and the Classical World', which you can read on GoogleBooks: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=UTlDDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false