WHEN HIERATIC WENT ABNORMAL: A SCRIPT AT THE THRESHOLD OF DEMOTIC.

This paper examines the origins, development and functions of Abnormal Hieratic, tracing its use across legal and non-legal contexts and its diffusion beyond Thebes to sites such as Saqqara, the Fayoum, Herakleopolis, Elephantine, Dakhleh Oasis, and Qasr Ibrim. Two principal phases can be distinguished: an early administrative stage (21st-22nd Dynasties) and a later stage (25th-26th Dynasties), when the script became the standard medium for contracts of marriage, sale, loan, and donation. Beyond its administrative and legal applications, Abnormal Hieratic is also attested in letters, and religious and literary texts, thus highlighting its broader cultural significance. Evidence from northern Egypt, including the Protocol of Sheshonq I (22nd Dynasty), a 26th Dynasty witness-copy contract, a fragmentary late hieratic divination papyrus (26th Dynasty), and early Demotic letters, illuminates the development of Cursive scripts in northern Egypt and calls for a reassessment of the place of Abnormal Hieratic within that trajectory. The scarcity of documents in northern Egypt has long limited our understanding of these Cursive traditions, but the growing corpus promisesnew insights into their development. Rather than representing a purely Theban phenomenon, Abnormal Hieratic emerges as equally embedded in northern scribal culture, where it developed naturally out of late hieratic under the influence of regional practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]