While mankind's fascination with the scripts of ancient Egypt has been a constant across the centuries, their study as part of modern Egyptology is only as old as the decipherment of the hieroglyphs by Champollion, now nearly two centuries ago. Although we feel confident that, at least in theory, we thoroughly understand these scripts, practical difficulties in reading the cursive variants of hieratic and demotic remain. These are often such that they constantly bring to mind the sometimes abstruse associations by which the ancient scribes arrived at the various orthographies they invented for writing the complex lingual structures. Demotic is a particularly interesting case in point, as it belongs to the multi-layered textual world of the Graeco-Roman period, where hieroglyphs, hieratic and demotic are usually found in complementary use, but also occasionally in competition with each other. In their variety, the studies presented in these Acts bear witness to the rich texture of the script by investigating several parameters by which it may be measured, including the reading of individual signs and grammatical categories such as verbal morphology. Indices of words and signs discussed, as well as a full bibliography of studies in monographs and articles relating to the topic, complete the volume.
