Most of the texts are written in hieratic and demotic scripts, although there are several texts written in hieroglyphs and in Greek.

The first, scratched into the soft sandstone, was written in a spidery demotic Egyptian script and dates from 10 B.C., 5 years after the temple was built.

These characters were taken from the demotic script.

This led him to deduce correctly that the demotic script was only partly phonetic, also consisting of ideographic characters imitated from hieroglyphs.

As writing developed and became more widespread among the Egyptian people, simplified glyph forms developed, resulting in the hieratic (priestly) and demotic (popular) scripts.

A papyrus from the ancient Egyptian temple of Tebtunis, dating to the 2nd century AD, preserves a long story in the demotic script about Imhotep.

This was reversed with the subsequent fourth Chinese domination and twenty years in which use of the vernacular language and demotic script were suppressed.

These were the 'hieratic' and 'demotic' scripts, which can crudely be thought of as merely different fonts of the hieroglyphic alphabet.

Graphemic borrowing from Chinese: The case of chữ nôm, Vietnam's demotic script.

The Egyptian hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic scripts were eventually replaced by the more phonetic Coptic alphabet.