Where would one go to find examples of *bad* Ancient Egyptian handwriting? You were blogging about it some time ago and now I am curious :) (please ignore this ask if you don’t want to answer it for any reason at all. I very much appreciate what you do, but your own mental health and boundaries come first)
I’m not sure you’d necessarily ‘go’ somewhere. Handwriting of Egyptian scribes being ‘bad’ is definitely a modern bias on the part of Egyptologists having to transcribe the Hieratic, but it’s definitely going to be in the more hastily written documents like letters or transcripts of legal proceedings. Most people wouldn’t be able to tell what ‘bad’ Hieratic looked like in 99% of cases to be honest.
So the best way I can do this would be to show things side by side:
Good - Papyrus Ebers
Ok - P.BM EA 10052
Bad - P.Mayer A
Worst - Fragmentary Letter in the Getty Museum
Honestly this last guy just gave up part way though. It starts off as neat and then….goes to hell.
What you’re looking for is:
- lack of reed dipping - ink getting lighter without frequent darkening indicating a fresh dip
- ligatures everywhere - see on the later examples there are ‘tails’ stretching out from some signs (usually pronouns =f or =k)? you want those short, and not colliding with other signs.
- Uniformness of sign writing. Neat and contained is good. Random signs way larger than is necessary is bad.
- Legibility of signs. The clearer the better. If you’re sitting there saying ‘what is that?’ more often than not, then you’ve likely got a case of bad handwriting.
