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Hieratic   Listen
adjective
Hieratic  adj.  Consecrated to sacred uses; sacerdotal; pertaining to priests.
Hieratic character, a mode of ancient Egyptian writing; a modified form of hieroglyphics, tending toward a cursive hand and formerly supposed to be the sacerdotal character, as the demotic was supposed to be that of the people. "It was a false notion of the Greeks that of the three kinds of writing used by the Egyptians, two for that reason called hieroglyphic and hieratic were employed only for sacred, while the third, the demotic, was employed for secular, purposes. No such distinction is discoverable on the more ancient Egyptian monuments; bur we retain the old names founded on misapprehension."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Hieratic" Quotes from Famous Books



... mainly responsible for breaking down the hieratic tradition which forbade the use of stone for civil purposes. "In Roman architecture the engineering element became paramount. It was this which broke the moulds of tradition and recast construction into modern form, and made it free ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... satisfaction of the mediaeval artist in conventional forms, but the lack of technical dexterity. This will become evident to any one who will turn his attention, in studying the mosaics, from what are no doubt the somewhat conventional and hieratic figures of saints and angels to the realistic attempts to portray the stories of the Bible. And it will be clear to any one who will study, for instance, the sculpture of Wells or Amiens or Chartres that by the thirteenth century the artists were rapidly learning how to represent the world as they ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various

... her bearing showed had pressed in upon her since her birth, had been able to destroy her inner resource of vitality. The final meaning of her was, perhaps, primitive and strong. When she had stood about the room there had been a kind of hieratic dignity about her; she had that sanctioned effect upon the eye which is given by someone adequately imitating the pose of some famous picture or statue. There flashed before Ellen's mind the tail of some memory of an open place round which women stood looking just ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West

... which went like clockwork. The world was judged with a narrow and somewhat stupid self-confidence. The ideal dwelt in the word of Confucian writings, divorced from their true meaning, and so badly interpreted that they ceased to be understood aright. The meticulous, bureaucratic and hieratic administration of the Tartars was a perfect system of government. The machine was still new and worked well, whence arose a false impression of permanence which added still further to the complacency of the conservative ...
— Chinese Painters - A Critical Study • Raphael Petrucci

... allowed to make one observation. From studying the conventional mode of execution of ancient Egyptian art—which was strictly subject to the hieratic laws of type and proportion—we have accustomed ourselves to imagine the inhabitants of the Nile-valley in the time of the Pharaohs as tall and haggard men with little distinction of individual physiognomy, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... the hieratic writings upon the outer covering of the roll which the young man presented to him, and asked with ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller

... now reached the parting of the ways. The study of Nature is fast superseding the dogmas of the monastic code, and what some writers have characterised as the hieratic is giving way to the naturalistic treatment of art. Like the pointed architecture itself, it is an outcome of the spirit of the age. Exactly when it begins we cannot say. As in the physical sciences, our limits are necessarily somewhat arbitrary to suit ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley

... sculptures in relief were discovered, including a gigantic representation of the king and the goddess Isis, which shows that in the early days of the Vth Dynasty the king and the gods were already depicted in exactly the same costume as they wore in the days of the Ramses and the Ptolemies. The hieratic art of Egypt had, in fact, now taken on itself the final outward appearance which it retained to the very end. There is no more of the archaism and absence of conventionality, which marks the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall

... with theology and exegesis and metaphysics. But only cross the threshold of the repellent enclosure, grow used to the order and shape of the building, and it will not be long ere you are overcome by a warm sympathy, and then by a steadily increasing admiration for the host who dwells there. The hieratic face of the old bishop lights up, becomes strangely living, almost modern, in expression. You discover under the text one of the most passionate lives, most busy and richest in instruction, that history has to shew. What it teaches ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand

... that in the Nasik caves, the five (reversed) to that on the K[s.]atrapa coins, the nine to that of the Ku[s.]ana inscriptions, and other points of similarity have been imagined. Some have traced resemblance between the Hieratic five and seven and those of the Indian inscriptions. There have not, therefore, been wanting those who asserted an Egyptian origin for these numerals.[105] There has already been mentioned the fact that the Kharo[s.][t.]h[i] ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith

... with the mysterious centuries as with half barbaric jewels, weighed down with the ornaments of Byzantium, rigid, hieratic, constrained; and however you come to it, whether from Rimini by the lost and forgotten towns of Classis and Caesarea, or from Ferrara through all the bitter desolation of Comacchio, or across the endless marsh from Bologna or Faenza, its wide and empty horizons, its astonishing silence, ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton

... crossed upon the breast; a living symbol of mystic resignation before the accomplishment of destiny"; or in the still more mysterious nymph of the Scarabaeus sacer, first of all "a mummy of translucent amber, maintained by its linen cerements in a hieratic pose; but soon upon this background of topaz, the head, the legs, and the thorax change to a sombre red, while the rest of the body remains white, and the nymph is slowly transfigured, assuming that majestic costume which combines ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros

... warrior supported on one knee and drawing his bow, is, for the time, wonderfully vivid and strong. All of these statues are evidence of the rapid progress which Greek sculpture was making in the fifth century against the demands of hieratic conventionality. ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR

... numerous and quite as striking as the similarities. For instance, the writer of the article on the "Alphabet" in the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" (1876) derives the Phoenician letters from letters used in the Egyptian hieratic writing,[0137] but his own table shows a marked diversity in at least eleven instances, a slight resemblance in seven or eight, a strong resemblance in no more than two or three. Derivation from the Cypriote forms has been suggested by some; but here again eight letters are very different, ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson

... healthy. Do ye understand this? Health and brightness acting like a shadow? Almost like an objection?{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} To this extent are we already pure fools.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} Never was there a greater Master in heavy hieratic perfumes—Never on earth has there been such a connoisseur of paltry infinities, of all that thrills, of extravagant excesses, of all the feminism from out the vocabulary of happiness! My friends, do but drink the philtres of this art! Nowhere will ye find a more pleasant ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.

... ancient Egypt is the product of a period of about four thousand years, and it was written in three kinds of writing, which are called hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic. In the first of these the characters were pictures of objects, in the second the forms of the characters were made as simple as possible so that they might be written quickly, and in the third many of them lost their picture form altogether ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge

... declamation, of which these remarkable people are very fond. The Zu-Vendi alphabet seems, Sir henry says, to be derived, like every other known system of letters, from a Phoenician source, and therefore more remotely still from the ancient Egyptian hieratic writing. Whether this is a fact I cannot say, not being learned in such matters. All I know about it is that their alphabet consists of twenty-two characters, of which a few, notably B, E, and O, are not very unlike our own. The whole affair is, however, clumsy and puzzling. {Endnote ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard

... forbids the insertion here of a full list of the titles of Amen, and a brief extract from the Papyrus of the Princess Nesi-Khensu [Footnote: For a hieroglyphic transcript of the hieratic text, see Maspero, Memoires, tom. i., p. 594 ff.] must suffice to describe the estimation in which the god was held about B.C. 1000. In this Amen is addressed as "the holy god, the lord of all the gods, Amen-R[a], the lord of the thrones of the world, the prince of Apt (i.e., Karnak), the ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge

... eyes immovably fixed like the eyes of sphinxes, and their long beards whitened by the snow of centuries. Behind them stood their peoples, in the stiff and constrained posture enjoined by Egyptian art, all eternally preserving the attitude prescribed by the hieratic code. Behind these nations, the cats, ibixes, and crocodiles contemporary with them—rendered monstrous of aspect by their swathing bands—mewed, flapped their wings, or extended their jaws in a ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various

... propounded to the Academie des Inscriptions in 1859, but unnoticed by the world at large till republished, after derouge's death, by his son in 1874. According to this view the alphabet was borrowed by the Phoenicians from the cursive (hieratic) form of Egyptian hieroglyphics. The resemblances between some Egyptian symbols and some symbols of the Phoenician alphabet are striking; in other cases the differences are no less remarkable. As a matter of fact the Egyptians might ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... warm there; the hall would have made a capital cellar. And the couples slowly advanced, their chins raised, their eyes blinking, between the gigantic stone figures, the black marble gods, dumb in their hieratic rigidity, and the monstrous beasts, half cats and half women, with death-like faces, attenuated noses, and swollen lips. They thought all these things very ugly. The stone carvings of the present day were a great deal better. An inscription in Phoenician characters amazed them. ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola

... Sailor The Adventures Of Sanehat The Tell Amarna Tablets The Hittite Invasion Of Damascus The Amorite Treachery The War In Phoenicia Northern Palestine Southern Palestine Royal Letters Cuneiform Inscriptions And Hieratic Papyri The Great Tablet Of Rameses II At Abu-Simbel Hymn To Osiris Travels Of An Egyptian In The Fourteenth Century B.C. Dirge Of Menephtah Hymn To The Nile The Solemn Festal Dirge Of The Egyptians Hymns To Amen Hymn To Pharaoh The Song Of The Harper Hymn To Amen-Ra ...
— Egyptian Literature

... and barren, and only about the varnished staircase was there any sign of comfort. There the ceiling was panelled in oak; and the banisters, the cocoa-nut matting, the bit of stained glass, and the religious prints, suggested a mock air of hieratic dignity. And the room Mr. Hare was shown into continued this impression. Cabinets in carved oak harmonised with high-backed chairs glowing with red Utrecht velvet, and a massive table, on which lay a folio edition of St. Augustine's City of God and the ...
— Celibates • George Moore

... slabs came to light at Tell el Amarna bearing the hieroglyphic names of King Amenophis IV. and his father, Amenophis III. These had evidently served as lids to the chests. Some tablets also were inscribed with notes in hieratic, written in red ink. But in spite of these exceptions, it was at once recognised that all the documents were written in Babylonian cuneiform. The reading of the introductory lines on various tablets served to show that the find consisted of part ...
— The Tell El Amarna Period • Carl Niebuhr

... a dream. Below these narrow frescoes, lines of hieroglyphs, written perpendicularly like Chinese writing and separated by hollow lines, excited the erudite by the sacred mystery of their outlines. Along that portion of the walls which was not covered with hieratic signs, a jackal lying on its belly, with outstretched paws and pointed ears, and a kneeling figure wearing a mitre, its hand stretched upon a circle, seemed to stand as sentries on either side of the door, the lintel of which was ornamented ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier

... into the immobile, sacerdotal, hieratic pose of a Hindoo god, burned perfumes wafting aloft clouds of incense which were perforated, like phosphorescent eyes of beasts, by the fiery rays of the stones set in the throne. Then the vapor rolled up, diffusing itself beneath arcades where the blue smoke ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... with an average height of 5 7/8 in., which is about the usual height of papyri of the Eleventh and Twelfth Dynasties. It contains at present eighteen pages of heavy and bold black and red writing, in the so-called hieratic character. At first sight it appears to be in perfect preservation, being entirely free from the cracks and decay which mar many fine manuscripts of far later date; but an examination of the contents shows that an unknown quantity has been torn off from the commencement. ...
— The Instruction of Ptah-Hotep and the Instruction of Ke'Gemni - The Oldest Books in the World • Battiscombe G. Gunn

... my knees, and remain there, turning all sorts of things over in her little sphinx's head, or perhaps not thinking of anything, retaining that beautiful, charming, hereditary pose of that noble and dreamy people, the hieratic ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant



Words linked to "Hieratic" :   priesthood, sacerdotal, priestly, hieroglyph, hieratic script, hieratical, beaux arts



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