[1] In the second century, the term hieratic was used for the first time by the Greek scholar Clement of Alexandria to describe this Ancient Egyptian writing system.

[3] Hieratic developed as a cursive form of hieroglyphic script in the Naqada III period of Ancient Egypt, roughly 3200–3000 BCE.

During the Greco-Roman period, when Demotic, and later, Greek, had become the chief administrative script, hieratic was limited primarily to religious texts.

Most often, hieratic script was written in ink with a reed brush on papyrus, wood, stone, or pottery ostraca.

Thousands of limestone ostraca have been found at the site of Deir al-Madinah, revealing an intimate picture of the lives of common Egyptian workers.

Hieratic is often present in any given period in two forms, a highly ligatured, cursive script used for administrative documents, and a broad uncial bookhand used for literary, scientific, and religious texts.

Letters, in particular, used very cursive forms for quick writing, often with large numbers of abbreviations for formulaic phrases, similar to shorthand.

This type of writing was superseded by Demotic—a Lower Egyptian scribal tradition—during the twenty-sixth dynasty, when Demotic was established as a standard administrative script throughout a re-unified Egypt.

[15][16] The Unicode standard considers hieratic characters to be font variants of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the two scripts have been unified.