I just found a nice website with information and lots of graphics about early writing systems. Pictured on the left is Thoth, the bird-headed god of writing, the "sacred scribe" of the Egyptians, "Lord of the creative voice, master of words and books" (Innis, "Media in Ancient Empires" 24).
This is an example of hieratic, a cursive script which eventually succeeded hieroglyphics when papyrus and ink became the preferred means of writing. Notice the two different colors of ink, black and red. Georges Jean, in Writing: The Story of Alphabets and Scripts tells us that the red ink was reserved for the names of gods.
Below is a scan from Jean's book demonstrating how papyrus was made from reeds which grew in the Nile delta.
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