As far as the governments concerned a contractor applies to business. And an individual has to establish his or her own company to become a contractor to a government agency. Government agencies seldom employ individual contractors or freelancers. They put them on a contractual basis if they want people to provide services. They deal with private firms if they wish to obtain advanced outside services.
Hieroglyphs because words and sentences can be formed with hieroglyphs (the different characters can represent different words and/or letters) which is very close to writing.
