Egyptian scribe
As an Egyptian scribe you would hold one of the most coveted jobs on the Nile – exempt from heavy labour, close to power, and armed with a skill fewer than one in a hundred people had.
Years of copying
Literacy in ancient Egypt was rare; estimates usually put it at around 1 per cent of the population, perhaps a little more. Scribal training started in boyhood and was often passed from father to son. Pupils copied model texts again and again, practising on cheap surfaces like limestone flakes (ostraca) and wooden boards rather than expensive papyrus, and mistakes could be punished with beatings.
Most everyday writing was in hieratic, a fast cursive form of hieroglyphs written with a reed brush in black and red ink. Formal hieroglyphs were reserved largely for monuments and religious texts, and from around the 7th century BCE an even faster script, demotic, came into use.
The empire ran on your paperwork
Scribes counted harvests, assessed taxes after the Nile flood, recorded court cases, managed temple stores, wrote letters and organised the rations of workers who built tombs and pyramids. Village records from Deir el-Medina, the community of royal tomb builders, mention absences for reasons including illness, a scorpion sting and brewing beer.
The well-known statues of seated scribes, cross-legged with a papyrus roll across the lap, show them as plump and calm – a sign of success rather than a warning about desk jobs. The job did have its hazards: studies of Old Kingdom scribes’ skeletons found degenerative changes in the spine, shoulders and joints, a trace of years spent hunched over their work.
Proud of the pen
Egyptian school texts such as the Satire of the Trades mock other professions – the smelly fisherman, the exhausted farmer, the bruised builder – to persuade boys that the scribe’s life was best. Some scribes rose very high: Amenhotep son of Hapu, a scribe under Amenhotep III, was later venerated as a sage and even a healing god.
