The Life of a Scribe

Learning to write put a scribe on easy street - if he survived the training

Compared with most other ancient Egyptians, scribes had a good life. A blacksmith would have “fingers like the claws of a crocodile” and “stink more than fish roe” after work. A potter would “grub in the mud more than a pig, in order to fire his pots.” But a scribe never suffered, never lacked reward for his work—and never had to pay taxes.

Those descriptions come from Satire of the Trades, a famous text that scribes copied as part of their training. The slightly arrogant humor suited the scribes’ special social status—not as powerful as temple priests, but higher than farmers, stonemasons, and other laborers. Scribes compiled records, tallied the harvests, and collected taxes. In the tomb-makers’ village, they kept track of tools and materials, rationed food, and wrote daily reports. And as an educated class in a largely illiterate society, scribes also performed very personal services for their fellow villagers. When a peasant needed to compose a letter, formally petition for redress, or even offer a specific prayer to the gods, he went to a scribe to write it down.

Like other Egyptians, most scribes came to their occupation by following their fathers’ footsteps. Training began at age five for boys. (And they were always boys; girls usually didn’t learn to read and write.) They mixed pigments for ink, rubbed rough papyrus with a stone to create a writing surface, and made brushes from reeds. They mastered practical math for accounting. Most important, they memorized the Egyptians’ 700-plus formal hieroglyphic symbols, as well as hieratic script. They learned by incessantly copying selected texts: sample correspondence, instructions on proper morals and behavior, and eventually manuals on government administration.

The educational methods now seem downright cruel. As one scribe put it, schoolmasters beat pupils’ backs so that words could enter their ears. Another recalled spending three months handcuffed in a temple—a motivational technique that apparently worked wonders. “When my hand was free,” he wrote, “then I surpassed all my comrades in books.” For their final years of training, the boys worked as apprentices to older scribes. If they did their work well, they could look forward to a life of respect and relative ease. What’s more, like the royal families and temple priests, they could become immortal. Since much of what we know about ancient Egypt we owe to the scribes, in one sense they certainly achievedtheir goal.