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Welcome to Voices of Ancient Egypt, the podcast for people who don't just want to learn about ancient Egypt, but want to understand it on a deeper, more meaningful level. I'm Melinda Nelsonhurst, an Egyptologist with a PhD in the field and years of experience teaching at the university level, working in Egypt, and training students around the world to read real ancient Egyptian texts. I've spent decades studying this civilization in a traditional academic setting, so you don't have to. And so you can access knowledge that's usually locked behind academic walls. This podcast brings ancient Egyptian history, beliefs, and language to life and shows you that learning hieroglyphs is possible no matter your age, background, or schedule. So whether you want to read hieroglyphs in museums, on social media, or on your next trip to Egypt, you'll find the tools, stories, and encouragement to make it real right here. Let's hear the voices of the ancient world together. The scribe is ahead of all work in this world. Be a scribe, for he is controller of everyone. He who works in writing is not taxed, nor has he any dues to pay. And as for writing, it is profitable to him who knows it more than any other office, pleasanter than bread and beer, clothing and ointment. It is more precious than a heritage in Egypt, than a tomb in the West. Hello and welcome back to Voices of Ancient Egypt. I started this episode today with a quote from a group of texts called the Miscellanei, which are scribal training texts from the New Kingdom. And I started with this because it illustrates so well the topic we're going to talk about today, which is, you know, we spend so much time reading what the ancient Egyptians wrote, but who actually held the brush? These were the people we call scribes today. And here's the real story of scribes and how they became who they were. Who were the scribes? How were they trained? What was their status? What did they write about when they were training to become scribes? Here's that real story. So, first of all, if you were an ancient Egyptian who can read and write, you were in the minority. We don't know a precise literacy number, but most scholars put literacy well under 5% during most of the phonic history. Learning to read and write was an opportunity really that very few got, but those who did could have a promising career in anything from being a local writer of letters and contracts and other needed documents to becoming one of the very highest officials in the land, such as, for example, Amenhotep, son of Hapu, who moved up the ranks to become the king's favorite and supervising all of the king's building projects, including the massive statues of Amenhotep III, now known as the Colossae of Memnon, which you may have seen that still stand on the west bank of Luxor today. And while most scribes likely came from families with members who were already in positions like this, or maybe not that high, but you know, similar professions that required literacy, some did seem to come from less well-off backgrounds. In fact, Amenhotep, son of Hapu, may have been one of them. We don't know his full story, but we do know that he was from a town in the Delta, and he may have been from a fairly simple background. In the writing that we call the satire of the trades today, the author, Khedi, is a father from the Delta also, who is bringing his son to school near the royal residence. And Kedi has no job title mentioned in the text, suggesting that he's not from the upper classes. But he did somehow succeed in finding a way to get his son into school that, and a school, not just any school, but the school by the residence, which would have been filled with boys from the upper classes. Now, boys, and there were only boys in these schools, likely started school somewhere between age five and age 10, depending on the boy and the family situation. Now, we do know that some girls did learn to read because we do have evidence of literate women in ancient Egypt, but it seems that they did not go to a formal school to do so. And this is probably because really there were very few, if any, positions in the administration or out in the wider society for them that would require any kind of level of literacy. That's not to say they wouldn't use the literacy in work-related tasks, because that is how we know about them being literate oftentimes, is because they wrote letters to people and it seems like they wrote them themselves rather than having somebody else write it. And they also sometimes acted as deputies for others, such as for their husband who was an official, and so forth. But they usually were not allowed to have their own positions outright, and so were not trained in the same way that boys were. But for boys, after the first few years of schooling that they had, they would then learn as an apprentice for an official or a craftsperson or so on and so forth, whatever position it might be that they were going to go into, they would apprentice for somebody in that field who was ahead of them. And only after that would they get their own full position. We have a wonderful example of how somebody could advance through positions from a man named Becon Kans, and he left his biography on a statue. The statue actually wasn't his originally, he reused it from an earlier official, but he wrote part of his biography on it, and in it he paints a picture of his career and how a boy could be educated and then move up the ranks throughout his career. So Bekon Kans tells us how he attended school for four years at the Mut Temple at Karnak. This is in modern Luxor. If you've been to Egypt, you um sure have been to the Karnak Temple if you've been to Luxor. It was the massive main temple complex for Amun and his consort Moot and their child Khansu, which is why a lot of people who worked there had names that included these gods in it, such as Bekan Khans, that's Kansu in the end of his name. He then apprenticed in the royal stables for 11 years. And it was only after this that his real career started. First, as a simple priest under his own father's supervision for the first four years. And incredibly, though, then he moved up the ranks and kept going for the next 39 years until he reached the highest level, becoming the high priest at Karnak, a position that he then held and served in for 27 years. So if you're doing the math, we don't know exactly how old he was when he started schooling, but he likely was really quite elderly by ancient Egyptian standards at the time. He may have been into his 90s. So we talked a bit about boys in training, going to school, and then apprenticing. But what actually was involved with this? What were the teaching methods and what stages did the students go through? Well, the teaching methods themselves, sometimes, at least for some parts of them, do leave a lot to be desired. So, for example, it is often mentioned in teaching texts that the teacher or a man that a scribe was apprenticed to would beat the boy on his back as a regular part of his education. And they write about how this was part of how a boy learns. Now, the practice of writing itself included reading or reciting texts. It seems like reading pretty much always included reciting, at least when in training. And the word that we translate as reading is actually a word for reciting aloud. And it also included writing, of course, practicing the skill of the writing the signs itself, as well as learning the language through writing, or learning the written part of the language, at least, they obviously are already speaking it. And they did this largely by copying older texts that were around. So we have many examples of partial copies of various types of literature that were used as practice texts for scribes in training. In some cases, they would have used a wooden board, a wooden tablet covered in gesso that was used in a similar way to like a chalkboard or old-fashioned slate, where you could write on it, you know, with in this case with ink and a brush rather than chalk, and then it could be cleaned off or, if needed, even whitewashed again to make a clean surface. And we have a number of these that have survived. But what has really survived in the greatest number for these kinds of school exercises are ostraca. So what are ostraca? That is the plural. And ostracha are broken pieces of pottery. That's usually what this word is used to mean. It's a Greek word. But in the case of ancient Egypt, we also sometimes get large chips of limestone used in the same kind of way, particularly from certain areas like the village of Darrell Medina, which maybe you've heard of. It was this town that was purpose-built out in the desert. You wouldn't have lived there normally because it's not a place where you can easily get water and various other resources, but it was placed there during the New Kingdom for the people who were building the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings. And it was there because it was right on the other side of the mountains, of the cliffs from the valley. And so it was a convenient location for traveling back and forth to work. And many people there, if maybe not all of them, but probably most, were literate in the village. We have tons of written evidence from them. And because of the nature of where they lived and what they worked on, they had tons of chips of stone around, both of limestone and also sandstone from the cliffs themselves. And so they had a lot of discarded pieces of things that they could use for ostraca, other than just pottery. And Ostraca were basically, you can think of them like ancient scrap paper. Some people liken them to like a sticky note, but I think they're even maybe lower down the totem pole than that, and more like scrap paper, like that piece you were gonna reuse, you know, that had something printed on the back, and you don't need that anymore. So you're gonna write on the other side now. Or when you tear off a little piece just to write down like your phone number or some little note for somebody. That's more like how Ostraco were used. And they were used for everything from school exercises, like we were talking about, to letters to donkey rental receipts. Yes, they had those. So students started out by learning hieratic. That is the cursive form of writing that they use through most of pharaonic history. And some stayed with only writing hieratic, depending on what they ended up specializing in. While others, though, would go on to learn hieroglyphic writing as well, so that they could work on things like monumental inscriptions, like, for example, the kinds of things that are going to go on temple walls and tomb walls and stele and so forth, or for writing certain religious texts or mortuary or sometimes called funerary materials, you know, everything from coffins to papyrus copies of the Book of the Dead, for example, all of which have hieroglyphs on them rather than hieratic, at least in most periods. There are some periods where the Book of the Dead is written in hieratic, but most of the copies that you tend to see in museums that are from the New Kingdom, for example, as well as some other periods, are in hieroglyphs. Now they would start by learning common ways to do certain things. So when scribes were first starting out, they're learning groups of signs and even sometimes whole sentences, whole phrases at a time. They weren't learning individual signs. And honestly, this is actually how I recommend learning hieroglyphs too when I teach my students. I recommend they were learn at least sort of in word blocks for the most part, rather than getting too caught up in learning one sign at a time. So this is how the ancient scribes would do it too. So not all of their methods would be ones that I would uh eschew today, but uh this one I think is actually really quite useful. It's just like if you're learning a modern language, it's good to learn it in chunks rather than just individual words. And same thing with hieroglyphs when you're learning them instead of learning the individual signs, it's good to learn whole words or phrases. So they would start uh particularly by learning really common things that they would encounter later on in their career. So, for example, common ways to open a letter or other common things that scribes are going to use a lot, such as formulaic parts of biographies. And this is the kind of stuff that they started out with is learning these. But complicating matters is that these things are all written in a stage of the language called Middle Egyptian. So if you were a scribe in a later time period, so Middle Egyptian was current in the vernacular, say around the first intermediate period and earlier parts of the Middle Kingdom, but then the language slowly changes over time and eventually we get into what we would call late Egyptian. And so if you were a scribe in the New Kingdom, for example, where everybody's very firmly into late Egyptian for quite a long time at that point, um, you would be learning to read and write a language that was really quite different from your own. It's not just the writing aspect of it, but actually the spoken part when you're reading it aloud and stuff doesn't sound like the kinds of things you're saying either. So this could be especially challenging for the scribes in training. So you could think of this as being like a seven-year-old today trying to copy out a medieval manuscript, for example. And not all boys liked the idea of this cushy profession, actually, and found this training rather dull. As especially things like life in the military looked a lot more exciting and appealing with its promise of adventure and excitement. And because of this, many of the texts that students copied were actually about how much better it was to be a scribe than to be in the military or any other job to for that matter. But the military is mentioned a lot because it seems to have been particularly appealing to young men, probably especially when these boys reached adolescence and stuff and they're really looking to take more risks and go out and have adventures. They don't want to be cooped up sitting under a shade, you know, sitting down all day copying boring texts on a board, right? So some of them did run away actually to try to like join the military or just, you know, goof off basically into other things. Some texts talk about scribes in training who are not being diligent with their studies and instead they're spending all their time drinking beer and hanging out in brothels and things like that. So even though being a scribe could be a wonderful career, definitely one of the best in ancient Egypt, that wasn't always enough to interest the young men who were studying for this. And so one of the most quoted texts that show up in schoolwork is one that we now call the satire of the trades, due to its content that lists various jobs and why they were so horrible, encouraging the reader to become a scribe and not end up like all these various people who are talked about in the text who have these miserable jobs. So then after their initial training, this initial training that they had, they would move on to more advanced texts, such as literary stories. And so we do have actually many of our copies of literature from ancient Egypt are often copies from scribes in training. So while we might have shorter little bits on things like ostraca from scribes who are early on in their training, when we get these longer sections of things like literature, they're clearly scribes who are much further along in their training, but maybe, you know, not fully advanced, ready to go out on their own yet. In addition, scribes also learned some amount of math. We don't know exactly how much all scribes learned, but it seems like from how it's mentioned in text that all scribes learned at least a little bit of it, and then some might have specialized more in going deeper into math, particularly if they were gonna be doing things involving accounting a lot. Now, during apprenticeship, this is when a scribe would start to specialize in a particular field, such as medicine, music, priestly rituals, or art and craftsmanship, among other things. There could be a lot of different ways you could go as a scribe and different things that you might do, because all of these things, many areas did require the knowledge of how to read and write. Although not all positions you might think of did. For example, a lot of priestly positions did not. But if you wanted to get into the higher priestly positions, then you would want to be able to read and write. Now, after this, a scribe could look forward to a long and fairly lucrative career, varying in level depending on what exactly he got into and how many advancements he made throughout his career. So he could even end up the head of one of the most powerful institutions in the entire country, like Bek and Kans did at the Karnak Temple. Or he could end up as head of all royal building projects, which is also one of the top positions in the country, such as Imhotep, who worked for King Joser did during the Old Kingdom. He's likely the one who designed Joser's steppe pyramid. And also like Amenhotep, son of Hapu, who we talked about before, who held this position under King Amenhotep III. Now, these last two, Imhotep and Amenhotep son of Hapu, even became venerated in a way that we would think of as very similar to what we think of in the modern West as a saint today. And Amenhotep, son of Hapu, had numerous statues of himself around Karnak Temple where people would come and pray to him for help and ask him to relay their messages to the god Amun inside the temple. And Imhotep became much like a patron god of medicine in the late period. This is why you'll actually see in museums today many small bronze figures of Imhotep that were created thousands of years after he died. His memory lived on, and he and others were remembered for how knowledgeable and wise they were and how deep their knowledge went, so much so that they were appealed to for help even thousands of years later. And this is because being a scribe was not just about that cushy and lucrative career. It was about being part of the tradition of learning, of knowledge, and of innovation that made ancient Egypt so astounding to us today. The scribes are the reason for all of the amazing, visually striking artifacts and huge monuments that we will mark over today. Everything from jewelry to papyri to pyramids. So learning to read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs isn't just about decoding artifacts. It's about joining an age-old tradition, joining ancient Egyptian scribes themselves. As we heard at the beginning of this episode, the ancient scribes themselves advise you to become a scribe because it is the best occupation in ancient Egypt. They advise you to join the scribal tradition and become a member of their ranks. And I'll leave you with the advice that the text we read at the beginning about how wonderful it is to be a scribe continues with. It says thus spend the day writing with your fingers whilst reading by night. Befriend the papyrus role and the palate. It pleases more than wine.