Think Like an Egyptian (33 page)

Many men bore other administrative titles and we class them all together as “officials” (see no. 80). Priests, or at least those attached to the major temples, form one category. Presumably all officials began by taking scribal training and were for a time simply “scribes.” Some kept a version of the title even though they became very senior. Amenhetep son of Hapu continued to call himself a “royal scribe” and “scribe of recruits.”

Scribes and their more senior counterparts were invested with an authority over other people, exercised on behalf of the king and the temples. An expedition sent to the quarries in the Wadi Hammamat in the 38th regnal year of King Senusret I (1918 BC) was led by a “herald” called Ameni. Under him were 80 officials (only 8 of whom were identified specifically as scribes) who had charge of roughly 18,660 skilled and unskilled workers (including 30 hunters and a contingent of soldiers), plus a train of millers, brewers, and bakers (20 of each together with 50 “butlers”), a ratio of 1 official to more than 200 men. This is the scale of work-force needed to build a pyramid.

The rate of literacy in ancient Egypt is very hard to determine but probably slowly increased over time. A modern estimate of full literacy during the Old Kingdom sets it as low as 1 percent of the population. At the ancient village of Deir el-Medina, 2,000 years later, where more written records covering daily life have survived than from anywhere else in ancient Egypt, literacy must have been far higher, with many of the men and quite a number of the women able to write letters to one another. One of the women was the widow Naunakht, the owner of a remarkable library of papyri built up by several generations of scribes in the village. It contained stories, love songs, magical and medical texts, a complete book of temple ritual, and a manual on how to interpret people’s dreams. The survival of papyri on domestic sites in ancient Egypt is extremely rare, and it is hard to estimate how much the literate class actually read for entertainment and instruction. If the Naunakht family was not unusual, the literate class collected and read “books” on a far greater scale than surviving evidence implies.

Scribes were elitist, believing their work of greater value than other professions. These views were passed on to pupils, in the practice texts used to teach boys how to read and write. The various professions in Egyptian society (from peasant to soldier and even chariot officer) are described in the most unfavorable terms. The message is clear: “Be a scribe, and be spared from soldiering. When you call out the reply comes, ‘Here I am.’ You are safe from torments.” Other pieces recount the material benefits, the comfortable villas, the well-stocked farmlands, the life of ease coupled with respect: “You are the one who sits grandly in your house; your servants answer speedily; beer is poured copiously; all who see you rejoice in good cheer.” “Be a scribe. Your body will be sleek, your hands will be soft.”

Scribes also felt a vocation: “By day write with your fingers; recite by night. Befriend the scroll and the palette. It pleases more than wine. Writing for him who knows it is better than all other professions.... It is worth more than an inheritance in Egypt, than a tomb in the west.” The long-term value came in the preservation of one’s name and reputation: “Man decays, his corpse is dust. All his kin have perished. But a book preserves his memory through the mouth of its reciter. Better is a book than a well-built house, than tomb-chapels in the west.”

The king’s palace possessed an elite school for scribes where children could mix “among the sons of magistrates, with the elite of the Residence.” The high priest of Amun, Bakenkhensu, attended a school attached to the temple of Mut in Karnak. The workmen’s village of Deir el-Medina had its own little school, to judge from the number of scribal exercises found. These exercises, sometimes written on large flakes of limestone rather than on papyrus, included manuals on good behavior, such as those credited to Ptahhetep and Any, and major literary texts. Another literary institution attached to temples, the “House of Life,” stored and copied papyrus texts concerned with mythology and ritual. A long list of words and place names—an aid to acquiring vocabulary—was compiled by a “scribe of sacred books in the House of Life” named Amenemope, suggesting that what to us are mundane subjects had a place as well. Akhenaten’s city of Tell el-Amarna also possessed a House of Life, a modest building of mud-brick, adjacent to others that seem to have been offices: given Akhenaten’s attempts to suppress the old religion, the House of Life is unlikely to have specialized in mythology and ritual. Not far away were found the Amarna Letters, clay tablets written in cuneiform (see no. 56, “Palace”). Most were diplomatic letters, but some refer to the study of the language and literature of Mesopotamia. Possibly the nearby House of Life was an academy of wider and secular learning.

 

 

 

 

Seals transferred the authority of officials to the objects under their control; everything from jars of wine to letters, boxes containing linen, and the bolts on doors were marked with seals. The earliest seals were little cylinders, mostly of stone, which gave rise to the hieroglyphic sign. It shows a rectangular hollow frame attached to a string of beads (probably to be carried in the hand). Within the frame is a cylinder that rotates on a little spindle. The very first ones were imported from Mesopotamia or Syria before the beginning of the 1st Dynasty and bore Mesopotamian designs carved into the curving surface. When Egyptians began to make their own they replaced these designs with the names of the official, his department, and perhaps of the king as well, written in Egyptian hieroglyphs. The impression of the seal was rolled across fine gray clay, which set hard and brittle.

During the Old Kingdom, cylinder seals gradually gave way to seals where the design was carved into a flat base and the impression was made by pressing instead of rolling. In time the design on the rounded backs of stamp seals became standardized to show the image of a scarab beetle. Many Egyptian “scarabs” are the ancient equivalent of signet rings.

Marking, though not with a seal but by branding, was also extended to humans. Rameses III tell us this in connection with his prisoners of war: “I established their leaders in strongholds bearing my name. I appointed among them chiefs of bowmen, leaders of the tribes, [they being] branded—made as slaves—with the cartouche of my name. Their wives and children were treated similarly.”

 

 

 

 

The making of papyrus was a distinctive Egyptian industry. It required considerable labor and was manufactured in large quantities. Strips were peeled from the stem and pressed crosswise in two layers, producing rectangular sheets. These were then joined by narrow overlaps to produce a roll, often made from 20 sheets. The hieroglyph shows a roll of papyrus tied with string in the middle. Over the knot is a lump of mud stamped with a seal. Prices from the New Kingdom show that papyrus was not expensive. A whole roll, which at this period was around four meters long, cost two deben, the price, for example, of a good pair of sandals or two jars of cooking oil. It was common to cut rolls into smaller pieces, to use both sides, and even to erase an older text so that the surface could be reused.

Writing on papyrus with pen and ink encourages a rapid fluid style of making letters. When writing secular texts on papyrus, scribes did not delineate hieroglyphs one by one but used an abbreviated “longhand” form of writing, which we call “hieratic.” The Egyptians did not turn hieratic into calligraphic art, but some scribes developed a bold, even style marked with flourishes.

The word
md
૩
t
(
medjat
), “papyrus roll,” can be translated sometimes as “book,” as with “The Book of Overthrowing Apophis,” a collection of spells for the protection of the sun-god Ra from the assaults of the great serpent Apophis and his allies. Although the term “Book of the Dead” is one of the most familiar from Egyptology, it is not a strict translation of what the Egyptians called it, which was simply “The coming forth by day.” A cheap copy could be bought in the New Kingdom for the price of a bed or a quality length of textile.

The ancient Egyptian language possessed many relatively abstract words. The Egyptians used the papyrus-roll hieroglyph,
, as a determinative for many of these words, treating the sign as a symbol for complicated knowledge that often used or resulted in a written record: “to know,” “truth (Maat),” “to barter, exchange,” “to command.”