D | Education and Writing |
Tomb of Queen Amonherkhepsef
In ancient Egypt, scribes used hieroglyphs to record state documents and important historical events. Hieroglyphs with religious purposes also were painted on tomb walls and wooden coffins, such as these hieroglyphs from the tomb of Queen Amonherkhepsef, located in the Valley of the Queens.
Wolfgang Kaehler/Corbis
Education and writing were interdependent in ancient Egypt. Literacy was the first step in attaining knowledge. However, reading and writing were limited to a small number of people, primarily the elite, the scribes, and those entering the upper levels of the bureaucracy. Children of royalty and the wealthy were educated at the palace. Children of other people learned in temple schools, through apprenticeships, or at home. Boys received a formal education, but girls had to learn to read and write at home.
Teachers were strict. The harshness of their methods can perhaps be inferred from the Egyptian verb seba, which means both “to teach” and “to beat.” Scribes learned first how to read, write, and compose letters. Those studying to become scribes had to recopy and memorize model letters as well as other types of texts, such as literary works. Some schoolboy copies with the instructor’s corrections of his pupil’s work still survive today. Instructional papyri (scrolls made of papyrus) in subjects such as mathematics and medicine have been discovered. All types of manuscripts tended to be stored in a “house of life,” a repository found in most temples. These repositories were somewhat similar to modern libraries.
Learned people in ancient Egypt studied mathematics and medicine. In mathematics they developed basic concepts in arithmetic and geometry. The ancient Egyptians understood the idea of fractions and knew how to add them. Egyptian scholars wrote some of the earliest known medical texts. These texts deal with topics such as internal medicine, surgery, pharmaceutical remedies, dentistry, and veterinary medicine.
Scribes were essential to all aspects of ancient Egyptian civilization. They kept all records and wrote all correspondence. They copied and edited all religious and literary texts. They even compiled economic reports.
The Egyptians used several scripts to record their language. Around 3300 to 3200 bc, a formal script known as hieroglyphs came into being. The word hieroglyphs comes from the Greek term hieroglyphikos, meaning “sacred carving.” In this script, symbols called glyphs were used originally to denote objects and concepts. Eventually the symbols came to represent primarily sounds. Hieroglyphs took the form of recognizable images drawn from the Egyptian environment. Some of the earliest examples of writing in Egypt appear to be names and also the number and origin of certain commodities. Generally, in the time of the pharaohs, the Egyptians used hieroglyphs to carve or paint monumental and religious texts on the walls of tombs, palaces, and temples, as well as on the surfaces of statues and stelae (carved stone slabs, sometimes painted wooden slabs). Hieroglyphs were the longest-lived system of writing, being used until the end of the 4th century ad.
A second script, called hieratic, was based on hieroglyphs but was simplified and more abbreviated. The hieratic script was adapted to the more rapid writing necessary to prepare letters and legal and administrative documents. For the most part, these documents were written in ink on papyri, as were literary, instructional, funerary, and mythological texts. The hieratic script was used until a more cursive script, called demotic, or “popular,” supplanted it in the 7th century bc. The demotic script was used at first to keep the more mundane records of daily life, but later it was used for everything, including monumental inscriptions. It survived hieroglyphs by a century. The last script the Egyptians developed was the Coptic alphabet, which dates to the early 2nd century ad. The term Coptic is derived from the Greek word for Egypt. Unlike its predecessors, which were partially alphabetical and recorded only the sounds of consonants, the Coptic script was a true alphabet and included vowels. It used the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet plus 6 additional characters derived from demotic for sounds that did not exist in Greek. See also Coptic Language; Egyptian Language.
The Egyptians created a calendar at a very early stage, based on their observations of the movements of the Sun and the stars. They used their calendar for many purposes, including the recording of historical events and royal decrees and the scheduling of festivals and other activities. Perhaps representing one of the first attempts at making a calendar are the remnants of stone circles from around 8000 bc in the southwestern corner of modern Egypt. These stone circles may have been used to map the movement of the heavenly bodies. The Egyptians probably created a calendar because it was so important for their survival to know when the Nile’s flood would come. They divided each day into 24 hours, 12 for the daytime and 12 for the night. A period of ten days made up a week, and one month included three such weeks, or 30 days. A year comprised 12 months and was divided into three seasons of four months each. To the 360 days of the 12 months in a year, the Egyptians added 5 more days, which they referred to as the birthdays of several gods. Thus, an Egyptian year totaled 365 days, remarkably close to the 365¼ days it takes the Earth to go around the Sun. There was no concept of leap year (accounting for the extra ¼ day a year), so the calendar fell behind by one day every four years.
