Scribe Statues
The Egyptian Scribe Statues
In modern times, we take for granted the privilege of knowing how to read, write, and express ourselves with words. The art of writing is a creative gift that is often overlooked in our world of technological breakthroughs. Today we have computers with word counters, spell checkers, rhyming dictionaries, and endless resources of information, that has produced a world full of instant novelists, book writers and poets. In ancient Egyptian times, however, only the scribes and a few select people knew how to read and write. The task of recording history, expressing everyday and extraordinary happenings was the responsibility of the scribe in ancient Egypt.
Having the title of scribe was an honorable position for one to hold in Egyptian culture. Future scribes were the only people in ancient Egypt who received a formal education. For all other stations in life, the people would participate in apprenticeship situations. In order to become an "official" scribe, your father had to be a scribe, and his father had to be a scribe, and so on. Therefore, one was born into a position of potential scribe much in the same way as one becomes royalty by being born into a royal family. Scribes had a significant amount of respect in the ancient Egyptian world. People viewed the scribes as being spiritual because they had the ability to do something most people didn't understand. (Casson, 54-55) They had vision and insight, what we call inspiration and creativity. Writers and historians today respect the gifts of creativity the scribes left for us to see, and we can appreciate the time it took to create something that would last the tests of time.
Being a scribe was an extremely difficult job because in total, there were hundreds of different hieroglyphs to remember. Hieratic is what Egyptian scribes were taught, a series of brush strokes to express thoughts and reach eternity. Some hieroglyphs were contained within an oval and were...
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