Chapter 2
Like the Sumerians, the ancient Egyptians sent children to school exclusively to learn how to write. But Egypt restricted literacy much more than Sumer did. Only boys from the most elite families were taught writing, and thus only a tiny fraction of the population was literate. Most walked through temples and along walls of buildings carved with hieroglyphs they were unable to decipher.
For most of writing’s history, access to literacy has been extremely restricted; and while literacy rates fluctuate throughout epochs, in Egypt it was perhaps the lowest of any civilization. The beauty of hieroglyphics is, in fact, related to their exclusivity. When a culture’s writing is a rare, exalted, and magical thing, it is also often elitist. Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, and other scripts share a correlation between beautiful handwriting and the sacred, but none are as elaborate and restricted as hieroglyphics were during their long reign.
The first and longest-used Egyptian script, hieroglyphics, was in use for three and a half millennia, much longer than the Roman alphabet has survived thus far. Cuneiform and hieroglyphics are often discussed together as the earliest scripts (hieroglyphs are thought to have been influenced by cuneiform, and invented shortly thereafter, although there is no hard evidence to confirm that or to precisely date either’s first appearance), but they are vastly different from each other in almost every respect. Cuneiform was adopted by many different peoples and cultures, while hieroglyphs had little influence on other languages and scripts. Part of the reason for this insularity lies, again, in beauty: Hieroglyphs were as much an art form as they were a means of information storage. These scripts are as much something we look at for their visual beauty as they are something we look through for their information.*
Unlike cuneiform, we know little about how hieroglyphs, a largely logographic and pictographic system, arose.* For centuries there were six hundred to seven hundred hieroglyphs, carved onto temples, tombs, and jewelry as well as written on papyrus. Then, during the Ptolemaic period in the fourth century B.C.E., there were suddenly six thousand to seven thousand in use. As the writing system became developed and institutionalized, it became more elaborate, making it even more difficult for novices to decipher and master and therefore further blocking access to literacy.†
Elite Egyptian boys were tasked with a difficult skill to master. Their medium was papyrus, a writing surface made from the marshy plant of the same name. Papyrus grew along the river, some plants as tall as ten feet. (In ancient times it grew in abundance; by the eighteenth century, it would be extinct.) It was an extraordinarily clever choice for a writing surface: flexible, durable, inexpensive, and reusable. It was made by taking off the rind, beneath which were soft insides that were cut into strips. These were wetted and then pounded together until they stuck to each other, the process repeated until a twenty-foot scroll was formed that would, after it was written on, be rolled up, tied with a string, and marked with a unique clay seal indicating the scroll’s owner. Like the Sumerians, the Egyptians carried seals, sometimes on one of their fingers, the origin of the term “ring finger.”1
With a blank roll of papyrus on his left, a student would pull a scroll until one section sat comfortably across his lap; this constituted a “page” of hieroglyphs. On his lap rested a scribal kit, an exalted, sometimes religious object; one was placed in King Tut’s tomb that contained two inkwells, one red, one black, and a vessel for water used to wet the ink. The black ink was made from carbon, the red ink from an iron oxide. The boy used the red ink—as would the Christians centuries later (think “red-letter day”)—only for important words and headings. His ink choice also had religious resonances; he would switch from black to red, a color associated with danger, to write the word “evil,” for example.
To write—or, perhaps more precisely, to paint—the boy took up a long, thin hollowed-out tool made out of the reeds that grew in the fields around him. He chewed on one end of the reed to make it into a brush. Dipping his brush in the ink, he copied homilies, such as:
Be a scribe, so that your limbs may become sleek, that your hands may become soft, that you may go forth, admired, in white attire and that your courtiers may salute you.
or one found on a scrap of papyrus now in the British Museum:
Apply yourself to writing zealously; do not stay your hand … pleasant and wealth abounding is your palette and your roll of papyrus.2
He wrote from left to right until he ran out of space on the papyrus that covered his lap. When the papyrus wrinkled, he used a stone to smooth it out.
The boy’s school was associated with one of the town’s temples. Before he was allowed to write on papyrus, he had to practice making hieroglyphs on clay shards called ostraca and on boards covered with gesso, a plaster mixture that created a surface somewhat like a chalkboard. Only when he proved himself capable was he allowed to use papyrus to create the images that served as symbols for speech: the ducks and crocodiles and men that we think of when we imagine Egyptian hieroglyphics, which were as much decorative as they were communicative.
While children like Ellie spend about three years learning twenty-six characters, as well as reading, math, and other subjects, the rare child in ancient Egypt who was allowed to write spent at least five years learning how to do so. Indeed, hieroglyphs are perhaps the most difficult and elaborate writing system the world has ever created.* The education necessary to master hieroglyphs was similar to but even more intense than that which is necessary to learn classical Chinese or Japanese today. And, like those languages, Egyptian stood then, as it stands now, as a language in and of itself, resistant to change and adoption by other peoples. Nonetheless it was long-lived: Hieroglyphic inscriptions have been found dating as late as 394 C.E., thousands of years after the system was invented.
Unlike cuneiform, much of what remains of Egyptian hieroglyphics today is religious, not economic. Hieroglyphs were used for formal purposes: writing on diplomas and wedding invitations, for example. It was also used for legal papers and bureaucratic memos, so much so that scholars who initially believed Egyptians to be a philosophical culture changed their minds when they realized how thoroughly bureaucratic so many of the documents were.3 But most of the writing remaining in hieroglyphics glorifies the pharaoh and the gods. Whether or not this means religion played a larger role in Egypt than in Sumer, where economic motives stimulated cuneiform, remains uncertain. Egyptians used the fragile papyrus as their writing surface, so less of it remains than sturdier Sumerian clay. Likewise, Egyptians may also simply have worked harder to preserve the religious texts than they did the bureaucratic ones.*
Also, hieroglyphs were only one of several scripts the Egyptians used. For the bureaucratic communication they were so fond of, like temple business or records of goods and services, the Egyptians gradually shifted to an easier, more pragmatic script: hieratic, perhaps the first true “handwriting” in our history—a less formal and ritualized script than hieroglyphics. Eventually, hieratic script came to be used religiously as well; for example, the Book of the Dead is written in hieratic. Then, as the centuries progressed, hieratic became identified with religious writing; hence the word “hieratic” itself, which was coined by the Greeks and means priestly.
The third Egyptian script the Greeks called “demotic,” or popular, which, despite its name, was still reserved for the ultra-elite. The Egyptian word for this script is more apt, translating as “writing of documents.” Demotic was in effect the first cursive script. It could be written quickly and was originally used, like hieratic, for administrative purposes. Then, as the centuries passed, it, too, took on a religious and literary role.
If Sumerian scribes were functionaries preserving culture and helping business get done, in Egypt they were part of the priestly and ruling class. So revered were scribes that commemorative statues showing scribes sitting, legs crossed, their writing boards and palettes across their laps, were commissioned by Egyptian princes and high officials who were not scribes themselves but wanted a piece of the status a scribe held. Scribes even had tax-exempt status. The Egyptian word for “writing” translates as “words of the gods.” The god of the scribes was Thoth, one of the most important of the gods. Thus, given this tinge of importance, writing and writers were equally touched with prestige and the sacred. One Egyptian saying about scribes extolled: “You are one who sits grandly in your house; your servants answer speedily; beer is poured copiously; all who see you rejoice in good cheer. Happy is the heart of him who writes; he is young each day.” Another observed: “Yes, for the scribe, whatever his place at the residence [the pharaoh’s court], he cannot be poor in it.” 4
What scribes wrote, however, was tightly controlled, and only what the pharaoh wanted written. Egyptian scribes were the conservative protectors of the status quo. The few who knew how to write were also the few who ran the temples, armies, and government. As scholar Barry Powell writes, “When we study ‘the Egyptians,’ really we study the thought, religion, achievements, and aspirations of this tiny elite. About the thoughts of those who worked the fields from birth to death, then were buried in unmarked graves at the edge of the desert or thrown into the Nile, we have no information. Writing preserves only the thought of literate peoples.”5 The brushstrokes made on papyrus were as inscrutable and illegible to the overwhelming majority of Egyptians as they are to most of us today. And of those majority we have no written record.
Hieroglyphics eventually died out. But civilization, of course, did not. The ancient Greeks, who famously believed in education for more than just the elite, invented an easier—the easiest ever—writing system: the first true alphabet. One might assume, then, that the next chapter in the history of handwriting would be one of increased literacy. But, in fact, writing took a big step backward.
* Tellingly, many books on the origins of these scripts are classified in American libraries as art, not history.
* Egypt straddles two traditions in the history of writing: Since hieroglyphics (unlike cuneiform) were important for the development of the alphabet, it is important to understanding much of subsequent Western culture described in this book; but in its insularity it is more similar to other, non-Western scripts not discussed here.
† In fact, one might wonder whether the creative blossoming of text messaging today might be creating a similar phenomenon, at least for adults who struggle to decode the never-ending invention of acronyms and emojis that teenagers frequently use to communicate.
* As Wolf writes in Proust and the Squid, “By the first millennium B.C.E., the brain of an Egyptian scribe may well have required far more cortical activation and cognitive resources to handle the encrypted meanings than was required for most other writing systems in all of history.”
* Of course, there are an enormous number of remaining hieroglyphics that were chiseled on walls, tombs, and buildings.