Great Lord Ra burst over the eastern horizon just as Ranofer turned into the broad road that edged the fields of the flower growers. Beyond the emerald fields he could glimpse the surface of the river, jeweled with sunlight. A flock of pintail ducks planed down over the papyrus marsh and vanished among the reeds.

"Sah," murmured Ranofer automatically, reminded of his lessons with the scribe. He halted and dropped to one knee, scratching the hieroglyph of the pintail duck in the dust with his finger. By adding a vertical stroke beside it and the picture of a man kneeling, one could write the word sah: "son." Ranofer admired his handiwork a moment, then changed the kneeling man to a sitting woman, obliterated the stroke and replaced it with a bread loaf. Behold! Saht: "daughter."

Ranofer smiled. It gave one a sense of power to be able to write words. He wished, though, that he had not added the bread-loaf "T." It reminded him of his empty stomach.

He got up and hurried on. There were many people in the street now, calling greetings to one another as they set out for their work. Once he had thought of it, Ranofer saw hieroglyphs everywhere. There on a doorstep was a wickerwork basket, "K"; yonder, "N," the ripples on the water. The vulture wheeling above the slow-moving boats was the guttural sound, "ah." Even the boats themselves and the rising sun, the amulet on his wrist and the beetle crawling in the dust were the same as the careful signs he had learned to draw on his clay tablet.

Sethi knew he was going to be late for school. He had stayed with his friend Ahmose much too long. He began to run, hoping he might still get there on time. When he got to the House of Life, where he studied, he was all out of breath. The building was a part of the temple of the god Amon. It was mainly used to teach future priest and transcribers of sacred texts. Sethi could have attended another school in Thebes. It was a school open only to sons of nobles and princes. But Rekhmire had preferred to send his son to the House of Life because the teacher, User, was his friend. User was a learned scribe. He spent much of his time reading, writing, and teaching.

User was already sitting on the floor cross-legged, and his pupils had formed a circle around him.

The word paper comes from papyrus, the reed that grows on the banks of the river Nile. To make paper, the Egyptians peeled the outer layer off the reeds. The pith inside the stems was cut into strips, soaked in water, and then placed in crisscross layers. These were hammered until they were squashed together. The surface of the papyrus was then smoothed out with a wooden tool. Other writing materials included fragments of pottery, leather, and plastered boards.

It is thought that only about four out of every 1,000 Egyptians could read or write. Scribes were professional writers who would copy out official records and documents, letters, poems, and stories. The training of young scribes was thorough, strict, and harsh. One teacher, Amenemope, wrote to his students, "Pass no day in idleness or you will be beaten." However, most workers envied the scribes for their easy way of life. They were well rewarded for their work.

School exercises were often written on broken pieces of stone or pottery that had been thrown away. These pieces were known as ostraka. Young scribes would copy exercises out onto the ostrakon and then have them corrected by a teacher. Many examples of corrected exercises have been discovered in Egypt.

Scribes recorded the size of the grain harvest. The farmer would then give a proportion of the grain to the pharaoh as a tax. Many scribes worked in the government, copying out accounts, taxes, orders, and laws. They were like our civil servants.

A scribe’s pen case contained reed pens and an inkwell. The ink was made of charcoal or soot mixed with water. Scribes carried a grinder for crushing the pigments first. Often the scribe’s name and the name of his employer or the pharaoh would be carved into the case.

Being a scribe often meant traveling on business to record official documents. Most had a portable palette for when they went away. Scribes often carried a briefcase or document carrier, too, to protect the information they had recorded.

Accroupi was a famous scribe of the Old Kingdom. Scribes were often powerful people in ancient Egypt, and many statues of them have survived. The high standing of scribes is confirmed in the text Satire of the Trades, which says: "Behold! No scribe is short of food and of riches from the palace."

Being able to read and write was essential for a career in the Egyptian civil service. Not much is known about Egyptian schools. Some temples ran schools but many boys seem to have studied with local scribes (trained writers).

Reading, writing, and mathematics were the basic subjects. Pupils learned by copying out texts in the two main scripts, hieroglyphic and hieratic. They wrote with pens made from reeds on wooden tablets, pieces of pottery, or scraps of papyrus. Surviving school texts show pupils’ spelling mistakes and teachers’ corrections. Discipline was strict: "A boy’s ear is in his back, he listens when he is beaten."

Some of the texts that boys were made to copy out were about the advantages of being a scribe. They stress that scribes sit in the shade and watch while other people do the hard work. Wealth and success is promised to the good pupil. The texts conclude, "If you have any sense you will be a scribe!"

Scribes were employed to write official or private letters and to draw up legal documents. Other common tasks were recording the progress of all kinds of work and making lists of goods. Educated people read for pleasure so scribes wrote or copied out literature such as proverbs, stories, and love poems.

We know little about Egyptian schools, as there are no pictures of teaching. The Egyptians were more interested in the results of education than in how it was achieved. Some of the temples had boarding schools attached to them known as "houses of instruction." Boys were sometimes sent to "wise men" as pupils, and the sons of high officials were brought up at the royal court. Literacy and a good education were very important, and becoming a scribe opened the way to all the professions, such as medicine, the civil service, and the priesthood.

Girls did not go to school but were taught at home. They learned all the household skills and there is evidence that many could also read and write. Poorer children followed their parents’ work by helping in the fields or looking after the animals.

Reading was learned by chanting aloud, beginning with whole words and phrases, not with individual letters. Model letters were copied out onto flakes of limestone. (Papyrus was too expensive for small boys to practice on.) Arithmetic was worked out silently. They calculated in 10s, but had no separate numbers for 2 through 9. So 35 was written as 10+10+10+1+1+1+1+1.

The Ancient Egyptian language has an alphabet of 23 letters plus about 700 other phonetic signs (representing sounds). It can be read from left to right, right to left, or vertically depending on the way the signs face. Only the consonants are shown, not the vowels, and there are no full stops (periods). For everyday business a different script was used—more like our modern handwriting. Letters were written together and not written out as separate signs.

Scribes were near the top of Egyptian society, and capable scribes could do very well. One, Horemheb, even became king. Students were trained rigorously for about five years beginning at the age of nine. This was often a problem because the young pupils could see children of their own age playing in the fields. Papyri have been discovered containing reprimands from senior to junior scribes about neglecting lessons; physical punishment was sometimes recommended. One form of encouragement offered to pupils was a list of the drawbacks of other professions—exaggerated, of course. For example, jewelers and metalworkers were said to choke in the heat of their furnaces, weavers had to put up with cramped conditions. But the scribe could look forward to authority, freedom from taxes, national service during times of flood, and immortality through his writings.

Egyptian artists were professional scribes who specialized in draftsmanship for royal or funerary monuments. From unfinished tombs like that of King Horemheb it is possible to see all the stages involved in painting. First, junior draftsmen drew the scenes in red ocher on the dry plaster. Next, senior artists made corrections in black outline. The painters would then fill in the outlines with color, or sculptors would cut away the background plaster to form a relief for painting.

Scribes had to be experts in writing hieroglyphs, an elaborate form of picture writing using about 700 different signs. It was deliberately kept complicated so that not many people could master it and scribes could keep their special position. Hieroglyphs were used on state monuments, temples, tombs, and religious papyri. They could be written from left to right, right to left, or top to bottom. For business contracts, letters, and stories, scribes used a different form of writing (script), called hieratic, which was a fast-written version of hieroglyphs, always running from right to left. Later on, an even more rapid script evolved, called demotic. At the end of the Egyptian civilization, scribes also had to be able to write Greek, the language of their overlords.

Cephren’s highest officials, called imakhou (friends of the pharaoh), were usually members of the royal family. They led trade missions, commanded the army, and acted as nomarchs (rulers of the nomes). The chief minister of tjaty was in charge of the Treasury and the House of the Granary (the department of Agriculture) as well as being the chief judge. Sometimes the pharaoh allowed a favored imakhu to build a tomb by the pyramids, where he would receive food offerings for the afterlife.

All government officials were scribes (educated men). Below the imakhu were the secretaries, the sandal bearers, the supervisors of the royal meals, and the overseers on the pyramids. Many other scribes were priests in the hundreds of temples to the gods or in the mortuary temples.