The Power of Scribes

  Surely everyone has seen statuettes depicting an Egyptian scribe: they sit with their legs crossed, their backs incredibly straight, the writing pad on their knees, and they look over us with the indifference of a cat. You can see that he is a scribe, for with him he has all the props of writing, but indifferent scribes do not write but most often just look, so they were not made while crouching over the paper as they were just nailing a sentence. They're just watching. Maybe to us, maybe somewhere else.

  Even if we can barely see them ‘during deployment’, they have become symbols of writing and reading, of learning and knowledge. They were always as well combed and elegant, but it wasn’t as easy a job as it first seems.

  First, he had to learn a lot from someone who thought he would be a scribe. Moreover, in an age where there was no public education. Education was for someone who could pay and as much as he could pay. It wasn’t a cheap pastime. Egyptian students don’t have to be imagined like in our age as they get bored to death. Anyone who could share in the grace of learning absorbed the knowledge in the form of an enthusiastic and grateful little sponge what only a few got.

  In ancient times, writing was something special, very important, offering a huge position, knowledge and mystical doctrine into which only the privileged were initiated. That’s why being a scribe was a VIP job. It was not enough for an Egyptian scribe to learn ‘easy to use’ demotic writing, he also had to be familiar with the world of hieroglyphs. But the huge advantage of the scribe was that whoever became a scribe could enjoy the protection of the god Toth. Toth, who appears in the depictions with a baboon's head and with an ibis's head (quite rarely with a human's head), is the inventor of writing, the scribe of the gods, the possessor of scientific knowledge, and familiar with the legal system, including the protector of scribes. If someone has learned throughout the half of the life, fantastic job opportunities have opened up for them, they can choose from the best deals. Every opportunity for advancement, career, and self-realization tempted the ancient scribe. They enjoyed the trust of the highest circles, so they knew everything, even what hadn’t even happened. 

They had to be discreet, quiet, and invisible, but illiterate clients rewarded their services richly and did not regret anything good from them. The possibility of progress is a dizzying perspective in a society where social roles are strongly determined. In the case of a scribe, it almost didn’t matter where he came from, his skills, his work elevated him to his place, not his birth or origin. Although the sons of scribes usually became scribes, as they could start learning with their father very early, as in so many other professions, the first master of a child is his father. However, we know very little about how an Egyptian scribe spent a day. And history went unstoppably on its own path, rulers handed over the throne of Egypt to each other, pyramids grew in the desert, and generations of cat gods sunbathed in the golden sands, this privileged multitude of scribes immersed anonymously in the sea of history.

  For millennia, they sat motionless in lotus pose, writing and thinking, sitting there in the shadow of great people, watching their words, writing them down, and writing and writing until they died. And they learned a lot.