Feature 4: Record Keeping

In our time only a few people were allowed to learn to read and right - not everyone. However the scribes were important to have. They did all of the record keeping. Obviously because nobody else knew how to write.

To become a scribe you had to go through 4-5 years of scribe school. There you would learn to read and write hieroglyphics. Hieroglyphics were pictures used in our time rather than the alphabet that your people use.

Hieroglyphics

 

The children in scribe school practiced writing very often. In the end all of the practice was worth it. Not everybody was qualified for scribe school. It was most often the children of scribes with the occasional craftsman's child who got to go.

 

 

Our hieroglyphics were very complex. In 196 BC by a group of priests who wanted to honor the current pharaoh. During that time there were two methods of writing in Egypt - Hieroglyphics and demotic. At the time the rulers spoke Greek, so when the pharaoh had a decree written on a stone (Rosetta Stone) it included all three languages

 

Rosetta Stone

 

 

The stone was found in the town of Rosetta in 1799 by Pierre-François Bouchard (a french soldier from Napolian Bonappart's army) during the French Expedition to Egypt. The British ended up beating the French in Egypt and then the stone was in their possession.

 

Once the stone was in England, Jean-François Champollion of Paris started working on translating it in 1803. It took over twenty years to fully translate the stone. Once translated it took even longer before scholars could read all of our writing.

 

Since we came up the Rosetta Stone all of your people were able to learn much about our country and our ways. Without scribes like myself the world today would not know nearly as much as it does about Egyptian history.

 

 

Hesy-Ra

Scribe of Pharaoh Djoser