Scribe School
© Lucy Charlotte Acland Johnson
In order to become a scribe boys had to go to school and be well educated (scribes were always male).
The best schools were in the temples and the sons of officials and nobles went to these.
There they learnt to read and write hieroglyphs (the Egyptians used this method of picture writing as a sort of alphabet), mathematics and simple record keeping-you might learn to do this on a computer nowadays!
The cleverer boys would also do more advanced subjects, if their parents could afford it, such as astronomy and geography.
Nowadays teachers are of course not allowed to hurt pupils: sadly, junior scribes might be beaten by a teacher for not listening or working hard enough-I expect you're glad you weren't at school then!
When practising writing boys would write on pieces of pottery known as "ostraca" as the wax tablets of papyrus (reed paper) they'd write with in future years were too expensive for practising on.
It took a long time to become a scribe, and once you'd completed your schooling you had to go into specific training: there were over 700 hieroglyphs compared with our 26 letters today.
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