When your mother sent you to school, where you were taught to read and write, she cared for you each day with bread and beer at home. When you yourself become a man and take a bride, and become settled in your house, pay attention to your own son, and bring him up carefully as your mother raised you.
New Kingdom scribal instruction
There were no specialized or simple reading books designed to encourage the development of tender young Egyptian minds. Instead, the first book to be studied, a lengthy text known as the Kemit, was a standard compilation of polite Middle Egyptian phrases, model letters and guidance to young scribes, written in an old-fashioned vertical script which must have been as dauntingly unfamiliar to the young students of the New Kingdom as Chaucer’s Middle English would be to the primary school children of today. Once this formidable academic hurdle had been overcome, students were faced with a succession of more advanced traditional works, with modern literature being considered only after three or four years when the pupil had become reasonably fluent in both his reading and writing. The so-called Wisdom Texts formed an integral part of this scribal training. These texts, which have furnished many of the quotations given in this book, developed during the Old Kingdom and remained very popular throughout the Dynastic period. They always followed the same format, and were written as lists of rather long-winded and idiosyncratic advice dictated by a revered master to his son or favourite pupil. The opinions on offer ranged from the general to the highly specific, and much of the advice still holds good in the modern world:
If a man’s son accepts his father’s words, then no plan of his will go wrong.
Old Kingdom Wisdom Text
Do not tell lies against your mother; the magistrates abhor this.
Middle Kingdom Wisdom Text
Lend a hand to an elder drunk on beer; respect him as his children should.
New Kingdom Wisdom Text
He who spits in the sky will have spittle fall on his head.
Late Period Wisdom Text
The schoolboy’s studies were made particularly tedious by the unique Egyptian tradition of employing three different types of writing at the same time, each style being considered appropriate to a specific type of document. The most popular and frequently used type of writing was a curly-looking script running from right to left. Specially developed to be written quickly with a fine paintbrush, this so-called cursive hieratic was the writing of everyday life and, consequently, the most widely studied and read. In contrast, hieroglyphic was a highly specialized, intricate and rather time-consuming form of writing reserved for monumental inscriptions of everlasting importance which could be carved or painted slowly and with great care. Cursive hieroglyphic, written from left to right, fell between these two extremes, being the writing of the semi-formal religious, magical and scientific texts. Towards the end of the Dynastic period changes in the Egyptian language led to the development of demotic, a fourth type of script which was used mainly for business purposes. Egyptian pupils, struggling to cope with different styles of writing, would have envied their modern counterparts faced only with the need to distinguish between the highly similar ‘joined-up’ lower case writing, sloping italic writing and printed capital letters.
Don’t waste your day in idleness, or you will be flogged. A boy’s ear is on his back. He listens when he is beaten.
Traditional scribal advice
The Egyptian schoolmasters were invariably very strict with their young charges, regarding frequent beatings as an integral and essential part of the learning process. As one Egyptian adult ruefully reminisced with his former mentor, ‘You smote my back, and so your teaching entered my ear.’ Leaving aside the question of corporal punishment, the approved teaching method differed markedly from current western educational practice. In particular, reading was taught by the constant memorizing, reciting and then writing of whole phrases which were regarded as one entity; there was no attempt to teach the pupils how to analyse a sentence by considering each word, or how to build up the spelling of a particular word by identifying and pronouncing the individual component signs and letters. Nor were the pupils encouraged to develop independent thoughts or to express themselves in imaginative prose. Instead, each conventional phrase was learned parrot-fashion so that it could be reproduced as a whole. This system of block learning goes a long way towards explaining why many Egyptian documents, even private letters, are so full of identical phrases that they manage to give the impression of being written by the same scribe. Some Egyptian letters consist entirely of these conventional phrases, and represent little more than a generalized greeting without any personal content, somewhat as a modern pre-printed birthday or Christmas card or even a brief postcard can serve as a rather impersonal gesture of contact today.