Ancient Egypt: Scribes and Calendar

• Very few people in ancient Egypt were literate.
• Young men from noble families were taught to write on papyrus and carve symbols into stone and were called scribes.
• Scribes recorded battles, business transactions, temple records, prayers, stories, and songs.
• Some scribes wrote letters for those who were illiterate.

The Calendar

• The Nile River helped the Egyptians to develop a calendar.
• Farming calendars were created based on the ebb and flow of the Nile's water, dividing the seasons.
• Division of the calendar year into three seasons is similar to our own.
• Egyptians had a 365-day calendar by 3000 B.C.
• The calendar was based on the sun, comprised of twelve 30-day months, plus five additional days.
• Egyptians noted that the brightest star, Sirius, rose once a year just before dawn.
• This event seemed to predict the annual flooding of the Nile River.
• This was fixed as the beginning of the calendar year.

Written on Stone

• As Europeans explored Egypt in the 1700s, no one, including Egyptians, could translate the writing and carvings.
• In 1798, while Napoleon fought the British in Egypt, his soldiers found a black stone slab with the same message written in three versions.
• The stone slab was the Rosetta Stone.
• The Rosetta Stone was key to unlocking a lost language.
• It was written in two forms of Egyptian, followed by a Greek translation.
• Scholars who could read ancient Greek used the Rosetta Stone to understand Egyptian hieroglyphs.
• In 1822, a French scholar translated Egyptian hieroglyphs using the inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone.
• The Rosetta Stone contains Greek, everyday ancient Egyptian writing called demotic, and hieroglyphs.
• Scribes were very important people.
• A Scribe statue was carved around 2400 B.C.
• Scribes sat cross-legged while writing, and used their kilts/skirts as writing surfaces.