Scribe

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A scribe (or scrivener) is a person who writes books or documents by hand. The profession lost most of its importance with the advent of printing.

Ancient Egyptian scribes

The Ancient Egyptian scribe (MdC transliteration zXA.w) was a person educated in the arts of writing (using both hieroglyphics and hieratic scripts, and from the second half of the first millennium BCE also the demotic script) and arithmetics. He was generally male, belonged socially to what we would refer to as a Middle Class elite, and was employed in the bureaucratic administration of the pharaonic state, of its army, and of the temples. Sons of scribes were brought up in the same scribal tradition, sent to school and, upon entering the civil service, inherited their fathers' positions.

Much of what is known about ancient Egypt is due to the activities of its scribes. Monumental buildings were erected under their supervision, administrative and economic activities were documented by them, and tales from the mouths of Egypt's lower classes or from foreign lands survive thanks to scribes putting them in writing.

The profession, first associated with the goddess Seshat, became restricted to males in the later dynasties.

The scribal profession had companion professions, the painters and artisans who decorated tombs, buildings, furniture, statuary, and other relics with pictures and hieroglyphic text.

Mesopotamian scribes

Writing in early Mesopotamia seems to have grown out of the need to document economic transactions, and consisted often in lists which scribes knowledgable in writing and arithmetics engraved in cuneiform letters into tablets of clay. Apart from administration and accountancy, Mesopotamian scribes observed the sky and wrote literary works. They wrote on papyrus paper.

Sofer

A Sofer (סופר סת”ם) are among the few scribes that still ply their trade by hand. Renowned calligraphers, they produce the Hebrew Torah scrolls and other holy texts by hand to this day.they wrote on papyrus which is a reed grown along the Nile river.

See also

• Worshipful Company of Scriveners
• Elder (religious)
• Scrivener
• The Seated Scribe
• Uncial
• Notable scribes:
• Amat-Mamu
• Bartleby the Scrivener
• Baruch
• Dubhaltach MacFhirbhisigh
• Ibn Warraq
• John Barbour
• Máel Muire mac Céilechair
• John Milton
• Michael William Balfe
• Sidney Rigdon

References

Sources

• Barry J. Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization, Routledge 2006, ISBN 0415235499, pp.166ff.
• Henri-Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing, University of Chicago Press 1995, ISBN 0226508366
• David McLain Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature, Oxford University Press collyn anderson2005, ISBN 0195172973

Footnotes

External links

• Catholic Encyclopedia

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Last updated on Sunday March 09, 2008 at 05:50:17 PDT (GMT -0700)
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