Few ancient Egyptians were given anv formal education, and the majority of the people were illiterate. For the latter, training was essentially vocational: practical trades and crafts were passed on from one generation to another, and boys often appear to have served apprenticeships under their fathers. Usually a son would be expected to take over his father’s trade or post and eventually to provide the jirincipal means of support for the family. There is little surviving evidence concerning the training or education of women, although daughters generally seem to have acquired domestic skills, such as weaving and cooking, from their mothers.
For the elite members of Egyptian society, education was essentially a matter of scribal training, since the use of writing was the kev to Egyptian administration and economic organization, and the sphere of the trained scribe extended beyond writing to the roles of manager and bureaucrat. A document from the fourteenth regnal vear of Psamtek i (664-610 liC) contains the individual signatures of fifty high officials, ranging from RRiK. sTS to VIZIERS, thus indicating the widespread literacy of the members of the ruling elite in the 26th Dynasty at least. Many of the surviving texts from the Pharaonic period were intended to function not only as literary works bur also as educational textbooks, such as the Miscellanies, and often the verv' survival of these documents is owed largelv' to constant copying as a means of accpiiring writing skills. The question of the extent of female literacy is still a matter of considerable debate; it is possible that a small ]iroportion of women could read and write, since there are surviving letters to and from women at the New Kingdom workmen's village of Deir el-Medina (r. l.500-ll()() Bc), although it is equally possible that such documents might have been written and read bv male. scRii3r..s on behalf of female patrons.
Written education was very clearlv addressed to boys, and many of the so-called ‘wisdom texts’ are presented in the form of sets of instructions spoken by fathers to sons (sec i. riiic;s and wi. sdom literature). The sons of the elite seem to have been given a broader education involving reading, writing and .i. ATt]i;.i.TfCS. Such boys would probably have been taught in a scribal school attached to some particular division of the admini. stration such as the iiou. se of life in a temple or, in the most privileged cases, at the roval court itself For most of the Pharaonic period the HtE. R.vnc; script would have been the Iirsi to be learned, with only a few selected individuals then being instructed in the more elaborate and artistic iiierogi. vpii. s. The subject of mathematics was evidently taught by means of numerous examples rather than by the use of abstract formulae, so that problems were usually broken down into a repetitive series of smaller calculations.
Learning was by rote, in that most lessons appear to have taken the form of copying out exercises and committing long passages of text to memory. The exercises took the form of model LE'l'TERS, reports and selections from ‘instructions’ such as the Book of Kemyt. Frequently such instructions presented a distinctly biased view of society, praising the scribal profession and sometimes satirizing other ways of life (see llu. UOUR). School di. sci-pline was strict, and one text includes the memorable phrase; ‘A boy’s ear is on his back - he listens when he is beaten’.
T. G. 11. Ja.ies, Pharaoh's people: scenes from life in ancient Egypt {0ioY(, 1984), 136-51.
E. .S I'Roi iiAi., Life in ancient Egypt (Cambridge,
1992) , 31-7.
G. RoiiiN. s, Uomcn in ancient Egypt (London,
1993) , 111-14.
D. Su EEMW, ‘Women’s corresp{)ndence from Dcir cl-.lcdinch’, Seslo Congresso Internazionale di Egittologia. Aiii it (Turin, 1993), 523-9.
World History
