by Will Durant
6. Letters
Education—Schools of government—Paper and ink—Stages in the development of writing—Forms of Egyptian writing
The priests imparted rudimentary instruction to the children of the well-to-do in schools attached to the temples, as in the Roman Catholic parishes of our age.130 One high-priest, who was what we should term Minister or Secretary of Education, calls himself “Chief of the Royal Stable of Instruction.”131 In the ruins of a school which was apparently part of the Ramesseum a large number of shells has been found, still bearing the lessons of the ancient pedagogue. The teacher’s function was to produce scribes for the clerical work of the state. To stimulate his pupils he wrote eloquent essays on the advantages of education. “Give thy heart to learning, and love her like a mother,” says one edifying papyrus, “for there is nothing so precious as learning.” “Behold,” says another, “there is no profession that is not governed; it is only the learned man who rules himself.” It is a misfortune to be a soldier, writes an early bookworm; it is a weariness to till the earth; the only happiness is “to turn the heart to books during the daytime and to read during the night.”132
Copy-books survive from the days of the Empire with the corrections of the masters still adorning the margins; the abundance of errors would console the modern schoolboy.133 The chief method of instruction was the dictation or copying of texts, which were written upon potsherds or limestone flakes.134 The subjects were largely commercial, for the Egyptians were the first and greatest utilitarians; but the chief topic of pedagogic discourse was virtue, and the chief problem, as ever, was discipline. “Do not spend thy time in wishing, or thou wilt come to a bad end,” we read in one of the copy-books. “Let thy mouth read the book in thy hand; take advice from those who know more than thou dost”—this last is probably one of the oldest phrases in any language. Discipline was vigorous, and based upon the simplest principles. “The youth has a back,” says a euphemistic manuscript, “and attends when he is beaten, . . . for the ears of the young are placed on the back.” A pupil writes to his former teacher: “Thou didst beat my back, and thy instructions went into my ear.” That this animal-training did not always succeed appears from a papyrus in which a teacher laments that his former pupils love books much less than beer.135
Nevertheless, a large number of the temple students were graduated from the hands of the priest to high schools attached to the offices of the state treasury. There, in the first known School of Government, the young scribes were instructed in public administration. On graduating they were apprenticed to officials, who taught them through plenty of work. Perhaps it was a better way of securing and training public servants than our modern selection of them by popularity and subserviency, and the noise of the hustings. In this manner Egypt and Babylonia developed, more or less simultaneously, the earliest school-systems in history;136 not till the nineteenth century of our era was the public instruction of the young to be so well organized again.
In the higher grades the student was allowed to use paper—one of the main items of Egyptian trade, and one of the permanent gifts of Egypt to the world. The stem of the papyrus plant was cut into strips, other strips were placed crosswise upon these, the sheet was pressed, and paper, the very stuff (and nonsense) of civilization, was made.137 How well they made it may be judged from the fact that manuscripts written by them five thousand years ago are still intact and legible. Sheets were combined into books by gumming the right edge of one sheet to the left edge of the next; in this way rolls were produced which were sometimes forty yards in length; they were seldom longer, for there were no verbose historians in Egypt. Ink, black and indestructible, was made by mixing water with soot and vegetable gums on a wooden palette; the pen was a simple reed, fashioned at the tip into a tiny brush.138
With these modern instruments the Egyptians wrote the most ancient of literatures. Their language had probably come in from Asia; the oldest specimens of it show many Semitic affinities.139 The earliest writing was apparently pictographic—an object was represented by drawing a picture of it: e.g., the word for house (Egyptian per) was indicated by a small rectangle with an opening on one of the long sides. As some ideas were too abstract to be literally pictured, pictography passed into ideography: certain pictures were by custom and convention used to represent not the objects pictured but the ideas suggested by them; so the forepart of a lion meant supremacy (as in the Sphinx), a wasp meant royalty, and a tadpole stood for thousands. As a further development along this line, abstract ideas, which had at first resisted representation, were indicated by picturing objects whose names happened to resemble the spoken words that corresponded to the ideas; so the picture of a lute came to mean not only lute, but good, because the Egyptian word-sound for lute—nefer—resembled the word-sound for good—nofer. Queer rebus combinations grew out of these homonyms—words of like sound but different meanings. Since the verb to be was expressed in the spoken language by the sound khopiru, the scribe, being puzzled to find a picture for so intangible a conception, split the word into parts, kho-pi-ru, expressed these by picturing in succession a sieve (called in the spoken language khau), a mat (pi), and a mouth (ru); use and wont, which sanctify so many absurdities, soon made this strange assortment of characters suggest the idea of being. In this way the Egyptian arrived at the syllable, the syllabic sign, and the syllabary—i.e., a collection of syllabic signs; and by dividing difficult words into syllables, finding homonyms for these, and drawing in combination the objects suggested by these syllabic sounds, he was able, in the course of time, to make the hieroglyphic signs convey almost any idea.
Only one step remained—to invent letters. The sign for a house meant at first the word for house—per; then it meant the sound per, or p-r with any vowel in between, as a syllable in any word. Then the picture was shortened, and used to represent the sound po, pa, pu, pe or pi in any word; and since vowels were never written, this was equivalent to having a character for P. By a like development the sign for a hand (Egyptian dot) came to mean do, da, etc., finally D; the sign for mouth (ro or ru) came to mean R; the sign for snake (zt) became Z; the sign for lake (shy) became Sh. . . . The result was an alphabet of twenty-four consonants, which passed with Egyptian and Phoenician trade to all quarters of the Mediterranean, and came down, via Greece and Rome, as one of the most precious parts of our Oriental heritage.140 Hieroglyphics are as old as the earliest dynasties; alphabetic characters appear first in inscriptions left by the Egyptians in the mines of the Sinai peninsula, variously dated at 2500 and 1500 B.C.141*
Whether wisely or not, the Egyptians never adopted a completely alphabetic writing; like modern stenographers they mingled pictographs, ideographs and syllabic signs with their letters to the very end of their civilization. This has made it difficult for scholars to read Egyptian, but it is quite conceivable that such a medley of longhand and shorthand facilitated the business of writing for those Egyptians who could spare the time to learn it. Since English speech is no honorable guide to English spelling, it is probably as difficult for a contemporary lad to learn the devious ways of English orthography as it was for the Egyptian scribe to memorize by use the five hundred hieroglyphs, their secondary syllabic meanings, and their tertiary alphabetic uses. In the course of time a more rapid and sketchy form of writing was developed for manuscripts, as distinguished from the careful “sacred carvings” of the monuments. Since this corruption of hieroglyphic was first made by the priests and the temple scribes, it was called by the Greeks hieratic; but it soon passed into common use for public, commercial and private documents. A still more abbreviated and careless form of this script was developed by the common people, and therefore came to be known as demotic. On the monuments, however, the Egyptian insisted on having his lordly and lovely hieroglyphic—perhaps the most picturesque form of writing ever made.
7. Literature
Texts and libraries—The Egyptian Sinbad—The Story of Sinuhe—Fiction—An amorous fragment—Love poems—His
tory—A literary revolution
Most of the literature that survives from ancient Egypt is written in hieratic script. Little of it remains, and we are forced to estimate it from the fragments that do it only the blind justice of chance; perhaps time destroyed the Shakespeares of Egypt, and preserved only the poets laureate. A great official of the Fourth Dynasty is called on his tomb “Scribe of the House of Books”;142 we cannot tell whether this primeval library was a repository of literature, or only a dusty storehouse of public records and documents. The oldest extant Egyptian literature consists of the “Pyramid Texts”—pious matter engraved on the walls in five pyramids of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties.*143 Libraries have come down to us from as far back as 2000 B.C.—papyri rolled and packed in jars, labeled, and ranged on shelves;145 in one such jar was found the oldest form of the story of Sinbad the Sailor, or, as we might rather call it, Robinson Crusoe.
“The Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor” is a simple autobiographical fragment, full of life and feeling. “How glad is he,” says this ancient mariner, in a line reminiscent of Dante, “that relateth what he hath experienced when the calamity hath passed!”
I will relate to thee something that was experienced by me myself, when I had set out for the mines of the Sovereign and had gone down to the sea in a ship of 180 feet in length and 60 feet in breadth; and therein were 120 sailors of the pick of Egypt. They scanned the sky, they scanned the earth, and their hearts were more . . . than those of lions. They foretold a storm or ever it came, and a tempest when as yet it was not.
A storm burst while we were yet at sea. . . . We flew before the wind and it made . . . a wave eight cubits high. . . .
Then the ship perished, and of them that were in it not one survived. And I was cast onto an island by a wave of the sea, and I spent three days alone with mine heart as my companion. I slept under the shelter of a tree, and embraced the shade. Then I stretched forth my feet in order to find out what I could put into my mouth. I found figs and vines there, and all manner of fine leeks. . . . There were fish there and fowl, and there was nothing that was not in it. . . . When I had made me a fire-drill I kindled a fire and made a burnt-offering for the gods.146
Another tale recounts the adventures of Sinuhe, a public official who flees from Egypt at the death of Amenemhet I, wanders from country to country of the Near East, and, despite prosperity and honors there, suffers unbearably from lonesomeness for his native land. At last he gives up riches, and makes his way through many hardships back to Egypt.
O God, whosoever thou art, that didst ordain this flight, bring me again to the House (i.e., the Pharaoh). Peradventure thou wilt suffer me to see the place wherein mine heart dwelleth. What is a greater matter than that my corpse should be buried in the land wherein I was born? Come to mine aid! May good befall, may God show me mercy!
In the sequel we find him home again, weary and dusty with many miles of desert travel, and fearful lest the Pharaoh reprove him for his long absence from a land which, like all others, looked upon itself as the only civilized country in the world. But the Pharaoh forgives him, and extends to him every cosmetic courtesy:
I was placed in the house of a king’s son, in which there was noble equipment, and a bath was therein. . . . Years were made to pass away from my body; I was shaved (?) and my hair was combed (?). A load (of dirt?) was given over to the desert, and the (filthy) clothes to the sand-farers. And I was arrayed in finest linen, and anointed with the best oil.147
Short stories are diverse and plentiful in the fragments that have come down to us of Egyptian literature. There are marvelous tales of ghosts, miracles, and other fascinating concoctions, as credible as the detective stories that satisfy modern statesmen; there are high-sounding romances of princes and princesses, kings and queens, including the oldest known form of the tale of Cinderella, her exquisite foot, her wandering slipper, and her royal-hymeneal dénouement;148 there are fables of animals illustrating by their conduct the foibles and passions of humanity, and pointing morals sagely149—a kind of premonitory plagiarism from Æsop and La Fontaine. Typical of the Egyptian mingling of natural and supernatural is the tale of Anupu and Bitiu, older and younger brothers, who live happily on their farm until Anupu’s wife falls in love with Bitiu, is repulsed by him, and revenges herself by accusing him, to his brother, of having offered her violence. Gods and crocodiles come to Bitiu’s aid against Anupu; but Bitiu, disgusted with mankind, mutilates himself to prove his innocence, retires Timon-like to the woods, and places his heart unreachably high on the topmost flower of a tree. The gods, pitying his loneliness, create for him a wife of such beauty that the Nile falls in love with her, and steals a lock of her hair. Drifting down the stream, the lock is found by the Pharaoh, who, intoxicated by its scent, commands his henchmen to find the owner. She is found and brought to him, and he marries her. Jealous of Bitiu he sends men to cut down the tree on which Bitiu has placed his heart. The tree is cut down, and as the flower touches the earth Bitiu dies.150 How little the taste of our ancestors differed from our own!
The early literature of the Egyptians is largely religious; and the oldest Egyptian poems are the hymns of the Pyramid Texts. Their form is also the most ancient poetic form known to us—that “parallelism of members,” or repetition of the thought in different phrase, which the Hebrew poets adopted from the Egyptians and Babylonians, and immortalized in the Psalms.151 As the Old passes into the Middle Kingdom, the literature tends to become secular and “profane.” We catch some glimpse of a lost body of amorous literature in a fragment preserved to us through the laziness of a Middle Kingdom scribe who did not complete his task of wiping clear an old papyrus, but left legible some twenty-five lines that tell of a simple shepherd’s encounter with a goddess. “This goddess,” says the story, “met with him as he wended his way to the pool, and she had stripped off her clothes and disarrayed her hair.” The shepherd reports the matter cautiously:
“Behold ye, when I went down to the swamp. . . . I saw a woman therein, and she looked not like a mortal being. My hair stood on end when I saw her tresses, because her color was so bright. Never will I do what she said; awe of her is in my body.”152
The love songs abound in number and beauty, but as they celebrate chiefly the amours of brothers and sisters they will shock or amuse the modern ear. One collection is called “The Beautiful Joyous Songs of thy sister whom thy heart loves, who walks in the fields.” An ostracon or shell dating back to the Nineteenth or Twentieth Dynasty plays a modern theme on the ancient chords of desire:
The love of my beloved leaps on the bank of the stream.
A crocodile lies in the shadows;
Yet I go down into the water, and breast the wave.
My courage is high on the stream,
And the water is as land to my feet.
It is her love that makes me strong.
She is a book of spells to me.
When I behold my beloved coming my heart is glad,
My arms are spread apart to embrace her;
My heart rejoices forever . . . since my beloved came.
When I embrace her I am as one who is in Incense Land,
As one who carries perfumes.
When I kiss her, her lips are opened,
And I am made merry without beer.
Would that I were her Negress slave who is in attendance on her;
So should I behold the hue of all her limbs.153
The lines have been arbitrarily divided here; we cannot tell from the external form of the original that it is verse. The Egyptians knew that music and feeling are the twin essences of poetry; if these were present, the outward shape did not matter. Often, however, the rhythm was accentuated, as we have seen, by “parallelism of members.” Sometimes the poet used the device of beginning every sentence or stanza with the same word; sometimes he played like a punster with like sounds meaning unlike or incongruous things; and it is clear from the texts that the trick of alliteration is as old as the Pyramids.154 Th
ese simple forms were enough; with them the Egyptian poet could express almost every shade of that “romantic” love which Nietzsche supposed was an invention of the Troubadours. The Harris Papyrus shows that such sentiments could be expressed by a woman as well as by a man:
I am thy first sister,
And thou art to me as the garden
Which I have planted with flowers
And all sweet-smelling herbs.
I directed a canal into it,
That thou mightest dip thy hand into it
When the north wind blows cool.
The beautiful place where we take a walk,
When thy hand rests within mine,
With thoughtful mind and joyous heart
Because we walk together.
It is intoxicating to me to hear thy voice,
And my life depends upon hearing thee.
Whenever I see thee
It is better to me than food or drink.155
All in all it is astonishing how varied the fragments are. Formal letters, legal documents, historical narratives, magic formulas, laborious hymns, books of devotion, songs of love and war, romantic novelettes, moral exhortations, philosophical treatises—everything is represented here except epic and drama, and even of these one might by stretching a point find instances. The story of Rameses II’s dashing victories, engraved patiently in verse upon brick after brick of the great pylon at Luxor, is epic at least in length and dulness. In another inscription Rameses IV boasts that in a play he had defended Osiris from Set, and had recalled Osiris to life.156 Our knowledge does not allow us to amplify this hint.