Scribe - wikipedia Scribe For other uses, see Scribe ( disambiguation ). This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. ( March 2017 ) Jean Miélot, a European author and scribe at work Modern scribes with typewriters outside Post Office, Mandi, Himachal Pradesh, India, 2010. A scribe is a person who serves as a professional copyist, especially one who made copies of manuscripts before the invention of automatic printing. The profession, previously widespread across cultures, lost most of its prominence and status with the advent of the printing press. The work of scribes can involve copying manuscripts and other texts as well as secretarial and administrative duties such as the taking of dictation and keeping of business, judicial, and historical records for kings, nobles, temples, and cities. The profession has developed into public servants, journalists, accountants, typists, and lawyers. In societies with low literacy rates, street - corner letter - writers ( and readers ) may still be found providing scribe service. Contents 1 Ancient Egypt 2 Egyptian and Mesopotamian functions 3 Judaism 3.1 Sofer 3.1. 1 Accuracy 4 Europe in the Middle Ages 4.1 Monastic scribes 5 See also 5.1 Notable scribes 6 References 7 Further reading 8 External links Ancient Egypt Egyptian scribe with papyrus scroll One of the most important professionals in ancient Egypt was a person educated in the arts of writing ( both hieroglyphics and hieratic scripts, as well as the demotic script from the second half of the first millennium BCE, which was mainly used as shorthand and for commerce ) and arithmetic. Sons of scribes were brought up in the same scribal tradition, sent to school, and inherited their fathers ' positions upon entering the civil service. Much of what is known about ancient Egypt is due to the activities of its scribes and the officials. Monumental buildings were erected under their supervision, administrative and economic activities were documented by them, and stories from Egypt 's lower classes and foreign lands survive due to scribes putting them in writing. Ancient Egyptian scribe 's palette with five depressions for pigments and four styli Scribes were considered part of the royal court, were not conscripted into the army, did not have to pay taxes, and were exempt from the heavy manual labor required of the lower classes ( corvee labor ). The scribal profession worked with painters and artisans who decorated reliefs and other building works with scenes, personages, or hieroglyphic text. The hieroglyph used to signify the scribe, to write and writings, etc., is Gardiner sign Y3, from the category of ' writings, & music '. The hieroglyph contains the scribe 's ink - mixing palette, a vertical case to hold writing - reeds, and a leather pouch to hold the black and red ink blocks. Thoth was the god credited with the invention of writing by the ancient Egyptians. He was the scribe of the gods who held knowledge of scientific and moral laws. Egyptian and mesopotamian functions Cuneiform depiction This early New Kingdom statue commemorates the scribe Minnakht ( `` Strength of Min '' ) and demonstrates how ancient scribes read papyri -- in a seated position on the floor with the text on their lap. In addition to accountancy and governmental politicking, the scribal professions branched out into literature. The first stories were probably creation stories and religious texts. Other genres evolved, such as wisdom literature, which were collections of the philosophical sayings from wise men. These contain the earliest recordings of societal thought and exploration of ideas in some length and detail. In Mesopotamia during the middle to late 3rd millennium BCE, the Sumerians originated some of this literature in the form of a series of debates. Among the list of Sumerian disputations is the Debate between bird and fish. Other Sumerian examples include the Debate between Summer and Winter where Winter wins, and disputes between the cattle and grain, the tree and the reed, silver and copper, the pickaxe and the plough, and the millstone and the gul - gul stone. An Ancient Egyptian version is The Dispute between a man and his Ba, which comes from the Middle Kingdom period. Judaism As early as the 11th century BCE, scribes in Ancient Israel, were distinguished professionals who would exercise functions which today could be associated with lawyers, journalists, government ministers, judges, or financiers. Some scribes also copied documents, but this was not necessarily part of their job. Jewish scribes at the Tomb of Ezekiel in Iraq, ca. 1914 The Jewish scribes used the following rules and procedures while creating copies of the Torah and eventually other books in the Tanakh. They could only use clean animal skins, both to write on, and even to bind manuscripts. Each column of writing could have no less than forty - eight, and no more than sixty lines. The ink must be black, and of a special recipe. They must say each word aloud while they were writing. They must wipe the pen and wash their entire bodies before writing the most Holy Name of God, YHVH, every time they wrote it. There must be a review within thirty days, and if as many as three pages required corrections, the entire manuscript had to be redone. The letters, words, and paragraphs had to be counted, and the document became invalid if two letters touched each other. The middle paragraph, word and letter must correspond to those of the original document. The documents could be stored only in sacred places ( synagogues, etc. ). As no document containing God 's Word could be destroyed, they were stored, or buried, in a genizah. Sofer Main article : Sofer ( scribe ) Sofers ( Hebrew : סופר סת '' ם ‎ ) are among the few scribes that still ply their trade by hand, writing on parchment. Renowned calligraphers, they produce the Hebrew Torah scrolls and other holy texts. Accuracy Further information : Dead Sea Scrolls Until 1948, the oldest known manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible dated back to CE 895. In 1947, a shepherd boy discovered some scrolls dated between 100 BCE and CE 100, inside a cave west of the Dead Sea. Over the next decade, more scrolls were found in caves and the discoveries became known collectively as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Every book in the Hebrew Bible was represented except Esther. Numerous copies of each book were discovered, including 25 copies of the book of Deuteronomy. While there are other items found among the Dead Sea Scrolls not currently in the Hebrew Bible, and many variations and errors occurred while they were copied down, the texts on the whole testify to the accuracy of the scribes. The Dead Sea Scrolls are currently the best route of comparison to the accuracy and consistency of translation for the Hebrew Bible because they are the oldest out of any Biblical text currently known. Europe in the middle Ages Monastic scribes In the Middle Ages every book was made by hand. Specially trained monks, or scribes, had to carefully cut sheets of parchment, make the ink, write the script, bind the pages, and create a cover to protect the script. This was all accomplished in a monastic writing room called a scriptorium which was kept very quiet so scribes could maintain concentration. Scribes woke to morning bells before dawn and worked until the evening bells, with a lunch break in between. They worked every day except for the Sabbath. The primary purpose of these scribes was to promote the ideas of the Christian Church, so they mostly copied classical and religious works. These recreations were often written in calligraphy and featured rich illustrations, making the process incredibly time consuming. It typically took a scribe fifteen months to copy a Bible. Such books were written on parchment or vellum made from treated hides of sheep, goats, or calves. The overall process was too extensive and costly for books to become widespread during this period. Although scribes were only able to work in daylight, due to the expense of candles and the rather poor lighting they provided, monastic scribes were still able to produce three to four pages of work per day. See also Asemic writing Scrivener Worshipful Company of Scriveners The Seated Scribe List of ancient Egyptian scribes Notable scribes Ahmes Amat - Mamu Baruch Dubhaltach MacFhirbhisigh Máel Muire mac Céilechair Sidney Rigdon Sin - liqe - unninni References Jump up ^ `` the definition of scribe ''. Dictionary.com. Retrieved 2017 - 06 - 06. Jump up ^ Rice, Michael ( 1999 ). Who 's Who in Ancient Egypt. London : Routledge. p. lvi. ISBN 0415154480. Jump up ^ Damerow, Peter ( 1996 ). Abstraction and Representation : Essays on the Cultural Evolution of Thinking. Dordrecht : Kluwer. pp. 188 --. ISBN 0792338162. Jump up ^ Carr, David M. ( 2005 ). Writing on the Tablet of the Heart : Origins of Scripture and Literature. Oxford : Oxford University Press. p. 66. ISBN 0195172973. ^ Jump up to : Kemp, Barry J. ( 2006 ). Ancient Egypt : Anatomy of a Civilization ( 2nd ed. ). London : Routledge. p. 180. ISBN 0415235499. Jump up ^ Budge, E.A. Wallis ( 1969 ). The Gods of the Egyptians. New York : Dover Publications. ISBN 0486220559. Jump up ^ `` The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature ''. Etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk. 2006 - 12 - 19. Retrieved 2017 - 03 - 09. Jump up ^ `` The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature ''. Etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk. 2006 - 12 - 19. Retrieved 2017 - 03 - 09. Jump up ^ `` Hebrew language, alphabet and pronunciation ''. Omniglot.com. Retrieved 2017 - 03 - 09. Jump up ^ Metzger, Bruce M. ; Coogan, Michael D. ( 1993 ). The Oxford Companion to the Bible ( 1st ed. ). Oxford : Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195046458. Jump up ^ Johnson, Paul ( 1993 ). A History of the Jews ( 2nd ed. ). London : Phoenix. p. 91. ISBN 185799096X. ^ Jump up to : Pavlik, John ; McIntosh, Shawn ( 2017 ). Converging Media : A New Introduction to Mass Communication. Oxford : Oxford University Press. pp. 66 -- 67. ISBN 9780190271510. ^ Jump up to : Lyons, Martyn ( 2011 ). Books : A Living History. Los Angeles : J. Paul Getty Museum. pp. 36 -- 38. ISBN 9781606060834. Further reading Henri - Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing, University of Chicago Press 1995, ISBN 0 - 226 - 50836 - 6 Leila Avrin, Scribes, Scripts and Books, ALA Publishing 2010, ISBN 978 - 0838910382 External links Wikimedia Commons has media related to Scribes. Wikimedia Commons has media related to Scribes of Ancient Egypt. Some Old Egyptian Librarians, Ernest Gushing Richardson, Charles Sribners, 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain : Easton, Matthew George ( 1897 ). `` ``. Easton 's Bible Dictionary ( New and revised ed. ). T. Nelson and Sons. Jewish scribes ( soferim ) Lists of scribes Great Assembly List of sofers Related articles Get ( divorce document ) Gevil Ketubah Klaf Ktav Stam Mezuzah Sefer Torah Tefillin ( amulet ) Category : Jewish scribes ( soferim ) GND : 4165276 - 9 Retrieved from `` https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Scribe&oldid=819670168 '' Categories : Ancient Egyptian culture Clay tablets Historical legal occupations Obsolete occupations Scribes Textual scholarship Writing occupations Hidden categories : Articles needing additional references from March 2017 All articles needing additional references All articles with unsourced statements Articles with unsourced statements from June 2014 Wikipedia articles needing page number citations from March 2017 Articles with unsourced statements from February 2015 Articles containing Hebrew - language text Commons category with local link different than on Wikidata Articles using Cite EBD template without article name Wikipedia articles incorporating text from Easton 's Bible Dictionary Wikipedia articles with GND identifiers Talk Contents About Wikipedia Azərbaycanca Беларуская Català Čeština Deutsch Español Esperanto فارسی Français Galego 한국어 Bahasa Indonesia Italiano עברית Қазақша Kiswahili Bahasa Melayu Nederlands Oʻzbekcha / ўзбекча Polski Português Română Русский Simple English Српски / srpski Srpskohrvatski / српскохрватски Svenska Tagalog తెలుగు Українська Tiếng Việt 中文 Edit links This page was last edited on 10 January 2018, at 17 : 35. 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Question: what role did scribes play in ancient egypt
Answer: buildings were erected under their supervision,[5] administrative and economic activities were documented by them, and stories from Egypt's lower classes and foreign lands survive due to scribes putting them in writing