Education in Ancient Egypt: 'Everyone Used the Same Text'
For hundreds of years, children in Ancient Egypt learned to read using The Satire of the Trades, a text in which a father gives advice to his son through descriptions of different professions. PhD candidate Judith Jurjens investigated how this worked in practice.
In The Satire of the Trades, a father takes his young son to school. Along the way, he describes various physically demanding professions. 'The father's aim is clearly to let his son know that he must work hard at school,' says Jurjens. 'If he becomes a scribe, he will be highly respected later and have an easier life.'
For almost a thousand years, Egyptian education drilled this message into pupils. Boys who went to school learned to write using The Satire of the Trades, even when its centuries-old language was probably already far removed from their own world. 'We know the text was used in this way because we have found it very often, frequently full of mistakes,' says Jurjens. 'These boys had to memorise a text that was as distant from them as Shakespeare is from us. Sometimes the garbled version they produced is even difficult for us Egyptologists to understand.'
New Methods
While it was known that The Satire of the Trades was used in education, how it was used was less clear. Jurjens looked at nearly a hundred new sources that hadn't been studied before, either because they hadn't been excavated or because they lay forgotten in storage.
'The schoolboys often wrote not just the text, but also things like the date,' she explains. 'By looking at this, you can discover, for example, that there were no fixed lesson times. Sometimes there were two days between two consecutive pieces of text, sometimes ten. There weren't weekends either; lessons could be given on any day of the week.' Additionally, pupils sometimes provided their work with an assignment. Jurjens: 'They would address their writing to their master, who was sometimes connected to the temple. This gives us more insight into who was literate.'
The teaching method also turned out to be slightly different from what was long thought, Jurjens discovered. 'We knew that a teacher often wrote down a passage from literary texts like The Satire of the Trades, which the student then had to copy, but I also found a source where the teacher wrote the first bit of the text and then asked the student to write the continuation from memory. You can see the teacher's beautiful handwriting first, followed by the scrawl of the student, who didn't quite manage to fit everything into the space and continued writing on the back.'
Three-thousand-year-old Test Papers
In the coming years, Jurjens hopes to make more discoveries like this. 'I would like to continue this research. Last October, I went to Cairo, where thousands of texts still lie waiting to be studied. I'm now writing an article about this, and I would like to make a commercial edition of my thesis. Meanwhile, I’m continuing to work as a Classical Languages teacher at a secondary school. It's quite a strange idea that my students' test papers might still be studied three thousand years from now.'