WHO GOT TO WRITE IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
By Jovan Stipić
Writing is power.
No, I am not saying this only because I am a published author whose books you can find here, but as a statement of fact.
Within many ancient societies, literacy wasn’t a skill but a privilege tightly guarded by the ruling classes, religious elites, and bureaucratic institutions. Those who knew how to write shaped truth itself. Fortunately, everyone can write today. Which means everyone thinks their opinions should be read, every day.
Those who wrote throughout history defined what lasted, because unlike oral tradition, it was far harder to change something once it was written. The written word was seen as eternal.
That is to say, the scribes of history didn’t really record what happened. They authored the events that suited the ruling classes. Likewise, just as the written word was glorified as a way of making one immortal, the erasure of someone’s name from history books meant that person had effectively been removed from existence.
Sounds like something a petty, toxic ex would do.
One of the most interesting examples of this comes from ancient Egypt, partly because Egypt truly was fascinating and partly because we still seem to fetishize everything they did.
The scribes, called sesh, were a privileged elite who trained from early youth in special schools to write, transcribe, and copy their own and other people’s texts. Yet, when I did the same in grade school, I got punished.
Double standards, it seems.
Most were men from non-noble but literate families, and they had a clear career path: temple scribe → court scribe → administrator → overseer. They used hieratic script (a cursive form of hieroglyphs) for daily administration, and hieroglyphs for ceremonial or sacred inscriptions. They wrote everything from mortuary texts to royal decrees, and they were also responsible for damnatio memoriae, the erasure of people from history, as mentioned earlier.
They didn’t just write history. They decided what counted as history.
Again, like a petty, toxic ex.