For centuries, Europeans thought hieroglyphs were mystical symbols, each picture hiding a secret idea. The truth is both plainer and more interesting. Egyptian writing recorded a real spoken language, and once it was deciphered, ordinary voices emerged: workers complaining about late pay, a woman cutting ungrateful children out of her will, a doctor reasoning about a head wound.
How hieroglyphs work
Hieroglyphic writing appeared around 3200 BC. It mixed signs that stand for sounds with signs that show meaning. Some signs stood for one consonant, others for two or three; vowels were not written. After the sounds of a word, a scribe often added a determinative, a sign that showed what kind of thing the word meant, such as a walking pair of legs for verbs of motion. A single picture could be a word, a sound or a category depending on context.
Hieroglyphs were for monuments. For everyday writing on papyrus, scribes used hieratic, a faster cursive script derived from hieroglyphs. From about 650 BC an even more abbreviated script, demotic, took over daily business. Much later, Egyptian Christians wrote their language in Coptic, using the Greek alphabet plus a few signs from demotic. The last known hieroglyphic inscription was carved at the temple of Philae in AD 394, after which knowledge of the script faded.
Scribes and literacy
Only a small fraction of Egyptians could read and write, perhaps a few percent at most, though estimates vary. Scribes formed the backbone of the state. A popular school text, the Satire of the Trades, has a father urging his son to study by mocking every other job: the potter caked with mud, the reed cutter bitten by insects, the washerman by the crocodile river. The Satire of the Trades praised the scribe's life by mocking other trades, and it tells us both what the elite thought of manual work and how hard that work was.
The tomb builders' village
Our richest window on ordinary life is Deir el-Medina, a village on the west bank at Thebes. Deir el-Medina housed the workmen who cut and decorated the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings. Many of them could read, and they left thousands of ostraca, flakes of stone and pottery covered in notes: work rosters, laundry lists, loans, lawsuits, love poems and absence records.
The workers were paid in grain, fish and other goods. In the twenty-ninth year of Ramesses III, around 1157 BC, the rations were weeks late. The workmen of Deir el-Medina put down their tools and staged the first recorded strike in history, sitting down behind temples and declaring they were hungry. A papyrus now in Turin records their protest and the officials' attempts to calm them; rations came, but the dispute flared up again. A few decades later, papyri record trials of men who had robbed royal tombs, showing that the state's grip on even its sacred sites was slipping.
Women and the law
Egyptian society was patriarchal, and women rarely held office. Yet compared with many ancient societies, Egyptian women had broad legal standing. Women could own, buy and sell property, make contracts, bring cases in court and initiate divorce. A woman named Naunakhte, living at Deir el-Medina around 1145 BC, made a will before a court and Naunakhte disinherited the children who had not cared for her in old age, explaining that her own property was hers to give. Married women usually kept a claim to a share of joint property if the marriage ended.
Medicine
Greek writers admired Egyptian doctors, and surviving papyri show why. The Ebers Papyrus, from around 1550 BC, contains hundreds of remedies, many mixing drugs with spells. The Edwin Smith Papyrus describes cases of injury in a rational order: examination, diagnosis, and a verdict on whether to treat. It includes the earliest known written description of the brain. Egyptian medicine combined careful observation with magic, and saw no conflict between them.
Cracking the code
In 1799, French soldiers rebuilding a fort near the town of Rashid, which Europeans called Rosetta, found a broken stone slab. It carried a priestly decree of 196 BC honoring King Ptolemy V, written three times: in hieroglyphs, in demotic and in Greek. Scholars could read the Greek, so the stone offered a key. The English scholar Thomas Young made early progress on royal names. Jean-François Champollion announced the decipherment in 1822, and his success depended on his deep knowledge of Coptic, which let him hear the Egyptian sounds behind the signs.
Worked example: reading an absence list
One ostracon from Deir el-Medina lists workmen and their reasons for missing days: ill, brewing, embalming a brother, wife bleeding, stung by a scorpion, making offerings to his god. What can a historian do with such a list? First, it shows a working system of leave, with reasons recorded and apparently accepted. Second, it reveals family duties and illness as normal parts of a working life. Third, it shows that men took time off when their wives menstruated, a custom we know of almost only from such records. A dry administrative note becomes a portrait of a community. History written from monuments shows kings; history written from ostraca shows the people who built for them.