Carved from limestone, the statue stands about 21 inches tall. The eyes are made from magnesite and rock crystal and the nipples with wooden studs.
The Seated Scribe was discovered by the famous French archaeologist, Auguste Mariette, in 1850. He found it buried in the sand at the vast necropolis of Saqqara. Unfortunately, the details of its discovery were lost with Mariette’s field notes when the Cairo Museum flooded in 1878. The sculpture is one of the most famous pieces on display in the Louvre. Skillfully sculpted from limestone, particular care was given to the face and hands of the scribe. Through a careful selection of materials, the sculptor has succeeded in giving the sculptor a remarkably life-like gaze: the eyeballs are made from magnesite, a white translucent stone, and the pupils from rock crystal. The work is generally thought to date to the Fourth Dynasty.
The face communicates intelligence and acuity.
The Scribal Profession
Egyptologist Barry Kemp describes the bureaucratic system that controlled Egypt for most of its history.
A developed bureaucratic system reveals and actively promotes a specific human trait: a deep satisfaction in devising routines for measuring, inspecting, checking, and thus as far as possible controlling other people’s activities. This is a passive and orderly exercise of power in contrast to direct coercion.1Kemp 2006, 165
Through the careful maintenance of records, scribes became the backbone of this “passive” bureaucracy. They tended therefore to occupy powerful positions in Egyptian society. Here is Kemp again,
In Egypt scribes were not only amongst the elite, they knew it, and said so plainly. ‘Be a scribe’, ran the advice of teachers, ‘it saves you from toil, it protects you from all manner of labour.’ ‘Be a scribe. Your limbs will be sleek, your hands will grow soft. You will go forth in white clothes, honoured, with courtiers saluting you.’2Kemp 2006, 165
The Seated Scribe has the soft, flabby body of a man who has retreated from a life of labour and taken refuge in the scribal profession. Most scribes were not literary geniuses; they were bookkeepers, whose skills were employed tracking the movement of commodities from field, to storehouse, to bakery or brewery. The circle was completed when field workers received payments of bread and beer. In the highly regulated system which existed in Egypt, even grain harvested from the temple estates was first collected into palace storehouses before it was distributed back to the temples.3Kemp 2006,
Sitting atop the hieroglyph for “mountain,” a scribe writes down the amount of grain gathered from the harvest. From a tomb at El Kab, near Thebes, belonging to the New Kingdom period.
The State and the Storehouse
If the bureaucratic system in Egypt was a passive system of control, as Kemp suggests, it could also be oppressive. In his study of Egypt during the Ptolemaic period, Tcherikover notes that one could not own a goose without it being duly noted and written down by a scribe.
The king drew especially large profits from a system of monopolies. Nearly all edibles, such as salt, olive oil, honey and fish, as well as woolens and flax, blankets, cushions, towels and linens, all sorts of drugs and cosmetics, gold and silver ornaments, papyrus and the like-all were made and sold under the supervision of government officials, and a severe penalty threatened anyone daring to infringe upon the king’s profits…. Such were the elements of the Ptolemaic kingdom, which may therefore justly be described in modern terms as a “totalitarian state.”4Tcherikover 1999, 14 ff.
Such a regimented system was capable of creating order so long as it had a subservient population. Peasants brought the fruit of their labour to the temple, not in the form of a tithe or free-will offering, but as rent, knowing that the land allotted to them by the king could just as easily be taken from them. The peasant might also be employed in the king’s corvee, building his pyramid or some other work project. In either case, the peasant owned neither his land or his labour. His payment was in rations duly noted by a scribe and distributed from storerooms controlled by the state. No money exchanged hands, only numbers in a ledger book.5Kemp 2006, 172
A portion of a wall mural showing scribes recording the collection of taxes and the punishment meted out for non-payment.
A Book is Greater than a Pyramid
Although many scribes no doubt entered the profession motivated by a desire to escape a life of labour, there must have been a few who genuinely wished to learn what was written on the dusty scrolls kept in the temple libraries. Thus the wise elder urges the young man to become a scribe so that he may become wise like the great sages of the past who mastered the arts of medicine and architecture.
Set your heart on being a scribe…
A book is of greater value than a house, than the tombs in the West.
It is more beautiful than a castle, or than a stela in a temple.
Is there anyone among us to equal Zedefra?
Is there anyone here to equal Imhotep?
There is no man in our times like Nefri and Akhte, who is the greatest of all. I also mention the names of Ptahzehuit and Khakhaeperresenb. Is there a man to equal Ptahhotep, or even Kaires?6Chester Beatty Papyrus ed. A.H. Gardiner, IV, No. 3; cited in Montet 2000, 205
Pierre Montet notes that the individuals named in this text are the first professional writers known to history. Perhaps the Seated Scribe was one of them!
Kemp, B. J.
Ancient Egypt : Anatomy of a Civilization.
New York: Routledge, 2006. Link
Montet, Pierre.
Eternal Egypt.
London: Phoenix Press, 2000.
Tcherikover, Victor.
Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews.
Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers, 1999.