If you imagine Egyptian writing as carved temple walls, you see only a small part of it. Hieratic, in ink, was the working script of Egypt: the script of offices, homes, schools and libraries.
Key idea
Letters, accounts, legal records, lists of workers, mathematics, medicine, literature and religious books were all written in hieratic, on papyrus, on wooden boards and on ostraca, potsherds and flakes of limestone used as cheap notepaper.
Why it works
Papyrus was valuable and stone carving was slow, so everyday writing went on whatever was at hand. A potsherd costs nothing; a scribe could jot a laundry list, a receipt or a school exercise on it. Most of what survives is from dry places: desert cemeteries, and villages like Deir el-Medina, where the workmen who cut the royal tombs left thousands of ostraca.
| Document | Date | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Diary of Merer | c. 2560 BC (reign of Khufu) | the oldest inscribed papyri known: an official's logbook of shipping limestone from the Tura quarries to Giza; found at Wadi al-Jarf in 2013 |
| Instruction of Ptahhotep (Papyrus Prisse) | Middle Kingdom copy | wisdom literature: advice from a vizier to his son |
| Westcar Papyrus | Second Intermediate Period copy | tales of magicians told at the court of Khufu |
| Rhind Mathematical Papyrus | c. 1550 BC (copied by the scribe Ahmose) | mathematical problems with worked answers |
| Ebers Papyrus | c. 1550 BC | a long medical handbook |
| Turin King List | New Kingdom (Ramesside) | a list of kings with the lengths of their reigns |
| Deir el-Medina ostraca | New Kingdom | work records, letters, receipts, school exercises and literary extracts |
Worked example: Why ostraca?
Why did a workman at Deir el-Medina write a receipt on a flake of limestone instead of papyrus?
- Papyrus had to be made from reeds and was valuable.
- Limestone flakes were everywhere around the tombs the workmen were cutting.
- For a short note, a free flake did the job: an ostracon.
Answer: Because it was free and at hand; papyrus was costly.
Worked example: Telling text types apart
A hieratic papyrus lists numbered problems, each followed by steps and an answer. What kind of text is it, and which famous example is like it?
- Numbered problems with worked steps are a teaching text in mathematics.
- The Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, copied c. 1550 BC, is the best-known example.
Answer: A mathematical text, like the Rhind Papyrus.
Common mistake
Thinking most Egyptian writing was carved. Most of it was written in ink, in hieratic. Carvings survive well and are easy to see; papyri and ostraca survive mostly in dry places, so even what we have is a fraction.