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Performing administrative tasks in ancient Egypt may not be difficult enough, but new research has shown that being a scribe left its mark on the skeletons of the men who held those privileged positions.
The scribes were high-status men who had the ability to write and were part of the 1% of the population who were literate, according to the authors of a new study published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports.
But the tasks done by the scribes were repetitive. Today, office workers look for chairs that support ergonomics for long hours sitting at a desk. Egyptian men took one in three jobs that became an occupational hazard, the study’s authors found.
Researchers analyzed the remains of 69 men buried at a necropolis in Abusir, Egypt, between 2700 BC and 2180 BC. Thirty of the men were scribes, as marked on their tombs, and their skeletons had more severe changes within specific areas of their bodies than the other remains.
The results open a new window on the life of scribes in Ancient Egypt in the third millennium BC.
Being a scribe
The remains analyzed in the study belonged to men who lived in ancient Egypt during the Old Kingdom, or the era of the pyramid builders, said study coauthor Veronika Dulíková, an Egyptologist within the Czech Institute of Egyptology at Charles University in Prague.
Records from that time indicate to researchers that elite sons were educated at the royal court.
“At a very young age, as teenagers, they enlisted to serve in entry-level positions in various administrative offices to receive the necessary training to advance their careers,” Dulíková said in an email. “They then moved up the hierarchy of the offices they had.”
At the time, literacy was in its infancy, she said. “There was no need for a largely agricultural population to be able to read and write.”
Scribes in ancient Egypt worked jobs that were not too dissimilar to government jobs in modern society.
“These people belonged to the elite of the time and were the backbone of the state administration,” said Dulíková. “Literates worked in important government offices such as the treasury (today’s Ministry of Finance), the Grange (today’s Ministry of Agriculture), the royal document department, etc. They also played an important role in the collection of taxes, in the temple. cult and in royal pyramid complexes.”
The roles of scribes were vital in ancient Egyptian society, but the records they left behind were even more valuable to researchers.
“The ancient Egyptians kept careful records of everything, and then deposited them in an archive,” said Dulíková. “When we find such a paper archive today, it is a treasure. From such records we can learn a lot about the functioning of the temple complex, about the services of the officials in the temples, about the form of their salaries, about the furniture or tools that were stored in the storehouses of the temple, etc.
The Egyptians were so meticulous that they included written records directly in the tombs to identify the jobs, occupations and ranks of the men buried there, which helped researchers identify the administrative scribes.
Skeleton tips
The study’s lead author Petra Brukner Havelková, an anthropologist at the National Museum in Prague, has specialized in identifying skeletal markers of activity for nearly 20 years.
When Havelková looked at the remains found in Abusir and saw examples of stress on the cervical spines, she realized that there could be a connection between the skeletal decay and the men’s occupations.
The first skeletons of the people of the Old Kingdom were discovered in 1976 at Abusir, but it took decades to find more.
Having been unable to find any research on degenerative joint and bone disease in ancient scribes, Havelková joined forces with Dulíková and other colleagues to conduct a study of their own. They began marking changes in scribe skeletons in 2009, but it took another ten years to find enough remains for a comprehensive study.
During their analysis, the researchers found that the scribes had a higher incidence of osteoarthritis, or a disease in which joint tissue breaks down over time.
These changes were observed in the joints that connect the lower jaw to the skull, the right coccyx, the tip of the upper right arm bone connected to the shoulder, the bottom of the thigh, the bones of the right thumb and throughout the spine.
There were also significant changes, such as flattening of the bone on the lower part of the right ankle and indentation on both knees.
Most of the skeletal changes could be traced to the positions adopted by the scribes in the course of their work, which is recorded on tomb wall decorations and sculptures. The scribes were standing, kneeling or sitting with their legs crossed for long periods of time while writing.
If they sat cross-legged, their extended skirts acted as a table, according to the researchers. In this position, they probably sat for hours, head bent forward with their arms unsupported and their spines flexed.
But skeletal changes in their knees, hips and ankles indicate that they are squatting or crouching which many scribes preferred. The scribes probably sat with their left legs in a kneeling or crossed position, with their right legs bent and knees pointing upwards.
Surprise jaw joint
The scribes tied the ends of the rush stems they used for writing implements to create brush heads which they sometimes held in a pinch-like position.
The chewing explains why their jaws were overloaded, and the skeletal changes observed in their right thumbs were likely caused by long hours of writing, the researchers said.
The researchers were less surprised to find changes in the lower limbs because sitting and kneeling cross-legged was common among the entire population at the time, but they did not expect the changes.
“The biggest surprise was the heavy overloading of the jaw joints in the scribes,” Havelková said in an email. “This was something we hadn’t even hypothesized about at first, focusing mainly on the rest of the skeleton outside the skull.”
Dr. asked Sonia Zakrzewski, professor of bioarchaeology and bioanthropology at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, the research “innovative.” She was not involved in the study.
“He synthesizes the Egyptian record (including the pictorial and sculptural evidence) with the bioarchaeological evidence of activity-related skeletal change to argue that the changes in muscle attachment sites and the location of arthritic changes indicate that the individuals involved are scribes,” Zakrzewski said in an email.
“One of the main issues we face in bioarchaeology is that we don’t know exactly how much, how long and/or how often activities need to occur for skeletal change to occur — but we do know that our bodies reshaped in response. such a song. The integration of other aspects of archeology with the skeletal record is needed in bioarchaeology and this study is a very nice example of that kind of approach. “
Now, the researchers want to collaborate with other groups to study and analyze scribes and other individuals throughout various ancient Egyptian cemeteries, such as the burial site at Saqqara.
“Together with our ‘neighbors’ at Saqqara, we have a common goal, which is to learn as much as possible about the lives and deaths of the people who lived in the time of the pyramid builders,” said Havelková.
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