this: the profession

Ancient Egypt

Much of what is known about ancient Egypt is due to the activities of its scribes. Monumental buildings were erected under their supervision, administrative and economic activities were documented by them, and tales from the mouths of Egypt's lower classes or from foreign lands survive thanks to scribes putting them in writing.

The profession, first associated with the goddess Seshat, became restricted to males in the later dynasties.

Scribes were also considered part of the royal court and did not have to pay tax or join the military. The scribal profession had companion professions, the painters and artisans who decorated tombs, buildings, furniture, statuary, and other relics with pictures and hieroglyphic text.

Mesopotamia

Writing in early Mesopotamia seems to have grown out of the need to document economic transactions, and consisted often in lists which scribes knowledgeable in writing and arithmetics engraved in cuneiform letters into tablets of clay. Apart from administration and accountancy, Mesopotamian scribes observed the sky and wrote literary works as well as the famous myth The Epic of Gilgamesh. They wrote on papyrus paper.

Ancient Israel

In 586 B.C., Jerusalem was captured by the Babylonians. The Temple was looted and then destroyed by fire. The Jews were exiled.

About 70 years later, the Jewish captives returned to Jerusalem from Babylon. According to the Bible, Ezra recovered a copy of the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) and read it aloud to the whole nation.

From then on, the Jewish scribes solidified the following process for creating copies of the Torah and eventually other books in the Old Testament.

1. They could only use clean animal skins, both to write on, and even to bind manuscripts.
2. Each column of writing could have no less than forty-eight, and no more than sixty lines.
3. The ink must be black, and of a special recipe.
4. They must verbalize each word aloud while they were writing.
5. They must wipe the pen and wash their entire bodies before writing the word "Jehovah," every time they wrote it.
6. There must be a review within thirty days, and if as many as three pages required corrections, the entire manuscript had to be redone.
7. The letters, words, and paragraphs had to be counted, and the document became invalid if two letters touched each other. The middle paragraph, word and letter must correspond to those of the original document.
8. The documents could be stored only in sacred places (synagogues, etc).
9. As no document containing God's Word could be destroyed, they were stored, or buried, in a genizah - a Hebrew term meaning "hiding place." These were usually kept in a synagogue or sometimes in a Jewish cemetery.