Writing and Social Status
This exercise will help you to understand how historians use early writing samples and artifacts to learn more about the development of distribution of labor and class as one of the criteria for early civilizations.
The text states: “Literacy defined elite status and conveyed enormous prestige to those who possessed it.” How might writing demonstrate social status? Connect your answer to today.
Consider the image depicting a well-known Egyptian scribe, Raherka, and his wife, Mersankh. What evidence do we have that, as a scribe, he had both social prestige and political influence?
The textbook quotes one of the early Egyptian school texts as saying, “Man decays; his corpse is dust; all his kin have perished. But a book makes him remembered through the mouth of its reciter.” How does this further support the scribe’s status?