(from Joyce Tyldesley’s Daughters of Isis)
Yeah, I would have taken that job.
I’ll make you love the scribe’s job more than you love your own mother.
I’ll make you love the scribe’s job more than you love your own mother. I’ll make its beauties obvious to you, for it is the greatest of all professions, and there is none like it in all the land…See, there is no worker without an ovrseer except for the scribe, who is always his own boss. Therefore, if you can learn to write, it will be far better for you than ll the other careers which I have listed before you, each one of which is more wretched than the last.
–Egyptian Middle Kingdom scribal propaganda, ca. 2000 B.C.
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