SPECIAL LITERACY AND OCCUPATIONS IN ANCIENT EGYPT
Written symbols appeared in ancient Egypt from at least the Early Dynastic Period, evolving historically from labelling and listing items to personal, literary, funerary, and administrative writings through the Greco-Roman Period. Persons who could understand and reproduce these symbols had some degree of literacy and were required in very early Egyptian history to provide documents/ writings on papyrus, stone, or ostraca (pottery fragments) for economic valuation, social and funerary literature, and legal proceedings. The importance of these documents would increase through the GrecoRoman period, and these texts and those who created them would become important to specific economic and social transactions, to royalty and the elite in funerary contexts, and to the representation of authority.
In ancient Egyptian mythology, the god Thoth was believed to have invented writing and given it to humanity. The ancient Egyptian term šš has been translated as ‘scribe' or ‘to write' (perhaps ‘to draw'); in hieroglyphs it is associated with a
