Scribe: Did you mean...?

Seshat (also given as Sefkhet-Abwy and Seshet) is the Egyptian goddess of the written word. Her name literally means "female scribe" and she is regularly depicted as a woman wearing a leopard skin draped over her robe with a headdress of...

Harper's songs were lyrics composed in ancient Egypt to be sung at funeral feasts and inscribed on monuments. They derive their name from the image which accompanies the text on tomb or chapel walls, stelae, and papyri in which a blind harper...

Although the ancient Egyptians are often depicted as death-obsessed and dour, they actually had a great appreciation for life and their culture reflected their belief in existence as an eternal journey imbued with magic. Life was a gift from...

This painting shows Egyptian cattle being counted by scribes. The painting found part in the tomb of Nebamun (c. 1350 BCE), an wealthy Egyptian accountant ("scribe and counter of grain") during the New Kingdom period. The paintings are...

Writing is the physical manifestation of a spoken language. It is thought that human beings developed language circa 35,000 BCE as evidenced by cave paintings from the period of the Cro-Magnon Man (circa 50,000-30,000 BCE) which appear to...

Nabu (sometimes known as Tutu) was the Babylonian god of wisdom, learning, prophecy, scribes, and writing, also responsible for the abundant harvest and all growing things. His name means "the Announcer," which refers to his prophetic and...

The First Intermediate Period of Egypt (2181-2040 BCE) is the era that followed the Old Kingdom (circa 2613-2181 BCE) and preceded the Middle Kingdom (2040-1782 BCE) periods of Egyptian history. The name was given to the era by 19th-century...

Medieval literature is defined broadly as any work written in Latin or the vernacular between c. 476-1500, including philosophy, religious treatises, legal texts, as well as works of the imagination. More narrowly, however, the term applies...

Ibn Battuta (l. 1304-1368/69) was a Moroccan explorer from Tangier whose expeditions took him further than any other traveler of his time and resulted in his famous work, The Rihla of Ibn Battuta. Scholar Douglas Bullis notes that “rihla”...

Linear B script was the writing system of the Mycenaean civilization of the Bronze Age Mediterranean. The syllabic script was used to write Mycenaean Greek from c. 1500 to c. 1200 BCE. It was deciphered by Michael Ventris in 1952, and so...