Summary Of The Book A Scribal Exercise Book: Egypt

A Scribal Exercise Book - Egypt
1. According to the teacher, what attributes do all nonscribal trades share?
According to the teacher, the entire nonscribal trades share attributes of having rough hands, have more muscle and typically being dirty due to clay or dirt coming in contact with their skin frequently.

2. Most of Egypt's peasants were free. Taking the obvious exaggeration into account, what does this text suggest about the lives of these peasants?
Peasant’s lives consisted of usually working all day long and sometimes into the night. Their job was not only to provide for their family but if ordered they had to give their crops away. If they could not provide the crops they were beaten and sometimes killed for this. From
All while doing this they have to transport slaves of war and luggage that they brought around with them. Most would die or return completely exhausted.

4. What are the presumed advantages of the scribe's profession?
From the text it mostly explains all of the hardships of all the other professions available in Egypt, while the scribe records all of it, so we can conclude that all the advantages of being a scribe avoids all the physical labor, suffering, and does not have to worry about his own economic stability.

5. Does this seem to be a fair picture of the dichotomy that existed in ancient society between the literate and the illiterate?
Yes it does. As you can see the peasants and soldiers and all the other nonscribal workers in the text live their lives doing physical labor day in and day out, while the scribes only job is to write what is happening. It even states in the text that unlike the others, they will be weak and actually have trouble lifting things that the others would do with ease due to their lack and physical
What was the status of women in this society? Did they enjoy any protec­tion or liberties?
Women did have very little protection and liberties. Men in the society had a lot of the power over them, although if the man was abusive for no reason or not dedicated to the wife she could get a divorce and some property.
4. What about children? What was their status? Did they enjoy any protection or liberties?
Children rarely had any protections and liberties. For instance if a worker built a house and it collapsed and killed one of the persons children that was in the house, the workers child would be killed. Female children had it even worse due to them not being able to get anything from the father if he died and they depended on the father a lot more than the males did.

5. Mesopotamian society has been characterized as a patriarchal (dominated by male heads of households) society. Does the evidence in this collection of decisions tend to support or refute that judgment?
The evidence supports this judgment due to all of the rules favoring men more. An example of this is if a man punches a pregnant women and leaves bruises or kills the fetus there is barley any punishment, while if women were to do anything to a man such as cheat on him without reason she if forced to become his slave and the man can remarry. In general you can see that all the rules make men higher in status than