What did they write in Ancient Egypt?
There was no paper in ancient Egypt, but there was papyrus. Papyrus made from plant fibers was thick and thick - thicker than plain paper.
- First they cut the reed and peeled its stems.
- The stems were cut into thin strips and laid out in rows, in several layers
- They beat them in strips with a hammer until the sticky sap of the plants glued them together.
- The surface of the papyrus was rubbed with a smooth stone or a special tool making it even and smooth.
- Papyrus sheets were glued into long strips and rolled up into scrolls.
Making papyrus was very long and laborious, so it was not cheap. For everyday recordings, the ancient Egyptians used clay tablets and even fragments of broken dishes. On papyrus, they wrote with a brush made of reed sticks, split from one end. Ink was made from soot or red earth.
What are hieroglyphs?
Hieroglyphs are signs of the ancient Egyptian alphabet. Each character denoted either a whole word - the name of an object or concept - or a separate sound in a word. Many characters are quite complex pictures.
Only a few children went to school. Some boys studied as scribes. They had to learn more than seven hundred characters. To indicate numbers, too, had their own characters.
