The pharaoh ruled with the aid of many officials and scribes. They ran the country, recording how much trade was done and collecting taxes. Everyone had to pay taxes, so scribes took details of people's wealth and calculated how much they had to pay.
Boys needed a good education to become scribes, so people tried to send their sons to school, while girls stayed at home to help look after the house.
Most poor children went to a local village school, but some went to school at the temples, with the sons of nobles and officials. There they learned to read and write, some basic mathematics and simple record keeping. Able boys, whose parents could afford it, were sent to study more advanced subjects, such as astronomy and geography.
Many examples of scribes' work have survived. The early Egyptians wrote using hieroglyphs. These were pictures used to represent sounds or groups of sounds. The whole alphabet consisted of about 700 hieroglyphs. Hieroglyphs were mainly used on buildings and for religious texts. For everyday use, scribes developed hieratic script. This was usually written in red and black ink with a brush or sharpened reed. In later times, an even simpler script called demotic came into use. [2]