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Advice To A Young Egypt Analysis

Decent Essays

When a historian looks over a primary resource there are several questions that they need to think about before they can even begin to do an analysis of it. There are four important questions to be asked. These questions are, what kind of document is it, who wrote it, who the audience was intended for and why it was written, as well as where and when it was written. This document entitled Advice to a Young Egyptian: “Be a Scribe” the reader is informed that it is written with multiple spelling mistakes so it is believed that it was written by an Egyptian writing students learning how to write. That answers one of the questions as to who, as well as where it was written. Since it was written by student, we have no information about their …show more content…

This document makes it apparent that becoming a scribe is a huge honor and that they should be lucky to be learning how to write because it is going to make their life much easier. They go through multiple occupations that show all the hardships of that carrier. An example of this was the job of a washer man and how “all his limbs are weak, (from) whitening his neighbor’s cloths every day, from washing their linens.” They continue to go on about how the cobbler “mingles with vats” as well as to say “his odor is penetrating” and his hands are described as His hands “red with madder.” In the document Advice to the Young "Be a Scribe” it also discusses jobs such as watchman, merchants, carpenters, and out workers that worked out in the …show more content…

It is described as a hard, difficult and unreliable life style. The life of a soilder is described as: “He is awakened at any hour. One is after him as (after) a donkey. He toils until the Aten sets in his darkness of night. He is hungry, his belly hurts; he is dead while yet alive. When he receives the grain-ration, having been released from duty, it is not good for grinding. He is called up for Syria. He may not rest. There are no clothes, no sandals. The weapons of war are assembled at the fortress of Sileo His march is uphill through mountains. He drinks water every third day; it is smelly and tastes of salt. His body is ravaged by illness.” At the end of each section, it all ends the same, “take note of it!” as if to tell the Egyptian writing student that these are the things that they could be doing, to constantly remind them that they are lucky to have the job as a

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