A new study suggests the ergonomics of an Egyptian scribe’s working life may be revealed in their bones.

Statues from Abusir, Egypt depict the scribe Nefer and his wife. New research suggests that ancient Egyptian scribes suffered from the effects of long periods sitting cross-legged—as well as gnawing on their pens.

The ancient Egyptians documented everything from prayers to proclamations to taxes, and it seems the task of writing it all down left its marks on the bones of the kingdom’s scribes.

According to a new study published in Scientific Reports, traces of workplace injuries can literally be seen on the bones of Egyptian scribes buried more than 4,000 years ago—including flattened ankles from decades of sitting cross-legged and possible jaw injuries from gnawing on the reed “pens” used by the dutiful documenters.

Although millennia of their civilization along the Nile depended on literacy to manage their vast bureaucracy, it’s estimated that fewer than 1% of ancient Egyptians knew how to read and write, says Veronika Dulíková an Egyptologist at Prague’s Charles University and a co-author of the new study.

“These people formed the backbone of the state administration,” she says. “Literate people worked in important government offices…. The ancient Egyptians kept careful records of everything, which they then stored in archives.”

Hazardous work

“No one designed proper chairs for ancient Egyptian scribes so that they would not damage their spines,” wryly notes anthropologist Petra Brukner Havelková of the Czech National Museum in Prague and lead author of the study. “But otherwise, they were certainly exposed to the same occupational risk factors.”

Brukner Havelková and her colleagues examined the skeletons of 69 adult males buried between 2,700 and 2,180 B.C. at Abusir, a complex of pyramids and tombs a few miles south of Cairo.

They identified 30 of the mummified remains as those of either professional scribes—trained individuals whose sole work was reading and writing—or of high-status officials whose work depended on reading and writing.

According to the analysis, the many of the scribes at Abusir suffered from osteoarthritis, a destructive disease of bones and ligaments, especially in the right collarbone, shoulder, and thumb—presumably from nearly-constant writing; flattened ankle- and thigh bones, a possible result of from sitting cross-legged for hours, days, or years; and osteoarthritis in the spine, especially around the neck, which may be a result of seated scribes repeatedly raising a head to a speaker for dictation, and then writing it on a papyrus resting in their laps—a repetitive head motion that many of us suffer in our attentive dance between phones, monitors, and keyboards today.

Gnawing pens and navigating bureaucracy

Most people today associate ancient Egypt with the intricate hieroglyphs carved and painted on walls of temples and tombs. But these were created by specialized artisans, while scribes were proficient in a more efficient “cursive” version of Egyptian script known as hieratic.

University of Oxford Egyptologist Hana Navratilova, an expert on ancient Egyptian scribes who wasn’t involved in the latest study, explains that hieratic developed some 5,000 years ago and was used for almost 3,000 years.

Scribes in ancient Egypt were on the roughly the same social level as soldiers: above artisans, merchants and the public, but subservient to priests and nobles. They were always male, and a son often followed his father into the profession.

Many ancient depictions of Egyptian scribes show them seated cross-legged on the floor or kneeling, but carvings and paintings also show them standing to work, perhaps while making tallies of crops in a field or inspecting granaries.

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“Many of these people didn’t actually sit in an office,” Navratilova notes. “We see them depicted during the harvest, or recording commodities or taxes, or working next to a butcher—they are everywhere.”

The researchers were surprised to see that many of the scribes from Abusir suffered from overuse of the temporomandibular joint (TMJ), where the jaw attaches to the skull; and they suggest it may be evidence that scribes regularly chewed fresh ends for the brush-like “pens” they used, which were fashioned from a reed.

The ink was usually black and made from soot, but a red ink made from hematite was also used for statements that required particular attention.

‘Intriguing’

Bioarchaeologist Cynthia Wilczak of San Francisco State University, who also wasn’t involved in the study, says this new research is “intriguing, but we are still a long way from identifying a ‘scribe-specific’ pattern of skeletal changes” in ancient Egyptian bones.

Wilczak notes that only six of the 30 skeletons from tombs at Abusir were identified as scribes from their titles, while the rest are thought to have been scribes based on their tomb locations and other indications of their social status.

“I would be interested to see if some of the observed patterns hold for identified scribes from other sites,” she says.

The suggestion that the jaw injuries could have been caused by chewing reed pens made sense, Wilczak says, but the teeth might also show signs of this activity: “Unfortunately, no evidence was presented to show the expected dental wear if this were the case,” she says.

Corroborating evidence

Biological anthropologist Danny Wescott of Texas State University, who also wasn’t involved, noted that the sample of skeletons from Abusir was small and that the observed increase in degenerative bone diseases was only slight.

That could mean that the significance of skeletal injuries observed on the Abusir skeletons might not be the case for evidence ancient scribes recovered from other parts of ancient Egypt.

Westcott is also concerned that there is no corroborating dental evidence in the study suggesting that the jaw injuries could have been caused by chewing reed pens, such as asymmetrical wear on the teeth.

“This study demonstrates the possibility of reconstructing [lives] from skeletal remains, but also the need for a holistic approach,” he says.

And that may happen: Brukner Havelková says her group is only at the beginning of their research, which they hope to confirm by examining the remains of ancient Egyptian scribes buried at other locations, such as at the Giza cemetery and the Saqqara necropolis.

“The published paper is the first insight into the question of the physical activity of scribes,” Brukner Havelková says. “Now it is time to confirm our assumptions.”