Scribes - Egyptian and Mesopotamian Functions

Egyptian and Mesopotamian Functions

Besides the scribal profession for accountancy, and 'governmental politicking', the scribal professions immediately branched-out into the socio-cultural areas of literature. The first stories probably related to societal religious stories, and gods, but the beginning of literature genres were starting.

In ancient Egypt an example of this is the Dispute between a man and his Ba. Some of these stories, the "wisdom literatures" may have just started as a 'short story', but since writing had only recently been invented, it was the first physical recordings of societal ideas, in some length and detail. In Mesopotamia, the Sumerians had one of the beginnings of this literature in the middle to late 3rd millennium BC, and besides their creation stories, and religious texts, there is a series of debates. An example from the small list of Sumerian disputations is the debate between bird and fish. In the other Sumerian disputes, in the debate between Summer and Winter, summer wins. The other disputes are: cattle and grain, the tree and the reed, Silver and Copper, the pickax and the plough, and millstone and the gul-gul stone.