THE SATIRS OF THE TRADES

 

Carpenters at work using a drill, Middle Kingdom, Beni Hassan

In ancient Egypt most craft production was for the elite, or for state and temple institutions, which could afford the necessary investment in long training and slow, labour-intensive  work. The very highest value of production, such as statuary or gold working, seems to be entirely associated with the palace or temple workshops. The best craftsmen were schooled from boyhood at the palace, in parallel with the palace schooling of the children of high officials. Such master craftsmen might hold very high status. To a limited extent, craftsmen working for the elite, or in a temple context, formed a small but nevertheless significant middle class, better paid and provided for than the ordinary peasants.

A famous Middle Kingdom text known as The Satire of the Trades was intended to encourage the trainee scribe to regard his profession as the best of all. In pointing up the supposed of other trades, the Satire reveals fascinating is an extract:

"[The scribe] is [merely] a child, [but] he is addressed respectfully.
He is sent to perform [official] missions, and before he returns he dresses himself in a gown.
I have never seen a sculptor as an [official] envoy, nor that a goldsmith is sent.
I have seen a coppersmith at his work, at the mouth of  his furnace,
His fingers like the claws of a crocodile, and he stinks worse than fish roe.
Every carpenter who wields the adze, he is wearier than the labourer in the field. His field is the wood, and his hoe the axe. There is no end to his craft he does beyond what his arms are capable of […].
The jeweler is boring carefully into every type of hard stone. He completes the inlay of an eye; his arms are exhausted and he is weary. He sits at sunset, with his knees and his back cramped […].
The potter is under the soil, although he stands among the living. He grubs in the mud more than a pig in order to bake his pots. His clothes are stiff with clay, his loincloth in rags. Breath enters his nose direct from his furnace. He tramples [the clay] with his feet, and is him-self crushed by it."

Brick makers at work, Middle Kingdom, Bani Hassan