Archaeologists have described work-related injuries in the skeletons of ancient Egyptian scribes for the first time. Some of their injuries are all too familiar to today’s office workers.
More than 4,000 years ago, in the3rd millennium BCE, ancient Egypt supported a complex society capable of building the Great Pyramids. During this time, a small group of literate men held positions as scribes and carried out a range of administrative tasks.
Scribes enjoyed high status and there is a wealth of artifacts depicting them in various postures. This includes sitting cross-legged as well as a pose between kneeling and squatting.
These elite men received elaborate burials, which is how archaeologists usually identify them as scribes.
A team of archaeologists and Egyptologists from the National Museum of Prague and Charles University in Prague compared scribe skeletons to those of non-scribes. They found greater incidence of osteoarthritis in the scribes’ hips, jaw, neck, thumb and shoulder joints.
The research is detailed in a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports.
“Like scribes, for example, their overloading of the neck is closely related to forward head posture with a flexed neck which is a position characteristic of many of modern occupations, I would even say most,” says lead author Petra Brukner Havelková.
The study attributes osteoarthritis in the ankle, hips and knees to long periods of time sitting or squatting in typical scribe poses. Osteoarthritis in the jaw joint likely reflects the use of rush pens, which needed to be chewed to maintain a writing tip. Meanwhile, degeneration in the wrist is consistent with scribes using a pinch grip on their pens.
Credit: © Archive of Czech Institute of Egyptology, Faculty of Arts, Charles University
Caption: The most affected regions of the skeletons of scribes compared to reference group. Drawing by Jolana Malátková.
“If you do a job that may not be physically demanding at all, but the tasks and positions are repetitive and you stay in them for a long time, sooner or later your body – especially your musculoskeletal system and skeleton – has to react to them,” says Brukner Havelková.
All 69 skeletons in the study came from the necropolis of Abusir, Egypt where the burials delineate the social status of the individuals. 30 adult males could be identified as scribes while the remaining, lower status workers served as the reference group.
Acquiring enough skeletons for the comparison was the most challenging part of the study’s methods.
Next, the archaeological team examined over 1,700 traits across the skeletons but found that only 4% significantly differed between the groups. Nearly all of these degenerative changes reflected the scribe lifestyle.
“While many diseases have been eradicated or can be cured, degenerative changes have been and will continue to be with us,” says Brukner Havelková. “They are part of life, a reflection of it.”
The authors of the study hope that their findings will help future expeditions identify scribes from their bones alone since environmental damage and burial robbery remove contextual clues. “Often the skeletal remains become the only thing to be found in ancient Egyptian burial chambers,” says Brukner Havelková.
After identifying such conspicuous occupational injuries in ancient Egyptians, Brukner Havelková recommends that today’s office workers adopt modern ergonomic solutions.
“Unlike today’s typist, no one designed proper chairs for ancient Egyptian scribes so that they would not damage their spines, defined what angle they should be in relation to the surface on which they were writing, and that they should occasionally stretch their bodies and exercise in the course of their work.”
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