The Seated Scribe

When this man was carved, in the age of the pyramid builders, writing in Egypt belonged to a small circle of officials who kept the accounts, records and letters of the state. He chose to be remembered doing exactly that. He sits cross-legged with a papyrus roll open across his lap, and his right hand is shaped to hold a reed pen that has not survived. Whoever he was, his name is lost. No inscription naming him was found with the statue. The French archaeologist Auguste Mariette came upon it in November 1850 at Saqqara, in a shaft near the Serapeum he was digging out, and the Louvre bought it in 1854. What holds people is the eyes. Each is a block of white magnesite with a polished piece of rock crystal set in for the iris, framed by a thin rim of arsenical copper that stands for the dark line of eye paint.