Question

Who were the scribes?

Answer 1

Answer:

• Before the invention of automatic printing, a scribe is a person who made copies of manuscripts .
• With the advent of printing press, the profession of the scribe lost its status and prominence. The profession of scribe was previously widespread across cultures.
• In Harappan civilization there were scribes. Scribes were people who knew how to write, who helped prepare the seals, and perhaps wrote on other materials that have not survived.
• Historians had to rely completely on the copies of the manuscripts made by the scribes. In ancient days, the scribes had to copy manuscripts by hand as there was no printing press during those days.
• Small changes were introduced as scribes copied manuscripts, those changes were a sentence or a word. Over the centuries these small differences grew a lot until manuscripts of the same text became substantially different from one another. Historians rarely find the original manuscript of the author in the present days and this has become a serious problem.
• The work of scribes not only involved keeping of judicial, business, and historical records for temples, cities, kings, and nobles, copying manuscripts but also other texts of administrative and secretarial duties.
• The profession of scribe was later developed into accountants, journalists, public servants, lawyers, typists.