Hieroglyphs (HI-row-GLIFS) sometimes called hieroglyphics (HI-row-GLIF-iks) are the way that the people of Egypt wrote things down. Unlike children today, only the rich people's sons could go to school because it cost so much money. One reason it cost so much money is because people didn't pay school taxes back then. People who learned to read and write were called scribes.

Scribes had to work very hard. It took ten years just to learn how to read and write. The teachers were so strict that they would whip students if they did anything wrong. Scribes had to write very long documents and if they messed up, they had to write them all over again. The scribe would have to copy a document every day for homework!

 A scribe wrote with a tool called a stylus. A stylus was like a long pencil made from a papyrus reed which is a plant that grew along the Nile River. A stylus was dipped into ink and then used to write on papyrus paper. If the ink ran, that would count as a mistake, and the scribe would have to write it over again.