Scribes

The third class in our list of ancient Mesopotamia social classes is Scribe. Scribes were among the most educated people in the world around 2000 B.C. Scribes gradually developed skills in math, science, business, and literature, in addition to reading and writing cuneiform. They were elevated to the upper class because of these attributes, as well as their service to the King. They were the teachers, teaching everyone how to write and read. They also worked in temples, at court, and as royal tutors.

In reality, 70% of the scribes recognized by name were the sons of society's upper crust, including royalty. This isn't to argue that status was a prerequisite for becoming a scribe, but rather the normal source of the prerequisite: money. The son of a merchant has the same chance as the son of a monarch of becoming a scribe. Even more socially progressive, the daughter of a monarch finally had the same chance of becoming a scribe as her male equivalent.

"The scribe did not so much read a line of text as translate it", stated Jerald Starr on his website. In order for a scribe's basic literacy abilities to be useful, he or she had to learn commerce, arithmetic, science, and literature. In other words, scribes needed to understand the context of what they were reading in order to read it. This is because cuneiform, a system used to record several languages, was phonetic, one syllable could make up any number of words, with any number of definitions, depending on whether you were writing in Sumerian or another Mesopotamian language.