Emily Chan
Furthermore, changes in the hips, knees, and ankles showed that the scribes sometimes sat with the left leg in a cross-legged or kneeling position while the other leg was bent with the knee pointing upward.
The three main postures of scribes were the cross-legged seated position, the standing position, and the kneeling/squatting position.
During the Pharaonic era, ancient Egyptian scribes used a thin pen made of rush until it was replaced by the reed pen around 100 B.C.
Their writings are found on papyrus, wooden boards, and pieces of pottery called ostraca. The team also observed signs of degeneration in the scribes’ jaw joints and the right thumb.
These may have resulted from the scribes chewing the ends of rush stems to create bristles to write with and pinching the pens in a repetitive manner.
“Our research reveals that remaining in a cross-legged sitting or kneeling position for extended periods, and the repetitive tasks related to writing and the adjusting of the rush pens during scribal activity, caused the extreme overloading of the jaw, neck, and shoulder regions,” wrote the researchers.
This information could not have been gathered from written sources or images in tombs. The changes in the scribes’ skeletons are also similar to what is seen in modern populations.
So, it seems that prolonged sitting still affects the human body in the same way today.
The study was published in Scientific Reports.
