The website The Past has published a feature by Simone Petacchi exploring whether women in ancient Egypt could read and write, drawing on the often fragmentary evidence for women's voices within the culture's written record.
The question is a difficult one to answer directly, and Petacchi's piece frames it as such. Writing in ancient Egypt was a specialised skill, closely tied to administration, temple life and the training of scribes. The evidence for who held that skill survives unevenly, and the traces left by women in particular tend to be scattered and incomplete. Petacchi's feature works through this scattered material rather than offering a single tidy verdict, examining what the surviving sources can and cannot tell us about women's place in a literate culture.
The difficulty is partly one of survival and partly one of interpretation. A great deal of what remains from ancient Egypt reflects official, institutional and religious spheres, arenas in which men are far more visible. Fragmentary evidence, the kind that Petacchi's title foregrounds, requires careful handling: an object, a title or a written reference can hint at a woman's involvement in the world of writing without settling the matter of whether she herself could read or compose a text. The feature keeps that distinction in view.
For readers interested in ancient Egyptian society, the topic sits at the meeting point of several fields, including social history, gender studies and the study of the scribal profession. It is a reminder that the written record, so central to how we know ancient Egypt at all, was not evenly available to everyone who lived there, and that recovering women's experience often means reading between the lines of documents made by and for others.
Literacy in ancient Egypt was bound up with the hieroglyphic script and its cursive relatives, hieratic and later demotic, each suited to different purposes. Mastering these systems took years of training, and that training is one of the threads any discussion of who could read must consider. Readers who would like to get a feel for how the script itself works can begin learning to read hieroglyphs with the Hierolyte app, which offers a way into the signs that scribes spent their careers perfecting.
Petacchi's feature is available in full on The Past. It offers a measured survey of a subject where certainty is hard to come by, and where the surviving evidence rewards patience more than sweeping conclusions.