The writing chapter emphasises the importance of writing in ancient Egypt as both a method for recording information and a vehicle for communication.

The home page introduces the idea that writing is vital for recording and communicating important information. A link off the home page features information about the Rosetta Stone.

‘The Old Master Scribe' is the story of a meeting between an old scribe and a young scribe. The old scribe explains the history of ancient Egyptian writing and the different scripts used throughout ancient Egyptian history. Pupils can find out more information about writing in ancient Egypt by clicking on the images in the story. This section could be used to introduce the idea that the ancient Egyptians used different scripts to record different types of information.

The explore section presents information about where writing was used in ancient Egypt, from the tombs of pharaohs to military life. In addition, this section includes information about the lives and training of scribes. This section could be used to investigate the role of scribes in ancient Egypt, and to look at how writing was used in the temples, tombs, fields, military life and government of ancient Egypt.

‘Making sense' is an activity based on one aspect of hieroglyphic writing, the determinative or sense signs. In hieroglyphic writing, there are certain words which are spelled using the same consonants (the ancient Egyptians did not write with vowels). Scribes would differentiate one word from another by adding a sense sign to the end of the word. Thus, the sense sign would determine the meaning of the word. Pupils roll over a story written in hieroglyphs to read the story. At three different points in the story, they must decide which ‘sense sign' to add to a word depending on the context of the sentence in which the word appears.