Letters. Epistolography simply means "letter writing." The Egyptians began to send one another letters almost as soon as they learned to write. Like modern letters, Egyptian ones had certain well-defined, regular features that anyone sitting down to write would employ automatically. A large number of letters from ancient Egypt are extant—some personal, some for business, and some even written to gods or to the dead! Scholars also have several "model letters," examples that may have been based on real letters that had at one time been exchanged between real people but were preserved and given to scribal trainees as models on which to base their own letters. It should be remembered that few people, even those who could read and write, would have written their own letters. Rather, it was normal to go to a scribe, a professional writer, who would...