Isadora to her Lord and Master…, Greetings. First of all, I hope you are as well as I am. As I begged you before, please do not forget me. Receive from Primus [the waggoner?] this salted fish. I would like you to send me the earthenware bottle and ink so that I may be able to write to you…So and so wrote this because she [Isadora] does not know how to write.
-Ostracon, 1st C CE, found along the Via Porphyrites at El Heita way station in Wadi Qena, translated from the Greek and published in The Red Sea Mountains of Egypt, Leo Tregenza
Once I served as scribe to KhairAllah, who dictated a letter I put down on paper much like this pottery shard inked by a scribe of the similarly illiterate Isadora not far north along the Nile River from where I wrote mine. KhairAllah was worried about losing his camel. Isadora was worried about losing her lover. What remains the same between then and now is this need to speak and be heard across vast desert spaces. Isadora did in the 1st Century, KhairAllah did in 1984, and today I do the same with him, via the email account of his son, who reads to his father.