Read this excerpt from The Riddle of the Rosetta Stone by James Cross Giblin. Only those Egyptians who needed the knowledge for their professions learned how to read and write. These included government officials, doctors, and priests, as well as the scribes who did the actual writing on papyrus and stone.

The schooling of a scribe began at age five or six and was usually completed by age sixteen. Through long, hard hours of practice, the student learned to paint or carve more than six hundred different hieroglyphs. He also learned how to write in hieratic, a flowing form of hieroglyphic writing in which the individual symbols were joined.

What inference can be made based on the details in the excerpt?