Ancient Egyptian literature

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Ancient Egyptian literature is, alongside Sumerian writing, considered the world's earliest. Its oldest layers reach back to a time when scribes carved a king's name by combining the pictures for a catfish and a chisel. That king was Narmer, and the carved object, the Narmer Palette, dates to roughly 3100 BC. From there a written tradition ran for thousands of years, until the closure of the temples in Roman times. Yet what survives is only a small fraction of what once existed. The moist soil of the Nile floodplain destroyed papyrus and ink, so much of the record comes instead from dry desert margins and hidden caches buried for millennia. The questions that follow are simple to ask and hard to answer. Who was allowed to write, and who was kept out? Why did stories suddenly appear in the early Middle Kingdom, after centuries of funerary spells and lists? How did anyone, after knowledge of the script was lost, ever learn to read these words again?

• 2. The Media Revolution

  ›

  In the early Middle Kingdom, between the 21st and 17th centuries BC, something new appeared: a narrative Egyptian literature. Before this, by the Old Kingdom of the 26th to 22nd centuries BC, written works meant funerary texts, letters, hymns, poems, and autobiographical accounts of officials' careers. Richard B. Parkinson calls the shift a media revolution. He ties it to the rise of an intellectual class of scribes, new feelings about individuality, rising literacy, and broader access to written materials.

  The creation of literature was an elite exercise. A scribal class attached to government offices and the royal court of the pharaoh held a near-monopoly on it. Scholars still disagree about how far this writing depended on the sociopolitical order of those royal courts. There is no full consensus.

  Middle Egyptian, the spoken language of the Middle Kingdom, hardened into a classical language during the New Kingdom, from the 16th to the 11th centuries BC. At the same time the vernacular Late Egyptian first appeared in writing. New Kingdom scribes canonized and copied many texts written in Middle Egyptian, which stayed the language for oral readings of sacred hieroglyphic texts. Some genres carried over, including teachings and fictional tales. The genre of prophetic texts, by contrast, was not revived until the Ptolemaic period, between the 4th and 1st centuries BC.

• 3. Words Of God

  ›

  The Egyptians called their hieroglyphs words of god and reserved them for exalted purposes, such as communicating with deities and the spirits of the dead. Each hieroglyph was an artistic picture of a natural object, and each word was believed to embody the essence of that object. The hieroglyph for door-bolt, pronounced se, produced the s sound; combined with others it could spell out abstract ideas like sorrow, happiness, beauty, and evil.

  In funerary texts from the Twelfth Dynasty onward, Egyptians believed that disfiguring or omitting certain hieroglyphs carried consequences for the dead. A spirit relied on these texts as nourishment in the afterlife. Mutilating the sign for a venomous snake or other dangerous animal removed a threat. But erasing every instance of a person's name would deprive that soul of the ability to read the funerary texts, condemning it to an inanimate existence.

  Hieratic was a simplified, cursive form of these signs, used for sacred and religious writing as well. By the 1st millennium BC calligraphic hieratic dominated funerary papyri and temple rolls. Where hieroglyphs demanded the utmost precision, hieratic could be written quickly, making it practical for record-keeping. It served as shorthand for private letters, legal documents, poems, tax records, medical texts, mathematical treatises, and instructional guides. A new and even more cursive script, Demotic, later took over informal writing. The final script the Egyptians adopted was the Coptic alphabet, a revised Greek alphabet, which became standard in the 4th century AD as Christianity became the state religion. Hieroglyphs were then discarded as idolatrous images, unfit for the Biblical canon.

• 4. Tools And Survival

  ›

  The reed pen was the chief writing tool of ancient Egypt, a reed with a bruised, brush-like end. With pigments of carbon black and red ochre, scribes wrote on papyrus, a thin material made by beating together strips of pith from the Cyperus papyrus plant, and on ostraca, small ceramic or limestone potsherds. Many papyri are palimpsests, manuscripts scraped clean to reuse, which suggests papyrus was moderately expensive and subject to seasonal shortages from the plant's limited growing season. By the Roman period, Greek lead-based inks and a shorter, thicker reed pen with a cut nib had replaced the Egyptian tools, making hieratic signs more spaced and rounded.

  Underground tombs built in the desert offered perhaps the best environment for preserving papyrus. Many Book of the Dead funerary papyri survive well. But placing non-religious papyri in burial chambers was only customary during the late Middle Kingdom and the first half of the New Kingdom, so most well-preserved literary papyri date to that span.

  Survival was wildly uneven. John W. Tait stresses that the unevenness covers both time and space. There is a dearth of written material from the Nile Delta, but an abundance at western Thebes. Settlements raised above the floodplain, or lacking irrigation, such as Elephantine, El-Lahun, and El-Hiba, yielded more documents. A waste pit found by chance at the Ramesside-era village of Deir el-Medina produced the majority of known private letters on ostraca, along with hymns, fictional narratives, recipes, business receipts, and wills. Penelope Wilson likens this find to sifting through a modern landfill, and notes the villagers were incredibly literate by ancient Egyptian standards. The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor survives in only one complete Middle Kingdom copy, with New Kingdom fragments on ostraca filling the gaps.

• 5. The Scribe's World

  ›

  Reading and writing were the main requirements for public office, though officials leaned on a literate group known as scribes. Papyrus Anastasi I of the Ramesside Period shows the range expected of them. According to Wilson, a scribe might organize the excavation of a lake, build a brick ramp, work out the men needed to transport an obelisk, and provision a military mission. Literate people are thought to have comprised somewhere between 1 and 15 percent of the population, on very limited evidence, with the figure varying by period and region.

  The Satire of the Trades, a popular Ramesside instructional text, mocked lowly occupations like potter, fisherman, laundry man, and soldier while praising the scribe. The Middle Kingdom Teaching of Khety carries a similar attitude, reinforcing the scribe's elevated place. The scribal class maintained, transmitted, and canonized the classics and wrote new works. Schoolboys copied the Story of Sinuhe and the Instructions of Amenemhat as writing exercises and as moral training.

  Menena, a draughtsman at Deir el-Medina during the Twentieth Dynasty, quoted the Eloquent Peasant and the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor in a letter scolding his disobedient son. His contemporary Hori, author of the satirical letter in Papyrus Anastasi I, attacked an addressee for quoting the Instruction of Hardjedef like a semi-educated person. Hans-Werner Fischer-Elfert explains that the classics were meant to be memorized completely and comprehended thoroughly, not mined as quarries for popular sayings. There is solid evidence for reading aloud, too. A funerary stela of Senusret I, who reigned from 1971 to 1926 BC, names people who would gather to hear a scribe recite its inscriptions out loud.

• 6. Teachings And Tales

  ›

  The teaching genre, called sebayt, was the only genre the ancient Egyptians named as such. It belongs to the wider wisdom literature of the ancient Near East, didactic in nature and tied to Middle Kingdom scribal education. Its texts often adopt the formula the instruction of X made for Y, where an authoritative figure such as a vizier or king guides his sons. Adolf Erman, who lived from 1854 to 1937, wrote that the fictional instruction Amenemhat I, who reigned from 1991 to 1962 BC, gave his sons far exceeds the bounds of school philosophy. Examples include the Maxims of Ptahhotep, the Instructions of Kagemni, the Teaching for King Merykare, the Instruction of Hardjedef, the Loyalist Teaching, and the Instructions of Amenemope. Ptahhotep and Kagemni both appear on the Prisse Papyrus, written during the Twelfth Dynasty.

  Narrative tales are the least represented genre surviving from the Middle Kingdom, yet they dominate Late Egyptian literature from the Ramesside Period into the Late Period. Parkinson defines tales as non-commemorative, non-functional, fictional narratives, the most open-ended genre. Major Middle Kingdom works include the Tale of the Court of King Cheops, the Eloquent Peasant, the Story of Sinuhe, and the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor. New Kingdom tales include the Tale of Two Brothers, the Tale of the Doomed Prince, and the Report of Wenamun.

  Ludwig D. Morenz describes the opening of Sinuhe as a funerary self-presentation that parodies the typical autobiography on commemorative stelas. William Kelly Simpson calls the account of Amenemhat I's death, reported by his son and successor Senusret I to the army, excellent propaganda. With its magical desert island and a talking snake, the Shipwrecked Sailor can even be read as a fairy tale. The Report of Wenamun is most likely based on a true journey to Byblos in Phoenicia to obtain cedar for shipbuilding during the reign of Ramesses XI. Sinuhe itself survives on five papyri from the Twelfth and Thirteenth dynasties, later copied many times on ostraca.

• 7. Prophecy, Hymn, And History

  ›

  The Prophecy of Neferti reads, in Simpson's words, like a blatant political pamphlet designed to support the new regime of the Twelfth Dynasty, founded by Amenemhat I after he usurped the throne from the Mentuhotep line. In the discourse, Sneferu of the Fourth Dynasty, who reigned from 2613 to 2589 BC, summons the sage Neferti, who prophesies a chaotic age restored to glory by a righteous king named Ameny. The genre of prophetic texts, also called laments and discourses, had no Old Kingdom precedent and produced no new New Kingdom originals. Works like the Admonitions of Ipuwer and the Dispute between a man and his Ba belong to it; A man and his Ba survives on an original Twelfth Dynasty papyrus, Papyrus Berlin 3024. A man recounts a conversation with his ba, a component of the soul, on whether to keep living in despair or to seek death.

  Funerary poems were thought to preserve a monarch's soul. The Pyramid Texts are the earliest surviving religious literature in poetic verse, first appearing under Unas, who reigned from 2375 to 2345 BC and built the Pyramid of Unas at Saqqara. From them grew the Coffin Texts, the Book of the Dead, the Litany of Ra, and the Amduat. During the reign of Akhenaten, from 1353 to 1336 BC, the Great Hymn to the Aten was written to the sun-disk deity and preserved in the tombs of Amarna, including the tomb of Ay. Simpson compares its wording to Psalm 104. A cycle of songs to Senusret III, who reigned from 1878 to 1839 BC, was found at El-Lahun.

  The annals of Ramesses II, who reigned from 1279 to 1213 BC, recount the Battle of Kadesh against the Hittites and contain the first narrative epic poem in Egyptian literature. King lists such as the Fifth Dynasty Palermo stone legitimated a pharaoh's claim to rule. The Nubian pharaoh Piye, who reigned from 752 to 721 BC and founded the Twenty-fifth Dynasty, left a stela in classical Middle Egyptian describing his campaigns with vivid imagery. An Egyptian named Manetho, active under Ptolemy II between 283 and 246 BC, compiled the Aegyptiaca, organizing rulers into the thirty-one dynasties still recognized today.

• 8. Loss And Rediscovery

  ›

  The most recently carved hieroglyphic inscription known today sits in a temple of Philae, dated precisely to 394 AD during the reign of Theodosius I. After the temples closed, knowledge of the Egyptian writing systems was lost. The script became silent for centuries.

  In the 4th century AD the Hellenized Egyptian Horapollo compiled a survey of almost two hundred hieroglyphs and his interpretations, though he missed their phonetic uses. That survey seems to have vanished until 1415, when the Italian Cristoforo Buondelmonti acquired it on the island of Andros. Athanasius Kircher, who lived from 1601 to 1680, was the first in Europe to grasp that Coptic descended directly from ancient Egyptian, and he made the first concerted European effort to read the signs, based on symbolic guesswork.

  The Napoleonic discovery in 1799 of the Rosetta Stone, with its hieroglyphic, Demotic, and Greek inscription, finally gave scholars the resources to decipher Egyptian texts. The breakthroughs came more than twenty years later, with Jean-Francois Champollion on hieroglyphs and Thomas Young on Demotic. By Champollion's death in 1832 the general sense of Egyptian texts could be discerned. Emmanuel de Rouge became the first scholar able to read an Egyptian text in full, and in 1856 he published the first translations of Egyptian literary texts.

  Scholarship has kept shifting since. Before the 1970s the consensus held that this literature was not an independent discourse, free of the sociopolitical order, and that literary works could be read as accurate historical sources. From the 1970s onward, historians and literary scholars questioned both ideas. The newer approach is multifaceted and cautious, weighing style, content, and the cultural, social, and historical context of each work. A single text, read this way, becomes a case study for reconstructing the features of an entire ancient literary world.