Westcar Papyrus

• 1. Introduction

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  The Westcar Papyrus carries five stories about miraculous feats performed by priests and magicians, told at the court of King Khufu of Egypt's Fourth Dynasty in the 26th century BCE. Each tale is brought to the king by one of his sons, serving as royal entertainment for a bored monarch. What lies inside those twelve columns of hieratic script has fascinated Egyptologists and historians for nearly two centuries. How did the document survive? Who really owns it? And what does the way the stories are told reveal about the Egyptian authors who shaped them? The answers are stranger, more contested, and more revealing than the miracles inside the text itself.

• 2. A Murky Discovery

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  Henry Westcar, a British adventurer born in 1798, apparently found the papyrus somewhere in Egypt in 1823 or 1824. He never recorded the exact circumstances of how he obtained it, leaving a gap at the very origin of the artifact's modern history.

  German Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius claimed in 1838 or 1839 that he received the papyrus from Westcar's niece. Lepsius could read enough hieratic to identify royal cartouche names, and he dated the text to the Old Kingdom. But the story of the acquisition quickly became unreliable. Lepsius wrote that the document was on display at the Oxford Bodleian Library, yet public exhibitions there have only been documented since the early 1860s, and Lepsius' name appears in none of the relevant records.

  Lepsius never published the text. He stored the papyrus in the attic of his home, where it remained until it was found after his death. Many British historians have concluded that Lepsius stole the papyrus. In 1886, German Egyptologist Adolf Erman purchased it from Lepsius' son and transferred it to the Museum of Berlin. Erman attempted the first complete translation in 1890, and the papyrus has been translated many times since, with different outcomes each time.

• 3. Fragile Fragments

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  Papyrus Westcar is made from the plant Cyperus papyrus, and the scroll was reused before the stories were written onto it. At some point between the lives of Lepsius and Erman and today, the scroll was separated into three parts, though no one knows exactly when or why.

  The papyrus textile itself is grainy, greyish-yellowish in colour, and very fragile. Part one was fixed onto linen and mounted between two glass panes, held at five spots with methyl cellulose. Part two was attached to a cardboard and wooden plate covered by a glass pane. Part three was simply placed between two glass panes and glued directly to them; the adhesive has partially lost its transparency, leaving a whitish haze.

  Because of paper lamination carried out during the eighteenth century, all three fragments are partially damaged. The material is torn, distorted, and squashed in places, and some fibres now lie directly over the inscription. Large gaps run throughout the artifact and the rim of the scrolls is badly frayed. The text itself was written in black iron gall ink and carbon black ink, divided by rubra into ten paragraphs. Between the neatly written lines, red traces of an older text are visible, suggesting the papyrus is a palimpsest; the ancient author tried, and only partly succeeded, in wiping the earlier writing away. The clean, calligraphical handwriting points to a highly educated professional. Today the document is on display under low-light conditions at the Egyptian Museum of Berlin.

• 4. Five Stories, Five Voices

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  Very little survives of the first story. Its ending alone has been preserved, enough to reveal that an unknown son of Khufu (possibly Djedefra) told it, and that it concerned a miracle performed by a lector priest during the reign of King Djoser. The priest may have been Imhotep, the famous architect who served under Djoser, though the name is entirely lost to damage.

  Khafre narrates the second story, set during the reign of King Nebka. The chief lector Ubaoner discovers that his wife is having an affair with a townsman of Memphis. Ubaoner fashions a wax crocodile and casts a spell: "As for the man who will come to wash in my pool, you shall seize that commoner in your mouth." The crocodile drags the townsman to the bottom of the lake, where they remain for seven days. When Ubaoner reveals this to King Nebka, Nebka orders the crocodile to dispose of the man permanently, then has the adulterous wife burned and thrown into the river.

  Baufra tells the third story, set in the reign of his grandfather Sneferu. Bored in his palace, Sneferu summons his chief lector Djadjaemankh, who suggests twenty young women row the king around the palace lake. Sneferu commissions twenty oars of ebony, sandalwood, and gold. The row is interrupted when one of the women loses a fish pendant of turquoise; she refuses to accept a replacement from the royal treasury and will not row until it is returned. Djadjaemankh uses magic to fold the lake water onto itself, retrieves the pendant, and restores the lake to its natural state.

  Hordjedef tells the fourth story, and in doing so breaks from the past-tense mode of the earlier tales. He brings word of a living wonder: Dedi of Djed-Sneferu, said to be over a hundred years old, capable of reattaching severed heads and taming wild lions, and in possession of knowledge about the secret rooms in the shrine of Thoth. Khufu sends his son to fetch Dedi, and at court Dedi restores the heads of a goose, an unspecified waterbird, and a bull. When Khufu presses him about the shrine of Thoth, Dedi reveals a prophecy: the one who can grant Khufu access is the eldest of three sons not yet born to a woman named Rededjet. Those sons will be the first three kings of the Fifth Dynasty, beginning with Userkaf.

  The fifth and final story abandons the framing device entirely and shifts to Rededjet's household. The god Ra dispatches Isis, Nephthys, Meskhenet, Heket, and Khnum to assist her in a difficult birth. Disguised as musicians, the gods help deliver three sons, each described as strong and healthy, with limbs covered in gold and wearing headdresses of lapis lazuli. The story ends abruptly after a maidservant who threatens to betray Rededjet to Khufu is seized by a crocodile on her way to water, and the papyrus breaks off mid-sentence.

• 5. What the Tenses Reveal

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  The first three stories are written in past tense, and every king is addressed with the salutation "justified" (Egyptian: m3ʕ ḫrw), a formula used in ancient Egypt when referring to a deceased king. Curiously, all the kings are called by their birth names rather than their Horus names, even though living kings were conventionally addressed by the Horus name. This applies even to Khufu himself in the first three stories.

  Egyptologist Verena Lepper has proposed that this pattern reflects a spelling reform that occurred during the author's own lifetime, one that tried to fix the rule for naming deceased kings. She uses this to argue that the Westcar stories are unlikely to be based on documents from the Old Kingdom itself.

  The fourth and fifth stories shift into present tense, and the language shifts with them: from the stilted, ceremonious phrasing of the earlier tales to something more contemporary. Prince Hordjedef himself drives this transition. He tells Khufu he is tired of old stories that cannot be verified, and that a present-day wonder is more instructive. The fourth story then moves from present tense into future tense briefly for Dedi's prophecy, then returns to present tense, where it stays until the end of the manuscript.

• 6. Kings Under Scrutiny

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  Nebka, Sneferu, and Khufu each receive a distinct treatment in the papyrus, and the portraits are far from flattering in every case. Lepper and Miriam Lichtheim both evaluated the depiction of Nebka as largely positive: he is a strict but lawful judge who punishes wrongdoing cleanly.

  Sneferu fares far worse. The author of the Westcar Papyrus depicts him as a fatuous fool who cannot entertain himself and cannot resolve a minor dispute with one of his rowing women without calling on a priest. Lepper points out that these critiques are hidden cleverly throughout, and suggests the papyrus may have been made available for public entertainment or at least public study. The very fact that a royal scribe could get away with satirizing a king in this way tells its own story about the period in which it was written.

  Khufu is the most contested of the three. In the fourth story, he is depicted ordering a condemned prisoner decapitated purely to test Dedi's claimed power of head-reattachment. Earlier scholars, including Adolf Erman, Kurt Heinrich Sethe, and Wolfgang Helck, read this as proof that Khufu was heartless and sacrilegious, in line with the negative traditions about him recorded by Herodotus and Diodorus. But Egyptologist Dietrich Wildung reads the same scene differently: the prisoner would have received his life back had Dedi performed the trick, and Dedi's refusal signals an Egyptian principle that human life must not be used for dark purposes. Lepper and Lichtheim suspected the author created the ambiguity deliberately, intending to leave Khufu as a genuinely mysterious figure.

• 7. Echoes in Later Texts

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  Verena Lepper and Miriam Lichtheim identified several later Egyptian texts that appear to draw directly from the Westcar stories. Two of the clearest examples are the papyri pAthen and The Prophecy of Neferti.

  The Prophecy of Neferti features a king who addresses a subaltern as "my brother" and is depicted as approachable and simple-minded; the king in question is Sneferu, the same monarch satirized in the third Westcar story. The papyrus pAthen contains the line: "for these are the wise who can move waters and make a river flow at their mere will and want," a clear reference to what Djadjaemankh did with the palace lake and to Dedi's powers.

  A more precise echo appears in pBerlin 3023, which contains the story known as The Eloquent Peasant. One line reads: "See, these are artists who create the existing anew, who even replace a severed head," which Lepper and Lichtheim read as a direct allusion to Dedi's head-reattachment miracle. The same papyrus, in column 232, contains the phrase "sleeping until dawn," which appears nearly word-for-word in the Westcar Papyrus itself. Because pAthen, pBerlin 3023, and The Prophecy of Neferti all share this manner of speaking, with multiple allusions to the same wonders, Lepper and Lichtheim concluded that the characters Dedi, Ubaoner, and Djadjaemankh remained known figures in Egyptian literary culture for a long period after the Westcar stories were first written down.