User:PericlesofAthens/Sandbox Ancient Egyptian literature

SANDBOX ANCIENT EGYPTIAN LITERATURE


For the other sandboxes, see:


 * User:PericlesofAthens/Sandbox Ancient Egyptian literature2.
 * User:PericlesofAthens/Sandbox Ancient Egyptian literature3

For my other sandboxes, see User:PericlesofAthens/Sandbox.

For my draft, see User:PericlesofAthens/Draft for Ancient Egyptian literature

Useful links: List of ancient Egyptian papyri, Sebayt, Medical papyri, Pyramid Texts, Coffin Texts, Abydos King List, Ancient Egyptian funerary texts

=Penelope Wilson's Sacred Signs=


 * Wilson, Penelope. (2003). Sacred Signs: Hieroglyphs in Ancient Egypt. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0192802992.

Some useful preliminary notes

 * Page 18-19: QUOTE: "The year's planning was based on one particular astronomical event. At the moment the flood began, the star Sirius was first visible from Egypt after a seventy-day absence. This coincidence signalled the beginning of the whole administrative year and it was all recorded. The timing of the rising of the Sirius—the goddess Sopdet in Egypt—and especially the height of the flood were meticulously recorded and cross-checked. The flood began around mid-July, covered the Nile Valley and delta for about three months, and then receded."
 * Page 19: For the flood level, QUOTE: "The ideal height was about 20 cubits (10 m) at Aswan...If this were exceeded settlements and farms could be destroyed, but if the flood fell short, not enough land would be flooded or water brought to produce the required food and surpluses. The southernmost part of Egypt at Aswan was therefore one of the key points in the country for measuring the flood height. As soon as the king's officials knew the height of the flood, they could calculate from their past records in the archives how much tax could be collected and therefore what kind of projects could be sustained for the glory of the king. This fiscal yield was broken down into units so that by the time the flood began to recede about three months later the scribes could be on hand to mark out the exact amount of land and inform farmers of their expected yields. From that first sign of the flood at Aswan a king would know what buildings projects he could afford, how many artisans and specialists he could usefully put to work, and perhaps how many foreign campaigns he could undertake. At times of low floods, the king would know that he needed to husband his resources wisely and perhaps scale down his building works and temple donations."
 * Page 19-20: QUOTE: "All of this was made possible by careful record-taking and accessible archives. Any king worth his salt would invest in his scribal training programme [sic] and he may even have come through it himself. Measuring, counting, calculating, and taxing were therefore the practical motivating reasons for developing a clear writing system in Egypt. The ideological reasons for the development of writing were concerned with recording this information to establish the status of the king in this life, in the next, and in the realm of the gods."
 * Page 22: QUOTE: "Writing is one of the ways of creating and recording ideas in a concrete form. The scribes and bureaucrats working at Memphis passed on their knowledge to their sons and laid the foundations for an élite class of literate bureaucrats. From the very beginning there was a difference between the hieroglyphic script and the cursive and linear hieratic scripts used in everyday life which would have been much more usual and more widely known."
 * Page 22-23: From the very beginning of Egyptian civilization, there was a difference between the Egyptian hieroglyphs utilized by the scribal elite and the more common, linear, and cursive hieratic script utilized in everyday life. The Egyptians called their hieroglyphs "words of God", since they used them to communicate with the Gods via temples, cemeteries, and monuments. QUOTE: "The Egyptian word for their pictorial writing was 'medunetjer', which means 'words of god', and it seems that this was recognized as the primary function of the hieroglyphic script: to communicate between Egyptians and their gods. This was possible in the buildings mainly associated with the gods, their temples, and in places where the divine world touched the earthly world—that is, in tombs and cemeteries. In addition, as the king was regarded as the intermediary between people and the gods, almost anything official or monumental relating to the king had to be written in hieroglyphic script. The drawing or carving of the pictorial hieroglyphs was a time-consuming process and if scribes had had to paint in every feather in every bird-sign it necessarily would have taken a great deal of time. Formal hieroglyphic writing was not a very efficient use of scribal time and so to speed up the writing process they had developed a shorthand script, which we call hieratic. The language written in this script is no different from that written in hieroglyphs and the scripts continue to be used in parallel with each other. It would be the difference between writing something in 'illuminated' letters lke those in the Lindisfarne gospels or in Koranic calligraphy and writing something in 'real' (joined-up) writing. In general, the more monumental a text (temple, tomb, stela) then the more likely that it will be written in hieroglyphs. Egyptian is thus a dual creature of two ways: language and script; hieroglyph and hieratic."
 * Page 23-24: Basically Wilson goes over the fact that Egyptian is usually written right to left, but for aesthetic purposes can be written left to right. One could choose to write in either horizontal or vertical columns, neither was a total standard.
 * Page 47: QUOTE: "Hieroglyphs had very specific purposes in Egypt. They were used for writing texts which were written for the gods, for an élite in the context of their relationship with the gods, and for the afterlife. Though hieroglyphs were used to write a recognizable language of Egypt, it was an exalted mode of communication within a formal ritual setting and within an architectural framework defining spatial and temporal zones. Most people were unable to read hieroglyphs and only a specialist group were ever taught the principles of the pictorial signs. The guiding principles for writing in hieroglyphs come from Egyptian art and ceremonial ideology rather than language. The purpose of the scribes in writing hieroglyphic texts was quite specific, rarefied, and intellectually élitist."
 * Page 61-62: Most Egyptians were farmers, herdsmen, and artisans who were illiterate. Only a minority of people knew how to read and write in hieratic script, let alone hieroglyphic script.
 * Page 63-64: QUOTE: "The presence of hieroglyphs acts as a status marker. The most extreme form of status, being divine, implied an all-embracing knowledge and magical power which could interact with the scenes and texts on temple walls. The rituals activated the hieroglyphs, so that by the scent and smoke of burning incense the very writing could be inhaled by the gods; poured water soaked into the offerings and the fabric of the temple, energizing and bringing to life; the provision of food, with its smells and taste, activated the senses and power of the gods. Not just each single hieroglyph, but also the two-dimensional reliefs, the three-dimensional statues, and the physical enactments and rituals were all 'read' to fulfill the function of the temple. In a way, each was also a back-up for the other, should they fail for some reason."
 * Page 70-71: QUOTE: "Within the temple, the images of the gods were named on the walls, ensuring that they took part in the correct rituals and took their places in the cosmic symmetry of the temple. To some extent, the naming of these images brings them to life, activates them and makes the roving essence of the gods immanent within their images, be they falcon statues, as at Edfu Temple, or Hathor reliefs, as at Dendera. It seems to have been important that each being was in its correct place."
 * Page 71: QUOTE: "The opposite of this idea was also appreciated by the Egyptians. If it were true that hieroglyphs in themselves were images of animals, people, birds, and even reptiles and that hieroglyphs were imbued with some kind of animating power, could it not also be the case that these creatures could come to life on the tomb walls where they were written? In this case might they not threaten the dead person and their continued existence? Indeed, this was believed to be the case and in the Pyramid Texts of Dynasty 5 written inside the burial chambers of the pyramids of kings such as Teti or Pepi I, the animal hieroglyphs were individually mutilated. The animal signs were written without legs, birds had their heads cut off, knives were inserted into the bodies of snakes or crocodiles, human figures were drawn incomplete, and sometimes certain signs were completely substituted if they could not be disabled in some other way."
 * Page 71: QUOTE: "Taking this idea further, the complete removal of the name of a person could also remove their existence. If the name of a tomb owner were scratched away, his his ka would not recognize its images and could not be nourished and therefore the dead person would not live in the afterlife. Their name, the memory of them, and their cult would indeed be forgotten and their beings would be inanimate. Clearly, this was an act of condemnation, sending a person to their second death, the most feared end for any human life. It was used in Egypt against both human beings and gods as a political and religious act of denial of existence."
 * Page 89-91 (picture on 90): QUOTE: "An archive of letters written by the scribe of the tomb Djehutymose and his son Butehamun provides valuable information about the state of affairs in Thebes during the reign of Ramesses XI in the uncertain times at the end of the New Kingdom. As a trusted aid of the generals in charge of Upper Egypt Djehutymose had to travel to Nubia and places within Egypt to report on events there while Butehamun kept management of affairs at Thebes. The letter below from Year 10 of the Renaissance Period opens with wishes for the blessings of the Theban gods on the General Piankh. There is a report on the receipt and reading of the general's last letter, then a report on the fact that the Theban contigent was too slow in sending some clothes for Piankh and that his wife suggested Djehutymose deliver them in person to Piankh in Nubia. This domestic-sounding detail actually reveals that Piankh was extremely busy with threatening events in Nubia. The letter concludes with some difficulties over a building commission and the progress of the search for an ancient tomb in the necropolis. The standard greeting formulae, such as 'may Amun bring you back safe and you fill your embrace with Ne (Thebes) and we fill our eyes with the sight of you when you have returned alive, prospering and healthy', are combined with evocative descriptions such as that of Djehutymose just missing Piankh: 'He just about died when we reached Ne and he was told you had gone before we had reached our mistress!'"

And now, I present the Crème de la Crème, so to speak

 * Page 91-92: QUOTE: "The range of hieratic documents is enormous, covering every type of document that could be written, including administrative tax accounts, day books recording the workers in the Valley of the Kings and their days off, formal state court records and the attendant investigation reports, land leases, and wills. There are also literary works and stories, poems, hymns, and prayers, dream interpreters' guides, magical spells, medical texts, and books of literary teachings and etiquette (inadequately called Wisdom Texts). There are temple inventories, records of the rituals to be carried out in the temple, the books of knowledge of the temple, the Book of That which is in the Underworld (guide book for the afterlife), and other books dealing with the next life. There are letters between individuals, letters to the dead, official letters asking for supplies to be sent to a royal work party, and more treasured letters. One letter written by King Pepi II to an individual called Harkhuf asked him to look after a pygmy he was bringing to the king as a gift. The letter was so valued that Harkhuf had a hieroglyphic version of it inscribed onto his tomb entrance at Aswan. There are surviving receipts and accounts by the million for everything from donkeys to lists of laundry. The modern propensity for the written word is not new. Consider a modern dustbin or recycling bin and its contents from letters to council circulars, shop receipts, written packaging, leaflets, magazines—their ancient equivalent does exist, but in rarefied circumstances and in particular conditions."
 * Page 92-93 QUOTE: "Masses of these documents come from the village of the workmen who built the tombs of the kings at the Valley of the Kings in Thebes. The inhabitants of the village of Deir el-Medina were very literate by Ancient Egyptian standards. As many of those who lived and worked there had the job of writing and carving hieroglyphs in the tombs and as many were scribes by profession, perhaps to cope with the administrative demands of such a rarefied place, there was an unusually large number of literate people in the village. Their receipts and notes ended up as infill for a huge pit excavated in the New Kingdom and to provide water. The discovery of this pit was like finding a landfill rubbish dump and sifting through the minutiae of a dustbin to piece together bits of individual lives. The texts survive on flakes of limestone and on fragments of pottery called ostraka (singular ostrakon). Some of these are hand-sized notelets that would have been placed in the palm of the hand of the scribe, fitting there snugly as they were written out. A scribe called Qenherkhopshef is recognizable by his handwriting, great sprawling hieratic signs, and by the fact that he bashed the edges of his ostraka so that they were blunted and splinters did not break off, taking part of an important note with them. He and his family also had a library containing a varied collection of papyrus books of many different kinds, presumably for their own amusement and perhaps to read out to other villagers. From his library came over 40 texts including a copy in Qenherkhopshef's hand of the 'Battle of Qadesh', the 'Story of Horus and Seth' (a kind of mythological soap opera), 'The Tale of the Blinding of Truth', 'Love Songs', 'Extracts from the Maxims of Any', hymns, recipes against greying hair and baldness, a dream book, official and private letters, and the wills and testaments of Naunakhte."
 * Page Page 93: QUOTE: "Perhaps more than anything else, the material from the village hints at a vast oral and aural literary tradition of which only a tiny proportion has been preserved. Some of the stories from Egypt are only preserved in a single text such as the earlier Tales of Wonder in Papyrus Westcar, and this too seems to be a story cycle with various episodes which was committed to papyrus by a scribe at one time. The Demotic cycle of 'The Story of Petiese, son of Petetum and 70 Other Good and Bad Stories' begins with the words, 'The voice which is before Pharaoh', implying that the stories were intended to be read out before an audience."
 * Page 93-94: Wilson provides a description here of the letters written by the ka-priest Hekanakht, who lived during the reign of Senusret I of the Twelfth dynasty of Egypt. His letters to his deputy and eldest son Merisu about problems with the household and family (including friction between family members and his concubine).
 * Page 95: QUOTE: "Scribes were an important part of every businessman's entourage. Important facts and figures could not be left to the memory like tales, but a good secretary taking copious notes must have given a sense of security in the face of the administration to people like Hekanakht. The line of scribes in the Tomb of Horemhab are shown wearing their elegant wigs and gowns, each one's long graceful fingers holding a pen poised above a papyrus. Their almost effete attitude contrasts uncomfortably with the African slave being punched in the face as he is dragged forward to be counted and become a statistic in an account of slaves. The four scribes shown here are presumably recording the accounts in quadruplicate."
 * Page 96: QUOTE: "There is no doubt, however, that scribes prided themselves on their skill and their ability. In a fictional literary teaching, a pompous scribe called Hori scolds a colleague and exhorts him to acquire the skills to organize the excavation of a lake and the building of a brick ramp, to establish the number of men needed to transport an obelisk and to arrange the provisioning of a military mission. He is expected to acquire a knowledge of Asiatic geography. A series of texts written by scribes for scribes and called the 'Satire of the Trades' poked fun at a variety of manual workmen, including the potter, the fisherman, the laundry man, and the soldier doing service overseas far from home. The sections end with the exhortation, 'Be a Scribe', and it is clear that the virtues of clean living, wearing fine linen, and living a rarefied, easier life were much to be admired."
 * Page 96-97: QUOTE: "The tenor of the Satire is that the scribal trade is the best and is the way to get on in life. It is assumed that everyone who wanted some sort of administrative post in one of the main divisions of the state bureaucracy essentially started learning to read and write together. Literacy was essential for all élite offices for men. Most elder sons followed in their father's footsteps, but there were also people who had risen through the ranks and sent their sons to school in order to ensure their status. How many people of natural ability were harvested along the way and given a scribal training is not known. After initial training in hieratic, men were selected to serve in one particular branch of administration. They worked as accountants in the financial institutions of state or as legal clerks in the legal administration. In temples, scribes could be priests, copying out sacred texts or performing the rituals there, or they may have had administrative duties in running the temple estates and storehouses. The army had many military scribes, keeping daily records of campaigns and accounts of supplies to the expeditionary forces. At court, scribes were responsible for everything from liasing between various departments to the construction of the king's pyramid, from negotiating a bride price for a foreign princess to setting the quotas of linen to be produced in the 'harim' institution. Each of these areas had a strong bias towards accounting and record-keeping, but each also had a specialist side. This meant that scribes were interchangeable (having transferable skills) and could move through the bureaucracy. It is no accident that some of the most powerful men in Egypt, such as the vizier, Paser, the general, Horemhab, and the priest, Herihor, had served in several offices and could convert their experience of how the state worked into royal power."
 * Page 97-98: QUOTE: "The initial training for scribes began in boyhood. Those chosen were lined up in rows, sitting with their texts on their kilts, and they chanted texts learned by heart until they could fit together hieroglyphs, words, and grammatical constructions and then read whole texts. In the New Kingdom they also copied out older, classic, set texts, including the Story of Sinuhe, which was evidently about what it was to be Egyptian, but more popular were the 'Satire of the Trades', 'Instruction of Amenemhet I', and 'Kemyt' (a compendium of model letters). All texts serve the dual purpose of teaching the mechanics of reading and writing, as well as inculcating proper behaviour within the scribal and administrative profession and setting out the code of ethics for scribes. Trainee scribes who did not work hard enough were beaten on the back and those who drank too much beer and visited whorehouses were not considered to be good examples of the profession."
 * Page 98: QUOTE: "It is likely that all scribes learned hieratic, but only those who became draughtsmen or priests learned hieroglyphs. The recognizable training texts which have survived are mostly in hieratic and clearly this was the most useful script to learn. Very few learning aids such as dictionaries have survived from Egypt, perhaps because of over use, but some word lists and an occasional grammatical paradigm do exist. The Tanis Sign Papyrus has columns for: a hieroglyph, the hieratic equivalent, then a brief note in hieratic of what the the sign is; for example,  is described as 'of a human being'. The Geographical Papyrus also found in a charred mass in a house at Tanis has information in hieroglyphs about each administrative area of Egypt (nome): the name of a nome capital, its sacred barque, its sacred tree, its cemetery, the date of its festival, the names of its forbidden objects, the local god, land and lake of the city. This interesting codification of data, probably made by a priest, is paralleled by very similar editions of data on the temple walls of Edfu, for example."
 * Page 99-100: On the subject of medical texts, QUOTE: "They contain a description of the problem, the diagnosis of the disease or injury, and a prognosis and prescription. They sometimes also back up the practical advice with magical spells against evils and on behalf of the sick person. These texts have been described as 'magic' based on superstition, but they may have had a valuable psychosomatic effect, in much the same way as modern placebo medicines. The Rhind Mathematical Papyrus is an exemplary set of mathematical exercises, giving various problems, such as calculating the volume of a cylindrical grain store or the slope of a ramp—essential knowledge in pyramid-building—and then working through them, so that a scribe can follow all the steps of the process and practise it himself. The calculations required the manipulation of fractions which demonstrate a love of numbers for their own sake, but nonetheless with very practical applications."
 * Page 102: QUOTE: "The temple at Deir el-Medina is dedicated to a second 'saint', and also a scribe, the legendary Imhotep. He was architect to King Netjerykhet (Djoser) and responsible for the building of the Step Pyramid, the first monumental stone structure. Little is known of him from his lifetime apart from his titles, which seem to have been 'Seal-Bearer of the King of Lower Egypt, Great Seer of the Great-Mansion, Chief Sculptors and Masons'. For his connection with the remarkable and innovative building, he was later regarded as a scribal saint who could intercede between men and gods. Bronze statuettes of him were dedicated in temples at Saqqara and in a few other places temple shrines were also dedicated to him [sic]. He is shown seated on a block chair, wearing a cap over his shaven head and with his papyrus book unrolled on his lap. Though his memory was ancient even for the Egyptians of the New Kingdom and beyond, his profession and his success as a wise man are perhaps the real attributes which were being celebrated. It seems that such people could communicate with the gods because of their wisdom, their ability to read hieroglyphs, and their beatified status."

The Decipherment of Egyptian

 * Page 104-105: QUOTE: "The journey towards the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs began almost as soon as they had been forgotten. The latest dated hieroglyphic inscription is from the temple of Philae and the reign of the Emperor Theodosius in AD 394. Visitors to Egypt such as the Greek writers Herodotus (fifth century BC) and Strabo (first century BC to first century AD), and Diodorus of Sicily (c. 40 BC) had already referred to the hieroglyphic signs as a form of unintelligible picture writing. In the fourth century AD, a Hellenized Egyptian called Horapollo made a survey of Egyptian writing and published a list of nearly two hundred signs, with his interpretation of their meaning, in Hieroglyphica. This work itself was lost or forgotten and the impetus to decipher hieroglyphs was lost until 1415, when a manuscript of Hieroglyphica was acquired on the island of Andros by Cristoforo Bundelmonti and provided the basis for the Renaissance interpretation of hieroglyphs. According to Horapollo, each sign had a symbolic meaning: the sky dropping dew meant 'education', the forequarters of a lion meant 'strength', and an owl represented foreknowledge of an abundant wine vintage. No allowance was made for a phonetic system of signs and some rather fanciful reasons for the meanings were suggested. For example, a vulture sign meant 'mother', because only female vultures were thought to exist, able to reproduce without the aid of males. In Egyptian, the vulture sign can mean 'mother', but the reason is because the phonetic pronunciation of the sign of the vulture mwt is the same as the word for mother. Further, the signs were supposed to have allegorical meaning based on stories and philosophy and it was though that they held the key to hidden ancient mysteries."
 * Page 105: QUOTE: "The first step in regaining the meaning of hieroglyphs was made by the Jesuit, Althanasius Kircher, in his book Oedipus Aegyptiacus (c. 1650). He was a professor of mathematics in Rome and was interested in science and languages. He studied Coptic manuscripts brought to Europe, compiled a Coptic grammar, and recognized for the first time that Coptic was a direct descendant of Ancient Egyptian. He, too, was sidetracked, however, and translated hieroglyphic texts based on symbolic inferences."
 * Page 105-106: QUOTE: "In 1799 part of a temple stela was discovered by the French scholars of Napoleon in Rosetta. The Rosetta Stone contains a priestly decree in honour of Ptolemy V which was set up in a major temple, perhaps at Saïs, in 196 BC. The surviving fragment of granite is inscribed with the decree to guarantee lands and endowments to the temples of Egypt, but crucially it has the same text in three languages: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Egyptian Demotic, and Greek. The importance of the stone for the possible decipherment of hieroglyphs was recognized straight away and attempts began almost at once to work on the script. Even though the Rosetta Stone was handed over to the British as part of the spoils of the Napoleonic War, the texts had by then been copied and were later sent all over the world. The process of decipherment required several stages as each of the principles behind the script was discovered. With hindsight, it seems as if it were a step-by-step progression, but in fact often one person (such as Kircher) would have a good idea, but would continue to use other incorrect assumptions at the same time. So, the final triumph came from deciding which of the many permutations were correct, as in any kind of code-breaking."

=John Tait's Never Had the Like Occurred=


 * Tait, John W. (2003). 'Never Had the Like Occurred': Egypt's View of Its Past. London: University College London, Institute of Archaeology, an imprint of Cavendish Publishing Limited. ISBN 1844720071.

Chapter 1 by John Tait

 * Tait, John W. (2003). "Introduction—'...Since the Time of the Gods,'" in 'Never Had the Like Occurred': Egypt's View of Its Past. London: University College London, Institute of Archaeology, an imprint of Cavendish Publishing Limited. ISBN 1844720071.

When was the past?

 * Page 6: QUOTE: "Chronology has always haunted traditional Egyptology. Its study has usually aimed at determining at what absolute date BC events happened (above all the beginnings and ends of kings' reigns). Sometimes it is comparative or relative dating that is sought. Notorious examples would be: when was the Exodus, and so who was the 'pharaoh of the Exodus'? and clearly it would be convenient for the analysis of the Amarna period if the co-regency question of various possible overlaps (or none) between the reigns of Amenophis III and IV (Akhenaten) could be resolved."
 * Page 6: QUOTE: "However, the time-honoured investigation of Egyptian chronology starts (apart from astronomical records) from the tattered remains and reflections of Egyptian king lists, most substantially the Palermo stone, the Turin Canon, and the various traditions derived from the text of Manetho (Loprieno, Chapter 8). Manetho himself wrote in Greek for the royal court in the early Ptolemaic period, allegedly under the direct patronage of Ptolemy II (third century BC), and his work took the form of a history. The earlier Egyptian-language sources could all be seen as belonging within a narrow 'scholarly' tradition specific to Egypt itself. They were celebrations of kingship rather than practical, administrative documents, and their audience would have been the royal court and the priestly elite, and the scribal elite which had a predilection for texts in the form of lists. The Turin Canon and Manetho listed kings in sequence, giving the length of the reign of each."
 * Page 7: QUOTE: "The Turin Canon recognized the beginning of major epochs by signalling the names of outstanding kings (Malek 1982). It also gave totals for the reign lengths of significant sequences of kings. This raises the question of whether these figures derive from a practical interest in absolute chronology, or relate to the ideas discussed by Uphill (Chapter 2). Other 'eras' fleetingly known include the 'era of Memphis' and the '400 Year Stela'. The '400 Year Stela' found at Tanis (Kitchen 1996: 116-117) states that it was explicitly set up on the orders of Ramesses II 'bearing the mighty name of his forefathers, in order to maintain the name of the father of his fathers'. It then puzzlingly names Ramesses' immediate predecessor (Seti I), and proceeds extraordinarily with a date in the standard formulation for a royal date: 'Year 400, 4th month of Shomu, Day 4', but the 'King' in question is the god Seth (Kitchen trans. 1996). The presentation is problematic, but no doubt Ramesses II is celebrating his immediate two predecessors, and his family line, presented as stemming from the god (a god especially recognized by the Ramessides). How realistic the figure of 400 years was is debatable, but it reveals that there was a tradition of dead reckoning of time from the foundation of Tanis, or from some other significant family event."
 * Page 7: QUOTE: "Manetho, to judge from the excerpts from his text that survive, divided his listing fundamentally into the dynasties that are still basic terminology today (as in the passage given above). Neither the Turin Canon nor Manetho indicated when they were listing contemporary or overlapping sequences of kings (as is today agreed some must be), and it is difficult to find any indication as to whether the Egyptians were oblivious to this (as we would see it) flaw, or welcomed it, or had other textual resources to circumvent it. Modern scholarship has tried to reconcile or explain away both these problems and also the numerous clearly conflicting statements about the lengths of reigns, a procedure that had sometimes been criticized as unrealistic. One important theme of the present volume, however, is that there were within Egypt traditions of looking at the past other than these scribal practices of compiling 'lists'."
 * Page 8: QUOTE: "The 'eras' mentioned above are not hints of practical schemes for reckoning past time, but belong in the same category as official, religious, priestly, and royal texts. This is well exemplified by the '400 Year Stela', which served the interests of the prestige of the Ramessides. Documentary texts and narratives may not accurately report the speech of daily life, even in the case of the simplest and briefest phrases. However, they suggest, at least, that the Egyptians may in real life have spoken freely of events 'two years ago' or 'six years ago', where 'year' presumably means a period of 365 days, but that counting back substantially larger numbers of years was not normal. Official texts could refer to quite recent dates by the formal apparatus of regnal years."

Text and memory

 * Page 9-10: QUOTE: "One factor contributing to the difficulties in understanding how the Egyptians knew about their own past is that textual material survives from Ancient Egypt in relatively small quantities. The quantity may seem generous in comparison with material from, say, the rest of north Africa in the same periods, but appears meagre in comparison with that from Mesopotamia. More importantly, the Egyptian material survives in a very uneven fashion. Any kind of inscription upon stone has survived the risk of reuse as building material or (in the case of limestone) the limekiln purely by accident. The everyday writing materials, papyrus and ostraca, are not normally found at settlement sites until the Greco-Roman period, when the material preserved becomes abundant, although often fragmentary. Papyrus from earlier periods survives when it has been stored or thrown away at the dry desert margins, and ostraca require almost equally special conditions if the ink is not to be lost from the surface. The unevenness of survival comprises both time and space. Little from any period has been discovered from within the Delta itself, while western Thebes is heavily over-represented. There is sparse evidence from the Libyan period, and puzzlingly little from the first Persian Period (and see Aston 1999). In consequence, it is unsafe to assert that a type of text or particular idea did not exist, just because no trace of it has survived. There are many examples of Egyptian literary texts that, as far as is known, have been preserved in only a single copy: for example, from the Middle Kingdom, the 'Shipwrecked Sailor' (Morenz, Chapter 6); or many narratives of the later New Kingdom; or the 'Tale of Woe' from the Third Intermediate Period (Caminos 1977); or the demotic 'Second Setna' story from the early Roman Period (Griffith 1900; Lichtheim 1980: 138-151). Indeed, the 'Tale of Woe' could be seen as the solitary surviving example of a whole genre, and similarly only a single known demotic hymn is in poetical (that is, verse) form (Zauzich 1991). Nevertheless it is possible to make general statements about developments and trends (Assmann 2001; Baines 1989b)."
 * Page 10: QUOTE: "It is virtually inconceivable that oral traditions of tales and songs—and religious and magical material—did not exist in Egypt. Even though indications are very slight (cf. Morenz, Chapter 6), it is simply assumed here that literary works may derive, more or less closely, from oral traditions, or may self-consciously exploit the manner or material of oral tradition (cf. Baines 1990b; Morenz, Chapter 6). It is also perfectly likely that a literary work crosses over into oral tradition (e.g. 'Thousand and One Nights' stories which, after being fixed in written form, later became a staple of coffee-house story tellers). Some of the possible complexities of the situation may be judged from the Inaros-Petubastis stories (Tait 1994), where there is a clear awareness of the fragmented nature of the country in the ninth to seventh centuries BC, from a period perhaps some 500 years before the stories assumed anything like their surviving form."
 * Page 10: QUOTE: "Some have seen in Egyptian narrative texts a somewhat cavalier and/or confused attitude to the past. For the periods down to the Late Period as well as in demotic narratives, ammunition for this kind of view can be seen from the fact that kings' names may be distorted, and chronology may be very vague (Fischer-Elfert, Chapter 7; Loprieno, Chapter 8; Morenz, Chapter 6). There is no attempt to place the stories within precise historical settings or exploit known events in the past. Thus, although Kitchen (1973: 455-461) and others have tried to trace what real similarities there are to the political shape of the Delta in the Late Period literature as compared to actual political events, no one has tried to argue that one particular period is constantly portrayed. The texts use memories of the Third Intermediate Period as a suitable setting for stories that commented on the nature of Egyptian culture and religion of current time. When the texts reached written form, and possibly when they first took shape, the problems preoccupying those who thought of themselves as Egyptians were not a divided country, nor foreign enemies, nor a king who could scarcely keep his own elite supporters under control, as portrayed in the texts, but a country firmly under foreign rule, and a threat to their culture from foreign cultures. Clearly, those among whom these stories circulated had not consulted texts such as king lists carelessly; they had constructed a detailed past on the basis of a memory of history."
 * Page 10-11: QUOTE: "Herodotus frequently reported that he had been 'told' things in Egypt, often specifically by priests (Lloyd 1975: 89-100), and for the remoter past the kind of information he gained seems to be of the same kind as can be seen in the demotic stories. The connection between some of the substantial tales in Herodotus and Egyptian literature has long been suggested (Griffith 1990). Memories of the past can survive for long periods: it is not necessary for a whole population, or indeed even any large proportion of it, to keep a remembered past alive. It can survive, waiting to be called upon when needed."

Conclusions

 * Page 12-13: After going on about how kings made claims about previous kings which were true, others which were false, and how even though the king was supposed to represent Horus on earth in a never-ending cycle, they still sought to outdo deeds made by kings of the past, QUOTE: "Another factor is the apparently monolithic institution of scribal training and practice in Egypt. Although the cuneiform tradition was equally, if not more, impressive, the Egyptian had many distinctive features. The Egyptian scribes constructed their own view of the history of the role of scribes and of the 'authorship' of texts. By the Late Period, the tradition was entirely maintained by members of temple elites, which profoundly affected the kind of past that was sought for."

Chapter 4 by Dietrich Wildung

 * Wildung, Dietrich. (2003). "Looking Back into the Future: The Middle Kingdom as a Bridge to the Past," in 'Never Had the Like Occurred': Egypt's View of Its Past. London: University College London, Institute of Archaeology, an imprint of Cavendish Publishing Limited. ISBN 1844720071.


 * Page 61: QUOTE: "For anyone embarking on the study of Egyptology, learning Middle Egyptian — the script and language of the Middle Kingdom (2040-1640 BC) — is the key admitting them to the world of the Ancient Egyptians. The beginner is unlikely to be aware that they are in the very best of company while they are learning this language: in the company of all those young Ancient Egyptians who were learning to read and write between 2000 BC and the period of the Roman emperors. The language of the twelfth Dynasty was regarded as the 'classical' variety of Egyptian until the end of ancient Egyptian history (Junge 1985; Loprieno 1995: 5-8). While the spoken language developed further in a dynamic way, evolving into Late Egyptian (1300-700 BC), demotic (700 BC-400 AD), and finally into Coptic (400-1400 AD), Middle Egyptian remained l'égyptien de tradition for religious texts for 2,000 years. This is why there were two languages being used for long periods of Egyptian history, when, alongside the everyday language, the Egyptian of the early second millennium BC lives on as the artificial language of the past."
 * Page 61: QUOTE: "Instructions in schools given in this language, which as early as ca. 1300 BC was no longer the living one, made use of literary texts written in Middle Egyptian in subsequent periods (Schenkel 1990: 7-10). In this way the works of literature from the Middle Kingdom period became 'classics', which were copied again and again in the schools of the New Kingdom and therefore — mainly in short passages of text — have been handed down in numerous copies. The 'Tale of Sinuhe' is not only known to us from two complete manuscripts of the Middle Kingdom (today in Berlin — Morenz Chapter 6: Figure 6:1, this volume), but also from large numbers of ostraca, which were written 500 years later in Deir el-Medina (Morenz Chapter 6: Figure 6:2; Simpson 1984) by those learning to write, who were taught that the language and style of that distant age was a model: the script used was admittedly the hieratic of the New Kingdom and the orthography was partly brought into line with the spellings of Late Egyptian (Herrmann 1957)."
 * Page 61-62: QUOTE: "Not only was the language of the Middle Kingdom regarded as a model, but so also were certain kings' names from this period. 'Kheperkara', the throne-name of Sesostris I (1971-1929 BC) was assumed 1,500 years later by Nectanebo I (380-362 BC) and this name, resonant with venerable ancient tradition, is encountered once more in distant Meroe, in northern Sudan, where, at the time of Christ, the Meroitic king Natakamani, who can readily be compared with Ramesses II in his activities as commissioner of buildings, assumed the throne-name 'Kheperkara' (Eide et al. 1998)."

Chapter 6 by Ludwid D. Morenz

 * Morenz, Ludwid D. (2003). "Literature as a Construction of the Past in the Middle Kingdom" in 'Never Had the Like Occurred': Egypt's View of Its Past. Edited by John W. Tait. Translated by Martin Worthington. London: University College London, Institute of Archaeology, an imprint of Cavendish Publishing Limited. ISBN 1844720071.

History and literature

 * Page 101: QUOTE: To 'remember', or, more precisely, to assure oneself of one's past and socio-cultural origins, is a fundamental human need, leading to individual and social identity. Within the bounds of a given culture, this does not necessarily lead to actual history-writing, such as we know it from the Hebrew Bible or from Herodotus and Thucydides (Momigliano 1990). Indeed, in Middle Kingdom Egypt there is no such history-writing. Nonetheless, reference to a mythically exaggerated or even fictitious past, both recent and distant, can be found in a variety of different contexts. Huizinga (1936: 9) defined history as 'the intellectual form in which a civilization renders account to itself of its past' (and see Baines 1989b). Literature can be particularly fruitful in this regard, where a story explicitly concerns the past, or where a text is set in illo tempore. Fictionality plays a particular role in this process."
 * Page 101-102: QUOTE: "In writing fictitious literary texts, building-blocks and structures were borrowed from the real world. Of course, fictional texts do not simply reflect the past as it was. The critical reader has to take into account a myriad of cloudings and refractions. Historians such as Liverani (1993: 46) in principle counsel skepticism, or at least caution, regarding surface-historicity. The realization of the existence of secondary historicity, as distinct from surface historicity, has led Egyptologists to date fictional texts set in the 'Time of the Regions' to a more recent time (Loprieno 1996a, Chapter 8, this volume). The one remaining plausible, if not certain, candidate for an origin in the 'Time of the Regions' is the 'Instruction of Merykara' (Morenz 1997). Liverani, on the other hand, believes that the date of composition of a fictional, would-be historical, text can be determined from internal evidence. However, a text with no precise references to any particular period can fit more than one political situation—not least because different reading strategies can be applies to it and it can be read from different perspectives; this is particularly true in the absence of a paratext and extratextual information. In the case of fictional Egyptian texts it is often difficult to pinpoint the boundaries of interpretational license inherent in the work and intended by the author (Eco 1990, 1992; Moers 2001). Providing they are not totally absurd, one can view Egyptologists' different ways of reading the same literary texts, such as the story of the 'Shipwrecked Sailor', as indicators of their literariness."

The emergence of belles lettres in the social context of the Middle Kingdom

 * Page 102: QUOTE: "Belles lettres (mdw, nfr.w, ts.w stp.w, 'goodly words and choice verses' - as in the 'Prophecy of Neferti' (E 7 ff, repeated in 13) emerged in Egypt in the Middle Kingdom (Parkinson 1997a: 134-135, 2002), that is, a millennium after the invention of writing, in the fourth millennium. Clearly, however, people would have been telling stories and singing songs much earlier, even if they were not written down. Indeed, at least a few forms of oral poetry are attested indirectly in workmen's songs, which are inscribed in several Old Kingdom tombs (Brunner-Traut 1975); for example, the song of the litter-bearers, which is attested in several Old Kingdom tombs. To these might be added sacred texts which are clearly fashioned poetically, such as the 'Pyramid Texts'; but these presumably served practical purposes as spells and incantations. Furthermore, certain letters can be assumed to have served to entertain. Such exquisite (i.e.  'belles' ; i.e. Egyptian nfr) letters, which are best known from the region of Djed-ka-Ra Asosi (2410-2380 BC), can be interpreted as precursors of the belles lettres of the Middle Kingdom (Morenz 1996: 25-26)."
 * Page 102: QUOTE: "A fundamental technical prerequisite for belles lettres was supplied by a sort of media revolution: in the early second millennium BC an extraordinary expansion in the use of writing becomes discernible in several sectors of Egyptian society (Morenz 1996: 3-5). With this resource, and in the context of the new social cohesion (Morenz 2001: ch. 1) literature was composed which did not just serve immediate practical needs such as divine cult, or the attempt to come to terms with the afterlife, or the demands of daily life. In this complex process and its ramifications, the need to discuss the most disparate matters as well as cultural self-assurance probably played a large part, and early belles lettres can be subsumed under the label 'Problem Literature' (Blumenthal 1996). These texts were conceived aurally, that is, they were intended to be read aloud. In this respect they were closely related to the spoken word. This new type of written word, which was far removed from a primary functional context and was situationally abstract, provided both entertainment ('amusement of the heart', shmh-jb) and intellectual adventure ('search of the heart' hhj n jb)."

Texts from texts

 * Page 102: QUOTE: "The belles lettres of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom can be considered 'Palimpsest Literature' (Genette 1997), that is, literature in which a model textual genre is played with, giving rise to a new, literary, text. Indeed, there are various examples in Middle Kingdom Egyptian literature in which a written tale is modelled on a more strictly purpose-bound genre:" [following table on page 103]


 * Page 103: QUOTE: "Some of the genres of text listed above as models are not attested in all periods. Thus, 'prophetic texts' are not attested directly from the Old and New Kingdoms, but their existence can be inferred. Without them as background, texts such as the 'Prophecy of Neferti' would be inconceivable. Similarly, 'Myth' texts are not directly attested from the Old and Middle Kingdoms, but their existence also can be deduced, since a text such as the 'Herdsman's Tale' (Morenz 1996: ch. 5) would be incomprehensible without them as background. In the case of the 'Instruction of Amenemhet' (see below) the anonymous Egyptian author used the genre label 'Instruction'...with an especial sense of parody. Here intertextuality was played with consciously (Moers 2001: ch. 2). Of course this did not simply amount to the transference of a given genre into belles lettres; rather, for each literary text we must reckon with a complex intertextuality and references to more than one model genre (Parkinson 2002: 17-18)."
 * Page 103: QUOTE: "Since these more or less fictional texts are situationally neutral, the introductory text normally furnishes several keys for reading the text in different ways, thus generating a pact with the reader. Blair (1979: 12) wrote, 'The victim (that is, the reader/listener) must agree in advance to participate in trickery (that is, when receiving the text)'."

References within texts to historical periods

 * Page 103: QUOTE: "Occasionally, belles lettres texts were authored without deliberate reference to a particular point in time — for instance the 'Shipwrecked Sailor' or the so-called 'Herdsman's Tale'. To follow a suggestion by Baines (1990), this mode of representation could have been consciously intended to remove the story into mythological space by means of the narrative techniques of folklore. On the other hand, in its themes, motifs and language, a text such as the 'Shipwrecked Sailor' clearly belongs to an evolved sphere, employing also particular artistic devices in its language (Collier 1996).
 * Page 103-104: QUOTE: "In contrast, the majority of surviving Middle Kingdom literary texts were set in the past. In the process, the authors disguised their fiction as reality, though they probably intended their ideal readers to identify the historical 'costume', and the costume likewise to produce a sense of alienation. In this way the reader was invited to adopt a 'willing suspension of disbelief'. The past lends itself particularly well to generating a milieu in which it could transcend the problematic nature of the present. Together with other alienations, this served to construct a 'tranquil zone' in which to act relatively freely."
 * Page 104: QUOTE: "More particularly, one can distinguish between settings in the recent, middle, and distant past (Morenz 1996: 41). The introduction to the 'Tale of Sinuhe' claims it to be a funerary inscription. It is cast in the form of a funerary self-presentation (a so-called 'autobiography') by way of parody, and is set in the very recent past. Even if the manuscripts (e.g. Figure 6:1) derive from a somewhat later time, a dating of the text to the reign of Sesostris I or to a time shortly after it is at least very plausible; hence from the point of view of the author and his contemporary readers/listeners, Sinuhe the literary figure belonged to the immediately preceding generation. This allows the tale wider freedom. Though the interpretation of the 'Tale of Sinuhe' should not be reduced simply to seeing it as propaganda literature, the author's 'present time' doe play a clear role in the text: to represent the situation under Sesostris I as reflected in the life of a high court official. At the same time, the tale of Sinuhe was handed down through the centuries, being copied numerous times even in New Kingdom schools, and became a sort of classic (Figure 6:2). Culturally speaking, then, the text remained relevant in Egypt a long time after it was written; so the past in this text must have remained of interest to its readers."
 * Page 104: QUOTE: "It was with especial sense of parody that the anonymous author used the genre label 'Instruction'... for the 'Instruction of Amenemhet', for here is a text of a different type form the usual instructions. According to the introduction, Amenemhet is already dead and speaks from the afterlife (Burkard 1999: 153-173), and one might think of this unusual situation in terms of an intertextual inversion of the setting of the 'Letters of the Dead'. If it was authored in the reign of Sesostris I (this being its most likely date, even though the oldest manuscripts date only from the New Kingdom), then the speaker's extraordinary situation places this text too in the recent past."
 * Page 104: QUOTE: "Scholarly consensus is that the tale of the 'Eloquent Peasant' dates from the Middle Kingdom (Parkinson 1991), while, as the king's name Nebkaura shows, the petitions are set in the Heracleopolitan period. The dating is not given at the beginning of the text, but only after the first petition (B1, 102-104) — and, even then, apparently is passing, and certainly as if it were of lesser interest (this is expressed by the introductory particle jst rf: Depuydt 1993):"
 * This peasant, namely, spoke these words
 * in the reign of the dual king Nebkaura, true of voice.


 * Page 104-107 (images on pages 105 and 106): QUOTE: "In texts with ambitions of historicity, a dating formula normally appeared at the beginning, so the dating here being treated as a matter of lesser interest can be regarded as an indicator of literariness. Something similar is also true of texts which do not refer to a particular point in time, such as the 'Shipwrecked Sailor', or the so-called 'Herdsman's Tale', which are, as it were, set in illo tempore. Depending on context — for tales are fundamentally concerned with the past, even when, as in the case of the 'Prophecy of Neferti', they are fictionally set in the future — rk, 'epoch time' could refer to the past epoch, though it was also used in dates and self-presentations for the present or immediate past. The 'Eloquent Peasant' does not need a precise indication of when it took place, but it does require a loose historical embedding. The Heracleopolitan Nebkaura was portrayed as a truly good king. By contrast with P. Westcar's 'Tales of Wonder' or the 'Prophecy of Neferti', in the 'Eloquent Peasant' the entertaining features are not made quite so explicitly into a theme. Thus, Nebkaura is a good king, but not such an amusing one as Snofru (Parkinson 2000a). By contrast, Simpson (1991) saw in this a text directed against the king by the elite."
 * Page 107: QUOTE: "Such fictionalized narrative settings are typical of this sort of framed narrative, and only very indirectly say anything about the concrete historical figures. 'Neferti' does not actually have a frame as such, but only an introduction and a concluding formula, which is stylized quite differently. In both instances (either by writing it down himself, or having someone else do it), a king from the past acts as the text's patron. By contrast with the famous Snofru (Graefe 1990), little is known about the historical Nebkaura, at least to modern Egyptology. For this reason, the variation between the two of the manuscripts is interesting: while B1, 104 actually has [one spelling for Nebkaura], R17,1 has [another spelling for Nebkaura]. This suggests that there was a certain vacillation even for the Egyptian copyists. However, an abbreviated writing of the same kind...is occasionally attested in royal names. Scribal carelessness certainly cannot be ruled out (but see Morenz forthcoming). That Nebkaura (Khety) shows himself to be a good king through his far-sighted provision for the peasant's family might be relevant to the text's origin in the Heracleopolitan region. A tradition, probably Theban, portraying Khety as evil was highlighted by Vernus (1991). Perhaps the author deliberately selected a king about whom, already in his own day, little was known. This raises the question of why, of all possible periods, the text had to be set in the Heracleopolitan period. Was this portrayal and criticism of officials as bad as Nmtj-nht only possibly in the past, even granted a good king and high steward? Was, in the view of later times, the accumulation of power by local officials specially typical of the 'Time of the Regions'? Was social criticism tactfully shifted to a past time regarded as troubled?"
 * Page 107-108: QUOTE: "A more distant past is to be found in the setting of the fictional 'Prophecy of Neferti' and in P. Westcar's 'Tales of Wonder' (Parkinson 2002: 47). Historical royal names do appear in these texts, but they can be understood, at least to some extent, as serving to give the text a flavour of historicity and as being proto-mythical. The framing action in the 'Prophecy of Neferti' was shifted back into the past to the time of Snofru, that is, several centuries before the author's present time. Whether the text was composed in the twelfth Dynasty or later, in the Second Intermediate Period (Morenz 1996: 107-110), Snofru's day was already long past, and in this, the author's time, concrete historical memory was being re-cast as proto-myth. Despite these differences in the past, the tale of the 'Eloquent Peasant' and the fictional 'Prophecy' do share significant similarities in the function of the king who is made literary in the framing narrative."
 * Page 108: QUOTE: "In P. Westcar's 'Tale of Wonders', the days of the Old Kingdom kings — Djoser, Snofru, Kheops, and the first three kings of the fifth Dynasty — are brought to life in several sub-tales. The fictional dating to the time of Kheops is clearly contradicted by the information that the sandbanks lay dry because of low water (P. Westcar 9, 15; for the date see Schott 1950: 918). This offers an approximate clue to the text's date. The framing narrative places the tales at the court of Kheops. At least in part, the stories refer to each other in their content, and their import grows by degrees until the Hor-Djedef/Djedi story, which is the highpoint in terms of drama and meaning. The most space in the text as a whole is taken up with the fictional present under Kheops. Piquantly, speaking about the past is made into a theme in the text itself."
 * Page 108: QUOTE: "The opposition Story-Reality is to be found even in a historic-novelettish tale. This testifies to a conscious use of the past as a back-cloth. By way of comparison, one might en passant consider Hesiod's Theogony (V.27), where the Muses announce to the poet that they know how to tell the truth, and 'lies which are similar to truth'."

The construction of a (mytho-)historical Dark Age in literature

 * Page 108: QUOTE: "Most or all of the so-called Lamentation Literature — especially 'Admonitions', 'Khakheper-ra-seneb', the 'Conversation of the Man Weary of Life with his Ba', and the 'Prophecy of Neferti' — is actually not the product of a "complaining class" (Lapenies 1992). For antiquity, the Prophets in the Hebrew Bible can more or less be defined as a 'lamenting class', though certain beginnings of this are certainly to be found in Ancient Egypt, for instance in certain features of the figure Djedi (Morenz 1996: 117-119), who is clearly a literary construct, in a certain sense a literary idealization, who nevertheless reflects social realities."
 * Page 109: On the text 'Admonitions', QUOTE: "Further possibilities remain open; thus, there may well have been multiple editions (Fecht 1972). Despite its evident concerns, scholars no longer really consider this text to be direct evidence for the 'Time of the Regions'. A further consideration is that instances of internal unrest, against which the king advances victoriously, are to the fore in the royal texts of the twelfth Dynasty, being especially well attested in the inscription of Sesostris I in the temple at Tod (Barbotin and Clère 1991). Even so, one must assume that the events and processes of the 'Time of the Regions' were inscribed onto collective memory and appear in words, culturally transformed, in certain passages of the 'Problem Literature'."
 * Page 109: QUOTE: "In the 'Admonitions', the more or less historical past is constructed as a gloomy backdrop which contrasts with both ideal time and the present (Morenz 1999). For a long time, and for different reasons which were never really made explicit, interpretation of history from the perspective of posterity (Günther 1993) was also followed by modern Egyptology. One of the main contributing factors was the vividness of descriptions in literary sources, which were often believed to be contemporary works. In addition, there were interpretational strategies oriented towards complexity and monumental art. Further, the relatively few genuine monuments of the period offering evidence superficially appeared to be of a lesser quality."
 * Page 111: QUOTE: "The prophetic genre of text probably derives from this notion of the possibility of knowing history. In these texts — especially the 'Admonitions' and the 'Prophecy of Neferti' — the distant past seems good, the fictional literary present bad, yet the future is expected to be good once more."

Two detailed examples of reference to the past

 * Page 114-115: After a whole lot of crap about the 'Admonitions', QUOTE: "It is quite likely that the destruction lament in the 'Admonitions' refers to the destruction of Memphis at the end of the Old Kingdom. Thus, this fully independent micro-text can be understood as a sort of oral tradition or at least a literarily formed piece of historical recollection which has trickled into writing, but it is clearly a text with literary forms and ambitions — certainly not a historical report in the narrower sense. Indeed, even recently this passage has been understood as an almost concrete historical report (Gundlach 1992)."
 * Page 115: QUOTE: "Occasionally, certain historical reminiscences ended up in sacred texts, not only in temple reliefs of the New Kingdom or Ptolemaic period — one thinks in particular of reflexes of foreign governments (e.g. Velde 1967) — but already in the 'Coffin Texts'."
 * Page 115: QUOTE: "Spell 656 of the Coffin Texts appears to be a notable textual encapsulation of the rivalry, known from several sources, which Thebes felt against Heracleopolis about domination over Egypt. In this passage, an ideologically minute picture from the Theban point of view is transformed into something mythological. So far, the spell is only attested from the Theban Grave (TT 319) of Nfr.w (a wife of Montuhotep II), and so was chronologically very close to this rivalry and the struggle for power in Egypt and prestige in rule."
 * Page 115: The spell runs as follows:


 * O Ra:
 * Those enemies of Osiris spoke,
 * that they rob (nhm) the white crown (hd.t), the greatness of your head, the
 * ...crown, which is on the top of your head.
 * They spoke, that they wanted to destroy (hd.t) the heads,
 * that they wanted to confuse (hnn) the people before you.
 * They spoke, that they wanted to confuse (hnn) Maat
 * that they wanted to setup...at the palace.
 * O Ra, concede that the word of the Osiris NN is right.


 * Page 116: QUOTE: "Quite probably this passage reflects rivalry about the kingship transformed onto another, quite different, plane; the rivalry can quite probably be connected with the 'Time of the Regions' and the Thebans' fight for royal rule. What especially argues for this is the recurring reference to the white crown, symbol of Upper Egyptian kingship. It remains questionable how far the crowns' cosmic symbolism is intended in this passage, for the 'political' dimension seems more important. In this context it is worth highlighting that the text does not speak of a single enemy of Osiris, but of an entire group: this could refer to several potentates (similarly the phrase...[crazy Egyptian stuff here]...on Montuhotep's temple relief at Gebelen qualifies the Theban potentates' opponents within Egypt; Morenz 2001: III a.3)."

Chapter 7 by Hans-W. Fischer-Elfert

 * Fischer-Elfert, Hans-W. (2003). "Representations of the Past in the New Kingdom Literature" 'Never Had the Like Occurred': Egypt's View of Its Past. Edited by John W. Tait. London: University College London, Institute of Archaeology, an imprint of Cavendish Publishing Limited. ISBN 1844720071.

Introduction

 * Page 119: QUOTE: "The historical period covered by this chapter is the New Kingdom, that is, the centuries from around 1550-1100 BC or the eighteenth to twentieth Dynasties. The term 'literature' is here taken in a rather narrow sense to include texts of educational purport, narrative and lyrical fiction, and entertainment. Also, it is assumed that these texts possessed aesthetic value for their ancient Egyptian recipients, who could evaluate and appreciate their content and style. Members of the literate elite, 'scribes'...or 'wise men; savants'...constitute the social stratum responsible for the reproduction of the so-called classical works of literature, as well as for the creation of the new compositions. Furthermore, there does not seem to be the slightest evidence for freelance and economically independent intellectuals; on the contrary, some of the 'authors' are known to have been predominantly involved in their everyday life with administration, on either a small or larger scale."
 * Page 119: QUOTE: "From a literary point of view the New Kingdom may be divided into two stages/phases: (1) the pre-Amarna period; and (2) the post-Amarna period (Baines 1996a). This division seems to be justified on several grounds. Linguistically, in pre-Amarna times, educational, narrative and lyrical texts were still couched in the language of Classical Egyptian, albeit of a rather advanced stage. By contrast, in the wake of Akhenaten's theological and linguistic revolution, literary texts without any forerunner in the early eighteenth Dynasty tend to be composed in a special register of Late Egyptian that reflects the language spoken at that time (Junge 1984, 1999: 19-22). This particular idiom has come to be known as 'literary Late Egyptian' (or as 'Medio-Neuägyptisch'), a style that still retains many of the old verbal and syntactical forms of Middle Egyptian but also includes elements of the vernacular of its day."
 * Page 119-120: QUOTE: "In addition to the linguistic division, the pre-Amarna period is remarkably lacking in genuinely new compositions that can be dated with any reasonable degree of certainty to the eighteenth Dynasty and that have no morphological ancestor in the Middle Kingdom or the Second Intermediate Period. This may be fortuitous, but it stands in marked contrast to the time after Amarna which coincides roughly with the Ramesside period or the second half of the New Kingdom. During the nineteenth and twentieth Dynasties, literary activity seems practically to explode on a scale hitherto unknown. This impression, however, may be in part the result of the accident of archaeological discovery. It is especially the Theban, and, to a lesser extent, the Memphite region, that yields most of the available evidence. Moreover, within the confines of the Theban area it is almost exclusively the workmen's village of Deir el-Medina, with both its many individual finds as well as its complete archives, that forms our picture."
 * Page 120: QUOTE: "This chapter concentrates on scribal reflections of their own literary past in Ramesside times. The non-existence of generic terms for cultural phenomena like 'history', 'theology', 'mythology' and 'literature' does not imply that there were no such phenomena or concepts in the minds of the literate elite. On the analogy of Assmann's (1984) differentiation between 'implicit' and 'explicit' theology, Ramesside literary production can be seen as twofold, that is, as consisting of a reproductive and productive stream of tradition. It is precisely within the productive stream that a more or less well-defined concept of 'explicit literature', or in Egyptian simply 'writings' (zh.w), is developed and more values are discussed for the first time in Egyptian history. With regard to genres, we only find 'instructions'...and 'discourses' or 'laments'...that are attributed to individual 'authors' of the past. Tales like those of 'Sinuhe' or the 'Eloquent Peasant' do not seem to have been connected to any single authentic or 'historical' narrator. In contrast, laments like 'Kha-kheper-ra-seneb' or 'Ipuwer' have no literary successors, whereas narrative texts in literary Late Egyptian constitute the bulk of available evidence from Ramesside times down into the Late Period. Laments may have been integrated into the genre of hymns and prayers to different gods that was beginning to proliferate at this time — a trend that could not have begun any later than the pre-Amarna period, as texts on ostraca written in a very personal tone demonstrate (Posener 1975; see also Guksch 1994)."
 * Page 120: QUOTE: "Thus we can observe another aspect of intra-cultural intertextuality that goes far beyond the already ancient custom of quoting old or synchronous texts implicitly or explicitly. The quotation of ancient texts was not simply limited to the accuracy of quotation, word for word, but extended to displaying at the same time a reasonable degree of understanding of their content and an awareness of their co-text or intratextual context (see below the allusion to Djedefhor in P. Anastasi I). This can only be fully appreciated when it is accepted that there was an inner-circle practice of critical discourse about what one was reading and writing or reproducing and creating."

Representations of the literary past

 * The corpus of transmitted classics in the New Kingdom


 * Page 120: QUOTE: "The available evidence suggests that Ramesside scribes must have felt the need for literary self-evaluation. A more or less fixed corpus of Middle Kingdom texts had been established as a set of classics (Assman 1991: 303-310; critique by Baines 1996a: 170-171) that were copied in schools and in private."
 * Page 120-121: QUOTE: "According to Egyptologists' typological — and partially even the Egyptian — classification of these texts as 'instructions', 'tales', and 'laments/discourses', the sheer number of reproductions of examples of ancient 'teachings' in New Kingdom times is striking. Hundreds of mostly partial copies of 'The Teaching of Djedefhor', 'The Teaching of Amenemhet I for his son Sesostris I', 'The Teaching of Khety', or the so-called 'Satire of the Trades', 'The Teaching of a Man for his Son', and 'The Loyalist Teaching' have been found in different parts of Egypt, whereas 'Ptahhotep' is, by contrast, poorly represented. This is all the stranger since it was some of the lines from this text that entered a long-term tradition that can be traced down to Coptic monastic literature such as the 'Apophthegmata Patrum' (Behlmer 1996: 576). The 'Instruction of Amenemhet', for example, was found not only in Deir el-Medina, but also in Memphis, Lisht, Amarna (for Lisht and Amarna see Quirke 1996: 393, fig. 1; Parkinson 2000b) and Elephantine (Fischer-Elfert 2002a). Until recently the 'Teaching of Merykara' was totally undocumented from the Deir el-Medina material of the Ramesside period, but Quack (1990) has now identified a small piece in the Posener/Gasse-Catalogue of literary hieratic ostraca from that site. This meagre evidence hardly suffices to prove that this text was a literary favourite, and why it was placed second or third in the scribal curriculum is not known. In view of the 774 literary fragments published by Posener (1938-1980) and Gasse (1990), one single exemplar of 'Merykara' is not sufficient to show that this text was a scribal classic. The same is also true for the 'Discourse of Kha-kheper-ra-seneb', which is only attested in two copies from the eighteenth Dynasty; the Deir el-Medina apprentice-scribes do not appear to have taken any notice of it (McDowell 2000: 223; Parkinson 1997b). Similarly, for the 'Instruction of Kagemni'. 'The Loyalist Teaching', 'The Prophecies of Neferti', 'The Letter of Kemyt' and 'The Story of Sinuhe' are all well well documented, with the 'Letter of Kemyt' substantially outnumbering the others (Fischer-Elfert 2002b)."
 * Page 121: QUOTE: "Although new evidence can of course always change a picture, currently it remains an open question as to why certain texts of Middle Kingdom origin did not enter the stream of tradition until at least the New Kingdom. This holds true for 'The Shipwrecked Sailor', 'The Eloquent Peasant', 'Conversation of the Man Weary of Life with his Ba,' 'The Teaching of Kagemni', and other fragmentary compositions. It should be borne in mind, however, that the 'Sailor' as well as the 'Peasant' cannot have been completely unknown in Deir el-Medina, since the draughtsman Menena (who was active in the reigns of Ramesses III-V/VI) felt obliged to quote portions of these texts when admonishing his wayward son Mery-Sekhmet in his instructional letter, written on a large ostracon (Guglielmi 1983; cf. Baines 1996a: 170; Guglielmi: 1984: 352-353, 361; Loprieno 1996a: 47, 1996b: 523). There is no way of knowing how Menena — who was not a scribe — came into contact with these ancient tales, leaving open the possibility that some of these passages may have become fossilized over time at stock phrases. He may even have belonged to that group of semi-educated persons well-versed in matters of literature and writing that the author Hori, the military scribe who wrote the genuinely Ramesside 'Satirical Letter of P. Anastasi I', had in mind when he scolded his fictional addressee(s) for quoting 'The Teaching of Djedefhor' in rather unbecoming and boastful display of his/their putative literary erudition (Fischer-Elfert 1986: 95-97)."
 * Page 122: After skipping a few lines from the letter by Hori, Fischer-Elfert writes QUOTE: "Thus, there is every reason to believe that there was a certain degree of fondness for ancient literature in Ramesside times on the part of even the less well-educated scribes who belonged to the military administration. Furthermore, this went hand in hand with a tendency to boast of their knowledge, regardless of how extensive their literary awareness actually was."
 * Page 122: QUOTE: "What may be revealed by Hori's attack on the way in which some Ramesside scribes felt obliged to demonstrate their greater or lesser acquaintance with ancient literature is the conception that these venerable works were meant to be known in full and not to be misused as quarries for popular sayings mined deliberately from the past. The classics of the time were to be memorized completely and comprehended thoroughly before being cited."
 * Page 122-123: QUOTE: "With the exception of 'The Admonitions of Ipuwer' (or 'Ipuser'), the date of composition of which is still open to debate but which may have a late Middle Kingdom origin (Parkinson 2002: 204-216), the evidence suggests that no other lament or discourse of this type was in vogue after Amarna (Assmann 1999a: no. 147). Classical literature, if there was ever any concept of what exactly made a 'writing', 'literary', consisted in Ramesside times only of teachings and tales. The first genre was called...[sby.t?]...a generic term for a speech from a father to his son, with reference to either a biological or a metaphorical relationship. The content of the texts of this genre centres around the proper way of speaking and acting in a variety of situations, and is intended for the 'son' and successor in office. No specific term has been identified for the other genre, but tales of this kind may have been subsumed under such a general label as md.t, 'speech; word(s)' (Parkinson 1991b: 111, nos. xii, xiii). Tales like 'Sinuhe' or the 'Eloquent Peasant', in contrast to teachings, never begin with this term. We do not know how such texts were referred or alluded to: perhaps by complete verses or sentences (Guglielmi 1983: 159(z))."


 * Literary heroes as objects of veneration and the 'magical' aspect of Egyptian literature


 * Page 123: QUOTE: "'Instructions' were written or, in Egyptian terms, 'made' (jrj). Three documents are presented and discussed here — two are written on papyrus and the third on fragments of a tomb wall in Saqqarah. With the exception of a magical spell on a previously unpublished papyrus in Athens (Fischer-Elfert 2002), which is accompanied by vignettes depicting some of the illustrious scribes of the past (Figure 7:1), the other two sources have been well known (Fischer 1976: 63-66; Fischer-Elfert and Hoffmann forthcoming; Parkinson 1991b: 97-99, Wildung 1977b: 25-29)."
 * Page 123: QUOTE: "Egyptologists generally agree that names like Ptahhotep, Amenemhet or Khety are to be regarded as pseudopigraphical attributions void of any historical authenticity. Or, in Parkinson's (1991b: 97) words: 'All available indications suggest that the 'authors' of Teachings and other wisdom discourses were as fictional as the protagonists of the tales' (see Vernus 1995 on the cult at the Saqqarah mastaba of Ptahhotep (D 64)). This may be true for Middle Kingdom literature as a whole and may also simultaneously mark a distinctive contrast to the literary production of Ramesside times. Thus, there seems little reason to doubt the non-fictionality of such 'teachers' as Ani, a scribe of the mortuary temple of Queen Nefertiti (Quack 1994), and Amenemope, scribe and overseer of fields in the Abydos nome (Laisney forthcoming). The other authors were also men of flesh and blood, active officials in the administration of Deir el-Medina just like Menena, Amennakhte and Hori, from whom come instructional texts couched in a very personal tone."
 * Page 123: QUOTE: "One observable consequence of the individual authorship of these texts is the emphasis placed on the personal past of the author and the sense that the instructions were written for a specific, individual recipient. This can be observed, for example, in the instructional texts of Menena, Amennakhte and Hori, alongside linguistically modernized citations of older literary texts (Morenz 1998b: 78). In this way, the instructional genre begins to acquire a more and more personal tone that is intensified by the author's strong critique of his own, as well as his biological(!) son's, faults. The actual lapse of time between when the son misbehaved and when the father reacted may in fact have been very brief."
 * Page 123-125 (picture on 124): QUOTE: "In the case of these texts, the need for composing a didactic treatise seems to have been necessitated and provoked by the listeners neglect of the principles and social norms of the day. This may explain why very personal texts like those of Amennakhte and Menena do not seem to have entered into the literary mainstream of future generations. At the same time it may have been the very same personal tone that provided the impetus for the authors of these texts to quote older works from the time of the Middle Kingdom. This quoting of older, more personal texts would certainly have enforced and substantiated their claim to be qualified 'educators' of their own sons and would-be followers in office. Of course it may be mere chance that the texts that quoted themselves did not reach the status of classical works of Middle Kingdom literature."
 * Page 125: QUOTE: "Ramesside writers did not seem to feel compelled to boast of the literary qualities of their own texts, and rarely did so (Derchain 1999: 28-29; Fischer 1976: 78 n. 65). On the contrary, they show every sign of having suffered from a severe inferiority complex with regard to their ancient predecessors. This impression can be substantiated by a remarkable text in which the literary production of the day was denigrated. It is also precisely this text that sets the standard by which the texts are to be judged as canonical, even though it is the 'authors' and not the texts themselves that are canonized. The source under consideration is P. Chester Beatty IV (BM EA 10684), a text dating to the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth Dynasty, which contains a famous chapter about 'those learned scribes from the time of the successors of the gods' (vs. 2, 5-6; Gardiner 1935, I: 37-41, II: pls. 18-22). The verso of this papyrus begins with maxims about how to behave properly in various situations and different social circumstances, much of which have been lost in the lacunae. Here the personal god...is described as the 'builder'...of the official's career and personality. Friendliness to people in need is rewarded with the prospect of god and men."
 * Page 128-129: Skipped a lot of material about the Chester Beatty papyrus. I will briefly summarize the info found on these pages about the Athens papyrus, which deals with magic. The ancient Egyptians wrote texts they believed to have magical qualities, with spells that were to be read aloud in order to "ward off nightmares and the spirits of the dead."

Reflections on the beauty of ancient monuments in visitors' graffiti and their relationship to literature

 * Page 131: QUOTE: "Whereas the encomium of ancient writers in P. Chester Beatty IV deplores the bad state of preservation of the tombs of even men like Imhotep and Djedefhor, visitors' graffiti in, for example, the pyramid-complex of Djoser praise its heaven-like appearance. These commemorations attest to the certain accessibility of at least parts of this huge assembly of monuments, pointing to the fact that there must have been designated areas inside that were open to the public in New Kingdom times. One of these areas must have been the court to the east of the pyramid proper, with its row of chapels, since it was mostly here that scribes during their journeys scribbled their graffiti in hieratic upon the walls (Firth and Quibell 1935: 78-79). One typical inscription found in the North Chapel, dating to the eighteenth Dynasty, and written by the scribe Ahmose, son of Iyptah, reads:"
 * The scribe Ahmose came to see the Temple of Djoser. He found it as if heaven were within it, Ra rising in it. Then he said: 'Let loaves and oxen and fowl and good and pure things fall to the Ka of the justified Djoser: may heaven rain fresh myrrh, may it drip incense!'
 * By the scribe of the school...Sethemhab, and the young scribe...Ahmose


 * Page 131: QUOTE: "There is no explicit clue in the texts themselves as to the actual state of preservation of the Step Pyramid and its annexes (Peden 2001: 98). Thus it is impossible to say how 'fictional' these comments are or if they reflect nothing but wishful thinking."
 * Page 131-132: QUOTE: "P. Chester Beatty IV and the harper's song 'from the time of King Antef' stress that all the sepulchres [sic] of the ancient writers had crumbled to dust. It is possible to interpret this lament as a general commentary about the decay of private funerary cultic installations, but there is nevertheless good evidence to the contrary. This evidence, however, concerns not the tombs of Imhotep, Khety or Kha-kheper-ra-seneb, which are still not known, but those of Middle Kingdom nobles of, for example, the Theban and the Oryx nomes. Hieratic inscriptions of the eighteenth and nineteenth Dynasty date commemorate pilgrimages to the tombs of Amenemhet and Khnumhotep of Beni Hasan (BH 2 and 3) or Senet/Antefoker (TT 60) at Thebes, all of which are early twelfth Dynasty in date. It is therefore not possible that they could have fallen into complete ruin by the time of the New Kingdom. The depiction of Sesostris I on the south wall of the passage of TT 60 can be presumed to have been the very impetus for the visits. Also, in the case of BH 2 and 3 the toponym 'Temple of Menat-Khufu' could certainly have been misinterpreted by the Ramesside pilgrims as a representation of a temple of King Kheops in this nome."
 * Page 132: QUOTE: "It follows from the archaeological record that the negative assessment of P. Chester Beatty IV is to be read as a literary fiction. The overall reality might have been, at least in many cases, completely different. The marked discrepancy between ruined tombs and the eternal memory of their former inhabitants might be an indication of the speaker's awareness of the fact that either these ancient writers never existed, or that the texts of historical figures such as Imhotep and Djedefhor were only attributed to them after their deaths. The Ramesside attitude towards its own literary past would therefore have been not too different from the current Egyptological point of view."
 * Page 132: QUOTE: "Wildung (1969: 69-72) has shown that the authors of these inscriptions should not be viewed as 'tourists', but as 'pious pilgrims' looking to profit from the mortuary cult of ancient kings, as, for example, that of Djoser, by using him as a medium between the world of the living and that of the gods. Thus, their interest in the 'temple (complex)'...would not have been historically motivated."
 * Page 132: QUOTE: "As certain examples seem to suggest, writing graffiti was obviously a topic taught in school. A small ostracon from the tomb of Senenmut (TT 71) preserves only the very first words of a typical representative of this genre (Megally 1981: 240; see also McDowell 1993: 29-30): 'Did come the scribe Djeserka in order to see...' The object of his interest is not mentioned, but it certainly was a tomb in the vicinity of Senenmut's."
 * Page 132-133: QUOTE: "Another illustration of the interaction between literature and visitors' graffiti is supplied by seven texts from the mortuary temple of Thutmosis III in Deir el-Bahri. No. 15, for example, according to the edition of Marciniak (1974: e.g. 74-75, pls. XV-XVI, 1973: 109-112; Sadek 1984: 83 - overlooked by Pedan 2001), incorporates a slightly modified quotation from maxim 21 of the 'Instruction of Ptahhotep', which is concerned with the proper treatment of one's own wife. Ptahhotep gives the following advice: 'Fill her (i.e. your wife's) body, clothe her back...' ('Teaching of Ptahhotep' P 327). The Theban graffiti from the second half of the twentieth Dynasty are devoted to Hathor, Lady of Deir el-Bahri. The dedication implores her 'to fill his (i.e. the speaker's) body and to clothe his back...' This plea is a clear adaptation of an ancient maxim, whose exact literary provenance must have been unknown to those who quoted it. Although textually not very substantial, the modified quotation from 'Ptahhotep' and its incorporation into a prayer on a temple wall testifies to a certain awareness of moral maxims from the past that could also be transposed and adapted to completely new contexts."
 * Page 133: QUOTE: "Graffiti not infrequently appears in clusters. This practice enables the writers to read older contemporary specimens of this genre and sometimes leads to scribal competition, or even to denigrating the scribblings of one's own professional ancestor, as seen, for example, in the graffito: 'like the work of a woman who has no mind/style.'"
 * Page 133: QUOTE: "This sort of dedication text can to a certain extent be regarded as a welcome complement to the 'praise of cities' (laus urbis), preserved on papyrus. There is an important difference, however: visitors' graffiti were first and foremost inspired by the ancienneté of sacred sites of the past. The hymns to centres like Thebes, Memphis, or Piramesse were mainly inspired by the fact that they were simply good places to live in."
 * Page 133: QUOTE: "There is thus an obvious contrast between the eulogy of sacred edifices of antiquity in graffiti on the one hand, and their actual state of preservation in the New Kingdom and their characterization as having fallen into ruin in P. Chester Beatty IV on the other. A simple explanation would be to insist on the radically different degree of sacrality attributed to the two media of communication at that time (Vernus 1989). A personal, although highly stylized, commemoration on the walls of an extremely sacred monument such as a temple or tomb, especially on the premises of a royal mortuary complex, would certainly not have been permitted, especially if the text assumed a critical tone towards its ruinous condition and called attention to the fact that its cult had been extinguished. Such a phrasing would have seriously violated the rules of decorum, at least as far as private persons as speakers are concerned. This rule seems not to have applied to kings or future pharaohs, or at least members of the inner circle of the royal family. An illustrative example of this privilege is the famous 'Sphinx' or 'Dream Stela' of Thutmosis IV (Sethe 1906-1957: 1,543, 7-8). In this particular case, however, it is the 'object' of the past itself or its god Harmakhis-Ra-Atum that calls for restoration. This spares the prince from having to utter any complaint in the first place. This may reflect a deeply rooted fear of verbalizing the elusive character of history and culture's former grandeur, and especially of its monumental manifestations. Critical remarks about the ruined state of private individuals' tombs, regardless of whether these tombs belonged to cultural and literary heroes such as Imhotep or Djedefhor, or to less important scribes, may, however, have been acceptable on an impermanent and fragile papyrus and would therefore not have been regarded as threatening to the monuments depicted in these texts (Peden 2001: 120 ff)."

Representations of the 'historical' past

 * Page 134: QUOTE: "Interest in kings of the past must certainly have been selective, since not all of the royal ancestors found their way into the literary tradition. New Kingdom literature includes Pepi II of the sixth Dynasty, Amenemhet II of the twelfth Dynasty, Tuthmosis III, Amenophis II and Ramesses II of the eighteenth and nineteenth Dynasties. Tales of — mostly military — bravery and glory were told about the last three kings. It is also clear, however, that some private individuals were also allowed to receive the interest of story-tellers. Three examples were generals, and therefore members of the military stratum. This may be a reflection of their status within society."
 * Page 134: QUOTE: "Aside from the Second Intermediate Period P. Westcar (Berlin P. 3303) with its tales of wonder at the court of the kings Snofru and Khufu, the second most ancient king of the Old Kingdom mentioned in New Kingdom literature is Pepi II of the sixth Dynasty. According to fragments of the eighteenth and perhaps twenty-fifth Dynasties, he is said to have had homosexual relations with one of his generals (Parkinson 1991b: 117, no. xxvi, 1995, 2002: 296-297; van Dijk 1994). He gets tracked by a so-called 'pleader of Memphis', who wants to publicize his observations, but ever time he attempts to do so he is prevented from telling his story by a band of noisy musicians. Pepi II is portrayed as 'doing everything he wishes to do to him' (the general), and this wording is reminiscent of the 'Myth of Divine Birth' as, for example, transmitted by Hatshepsut in Deir el-Bahri. If any 'mythologizing' reading of the text is to be allowed, this particular king may have been chosen because he had occupied the throne for 90(?) years, making him the king who had reigned the longest up until the time of the composition of this text. Furthermore, there are some indications that it dates to almost the same period as P. Westcar."
 * Page 134: QUOTE: "Two Moscow papyri from the eighteenth Dynasty preserve fragments of two episodes from the reign of Amenemhet II of the twelfth Dynasty. Their date of composition may well go back to the Middle Kingdom. In any case, it is at least certain that the texts occupy an 'intermediate [position] between Middle Kingdom belles lettres and texts of the Ramesside Period' (Baines 1996a: 161; Caminos 1956: 1-39, pls. i-vii, pls. viii-xvi; Parkinson 2002: 311-312). Their stories of the 'Pleasure of Fishing and Fowling' and the 'Sporting King' are currently unique examples."
 * Page 134-135: QUOTE: "The Hyksos period is reflected in a story on P. Sallier I dating to the nineteenth Dynasty, but the story itself may be slightly older (Wente 1973). It centres around the foreign 'ruler' of the fifteenth Dynasty called Apopi, and his Egyptian colleague in office, the so-called 'great one of the southern city' (= Thebes) Seqenenre Ta'a of the seventeenth Dynasty. In his Delta residence, Avaris, Apopi feels deeply offended by the noise of a herd of hippos located somewhere in the east of Thebes, which prevents him from sleeping during the day and at night. He asks Seqenenre to put a stop to this annoyance. He also advises him to send tribute to the Delta, to which Seqenenre agrees. After the Theban vessal has declared that he will comply, the text stops and we do not know what and how much is missing. There are some features of the text that call for an ironic reading. Apopi, certainly because of his semitic origin, is portrayed as being unable to write a letter in Egyptian by himself, since he is forced to have his scribes and 'wise men' do the job for him. Seqenenre, on the other hand, does not match the prototype of a determined Egyptian pharaoh. After having decided to comply with Apopi's request, he informs his entourage of his decision. Instead of breaking into servile applause as expected after an order from pharaoh, his courtiers remain absolutely mute for 'a long moment'. Their reaction turns this episode into a mockery of the standard so-called Königsnovelle (literally 'king's novel')."
 * Page 135: QUOTE: "This tale is in all probability correctly supposed to be a work of fiction, devoid of any historical facts. How could it have been possible to get annoyed in Avaris by animals as far away as Thebes? Moreover, since both rulers get their just deserts, it is extremely unlikely that the text was composed merely to deride and make fun of the Hyksos."
 * Page 135: QUOTE: "A very fragmentary papyrus in Turin (Botti 1955) relates an episode during one of Tuthmosis III's Syrian adventures. The central column preserves part of a speech of a man called Paser addressed to his king Menkheperra (Tuthmosis III) in which he tries to assure his master of the assistance of Amun-Ra. The king himself then seems to praise his divine helper, with Month of Hermonthis on his right arm, Month of et-Tod on his left and Month of Thebes 'exterminating (the foes) in front of the king Menkheperra'. The column ends with something about the asses of the prince of Syria being 'smashed down'. There is no clue as to which Syria campaign is being referred to but, indeed, it may be that this is a completely invented story, influenced or inspired by the annals on the walls of the Karnak temple, or possibly by day-book accounts, perhaps still preserved at the time of composition. In any case, this story might well mark the beginning of a long-lasting tradition of Tuthmosis III in literary discourse (Quirke 1996: 273(3); Redford 1986b: 545.)"

Conclusions

 * Page 136: QUOTE: "Reflections of the past in New Kingdom literature consist mainly of the names of private individuals who were held responsible for creating cultural values entrusted to 'writings' and 'bookrolls'. Their compositions were destined to be transmitted in written, not in oral form, to the end that 'the words/phrases of Imhotep and Djedefhor are in everybody's mouth' (Antef song). Instructions and laments/discourses, and perhaps even tales, were thought to have originated in a mythical past or in 'the time of the successors of the gods' (P. Chester Beatty IV). Their anienneté made them standard reference tools for posterity. From the literary 'ogdoad' only the very first two members can be verified in the historical and archaeological record: Imhotep and Djedefhor. By Ramesside times at the latest these stages had become the object of a collective ancestor cult in scribal circles. Ancient writings like the instructions of 'Ptahhotep' or the laments of 'Kha-kheper-ra-seneb' were invested with a 'magical' component and effect...Their 'authors' names were instrumental in everyday magic against nocturnal terrors (P. Athens). Thus, according to the Ramesside definition, 'literature' was understood to be imbued with magic."
 * Page 136: QUOTE: "Kings of the past and (perhaps in their wake) generals feature mainly as actors in tales of their military feats or failures. In contrast to, for example, the pharaoh Sisobek in the Late Period story of P. Vandier, whose name might be a pseudonym, all of them are historical personalities of flesh and blood."

Chapter 8 by Antonio Loprieno

 * Loprieno, Antonio. (2003). "Views of the Past in Egypt During the First Millennium BC," in 'Never Had the Like Occurred': Egypt's View of Its Past. London: University College London, Institute of Archaeology, an imprint of Cavendish Publishing Limited. ISBN 1844720071.

History versus historiography

 * Page 139: QUOTE: "Among the civilizations of the ancient world, Egypt stands out as a culture with a keen sense of its exceptional historical depth: references to past people or events abound both in visual and in written records, and we can generally say that in many aspects of their social life Egyptians looked at their history as a source of political or intellectual legitimation (Baines and Yoffee 1998: 212-225). Whether in the sense of modelling one's present actions upon the memory of the past (Vernus 1995: 35-54) or in the sense of stressing one's own achievements against the background of tradition (Vernus 1995: 54-121), one can argue that Ancient Egypt conforms to the cultural historical generalization that literate cultures tend to ascribe canonical status to individuals or events perpetuated in a fixed written record (Assmann 1992: 93-97). Yet, classical Egypt did not know a genuine discourse of history (Assmann 1996: 15-38), a 'historiography' written by individual authors comparable to Herodotus or Thucydides who project to the study of the past their own intellectual agenda (Hunter 1982: 3-13; Schadewaldt 1982: 113-119, 275-283): much like the transmission of literary works, the knowledge of the past was an important component of the elites' cultural identity, but the study of the historical and literary past privileged timeless paradigms of political function or intellectual prestige over contextualized, concrete examples of individual achievement. This is why, for example, Egyptian annals, king lists or priestly genealogies consist of chronologically organized but semantically repetitive sequences of names and deeds (von Beckerath 1997: 13-31; Redford 1986a: 1-96), or the names of classical literary authors tend to function as pseudopigraphic referents (Loprieno 1996a: 225-226)."
 * Page 139-140: QUOTE: "While most scholars would probably agree with this generalization when applied to the earlier periods of Egyptian history, the first millennium BC provides a more complex picture that obliges us to revisit common assumptions on Ancient Egypt's cultural traits. During the Third Intermediate Period, from the 11th to the eighth century (Taylor 2000: 330-368), the Late Period, until 332 BC (Lloyd 2000a: 369-394), and the hellenistic age, under Ptolemaic (Lloyd 2000b: 395-421) and Roman rule (Peacock 2000: 422-455), we can observe a variety of different streams in Egypt's approaches to the past, which also resulted in an intense dialogue between Egypt and other civilizations of the Mediterranean world, such as Israel and Greece. This study shows that a historiography in the sense of a more critical dialectic with the past than was the case in earlier centuries developed during the first part of the first millennium BC and appeared as a feature of Egyptian civilization from the eighth and the seventh centuries BC, eventually reaching its peak in hellenistic times (Loprieno 2001: 89-128)."

History of events versus history of memories
=John North's Astronomy and Cosmology=


 * North, John. (1995). The Norton History of Astronomy and Cosmology. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0393036561.

The Calendar

 * Page 12: QUOTE: "Some time after the nomadic tribes of North Africa first settled as farmers in the Nile Valley, they realized that there was a correlation between the pattern of the river's behaviour and that of the star Sirius (called Sothis), the brightest in the sky. The rising of the Nile, important because its flood waters irrigated the valley, was seen to coincide with the first sighting of Sirius on the eastern horizon shortly before sunrise, after a long period of invisibility. This event, now known as its 'heliacal rising', took place in mid July, and so not at a notable point in the solar year. The three seasons for the Egyptians were related to the behaviour of the river, and so the names of the months that began them were 'Flood', 'Emergence', and 'Low Water' or 'Harvest'. The other month names came from lunar festivals. The Sun was at first important for them, it seems, mainly as an indicator of the yearly cycle. It is unlikely that the solstices could have been as important to the Egyptians as to northern peoples, whose views on a year with only three seasons it would be amusing to learn."
 * Page 12: QUOTE: "To reconcile the three interlocking systems—stellar, lunar, and solar—was one of the main tasks of Egyptian astronomy, and it remained at the centre of astronomy until modern times. The festival of Sirius/Sothis more or less followed the solar year of about 365¼ days, but to the length of twelve months, each of twenty-nine or thirty days, averaged only about 354 days. From at least the middle of the third millennium, therefore, the Egyptians devised one of the earliest calendar rules known to history: an extra ('intercalary') month named Thoth, a lunar deity, was added to the year only if Sirius/Sothis rose heliacally in month twelve."
 * Page 13: QUOTE: "As Egyptian society became steadily better organized, the calendar was developed further. The length of the year was determined as 365 days, and the 'months' were standardized at thirty days, each of them divided into three 'weeks' of ten days. The system, which dates from perhaps the twenty-ninth or thirtieth century BC, has many advantages. The week is a conventional matter of no great astronomical importance, but there is an obvious ambiguity in the word 'month' here. To those for whom the visible Moon is a matter of religious importance, the only problems that this calendar solves are essentially problems of book-keeping. It is hardly surprising that the Egyptian year of 365 days is one that astronomers have found attractive, for it simplifies the conversion of long periods of time to days. Even Copernicus, following Hellenistic practice, used it for his astronomical tables."
 * Page 13: QUOTE: "The new calendar inevitably ran into difficulties as the slight error in the length of the year accumulated (that is, the odd quarter of a day or so). The solution was to devise a new lunar year to run in harness with the civil year. New rules of intercalation were drawn up around 2500 BC, and for over two millennia Egypt had three calendars in use, side by side."

The Hours of Day and Night

 * Page 13: QUOTE: "The Egyptians' wish to divide the night into smaller parts combined in a curious way with their civil calendar to give us our division of the day into twenty-four hours. Any society that carries out ritual acts by night is likely to devise ways of judging the passing of the night. The Egyptians wrote copiously on the passage of the sun-god Re on his night-boat through the Other World, between sunset and sunrise, and the stages were marked by movements of the stars. To find how they were marked we must turn back for a moment to the calendar."
 * Page 14: QUOTE: "Heliacal rising (first morning visibility after a period during which the star rose only in daylight) was an important Egyptian calendar notion. A bright star was chosen as a marker — we have already seen that Sirius/Sothis was the most important marker of all. Each day subsequent to its heliacal rising, a star rose a little more in advance of the Sun than before, until another suitable marker star rose heliacally. But who is to select those stars, and on what principle? The solution was reasonably straightforward. We have seen that the civil calendar divided the year into thirty-six 'weeks' of ten days each. Thirty-six stars or constellations were therefore sought that marked, by their heliacal risings, the beginnings of those thirty-six weeks. (It seems that they were chosen to be as much like Sirius/Sothis as possible, each invisible for about seventy days in the year.)"
 * Page 14-15: QUOTE: "Forget, now, the reasons for which the stars were chosen, that is, reasons having to do with the division of the year, that is, with the calendar. We simply have thirty-six stars, or groups of stars, recognized as being of great importance, and during any night their risings will occur at moderately regular intervals. Turning as they do once in roughly a single solar day, one might imagine that eighteen of the thirty-six wold rise successively during an average night, but in fact the problem is complicated in several respects. During most of twilight the stars are invisible: total darkness was what was deemed to matter. The stars chosen were to the south of the celestial equator, that is, did not cross the ideal horizon due east. (They were in fact in a belt roughly parallel to, and to the south of, the Sun's path through the stars, the ecliptic.) Not all nights are in any case of equal length — at Egyptian latitudes a midwinter's night is nearly half as long again as a midsummer's night. We need to go further into the theoretical reasons for it: even though during much of the year the night was not divided into exactly twelve parts by these stars, it was finally regarded as being so divided. Evidence for this way of dividing the night comes from diagrams on the inside of coffin-lids from the Eleventh Dynasty (twenty-second century BC)."
 * Page 15: QUOTE: "Daylight was later divided into twelve hours, by analogy with the night. And so we were given the twenty-four hours of our day, form which even the 'rational' endeavors of Revolutionary France did not manage to disengage us."
 * Page 15: QUOTE: "It is assumed that the coffin-lids are concise versions of representations on the ceilings of tombs of contemporary rulers of the Middle Kingdom. The earliest of these is in an unfinished tomb of Senmut, vizier of Queen Hatshepsut, and it was followed by those in the underground cenotaphs of Seti I, Ramses IV and later rulers. Almost a thousand years separate the Seti ceiling from a notable papyrus manuscript, Carlsberg 1, that amounts to a commentary on it. This funerary text contains instructions for making a shadow-clock, with four divisions on its base, illustrated in figure 2.1 in two positions, that on the left for afternoon use, and that on the right for mornings. Another from the time of Thutmose III (1490-1436 BC) has five divisions."
 * Page 15-16 QUOTE: "How aware early peoples were of the pattern of variation in the lengths of day and night it is impossible to say, but this awareness must clearly have been heightened with the invention of the water clock. The earliest example dates from the time of Amenhotep III (1397-1360 BC), but relates to calendar-reckoning during the reign of Amenhotep I (1545-1525 BC), and it is from an inscription in a tomb from that earlier period that we know of attempts to express the ratio of the lengths of longest and shortest nights. The ratio given (14 : 12) is not particularly accurate, but it is the principle that counts, and we are in the unusual position of knowing the name of the man responsible, Amenemhet."
 * Page 16: QUOTE: "After the Alexandrian conquests succeeded in Hellenizing Egypt, the Babylonian zodiac—that is, the set of constellations centred on the ecliptic—was introduced into Egyptian astronomy. When this happened, the thirty-six star divisions were simply transformed into thirty-six sections of the zodiac, each of ten degrees. These are the 'decans' or 'faces' of Greek (Hellenistic) and later astrology."
 * Page 16: QUOTE: "Around the fifteenth century BC, it was recognized that the risings of the decanal stars were a poor way of regulating civil and religious life, and another set of stars was chosen. These were observed, not at the horizon, but as they crossed the meridian. Again this was no exact matter: these meridian transits were observed with reference to the head, ears and shoulders of a sitting man. Three royal Ramesside tombs (c. 1300-1100 BC) were decorated each with twenty-four tables (two to a month) that made it possible to judge the hour in this way. It has been conjectured that these star clocks were drawn up with the help of water clocks, for several water clocks survive with astronomical material engraved on them."
 * Page 16-17: QUOTE: "Despite the great cultural wealth and length of time over which the heavens were scrutinized by the Egyptians, not to mention the respect which they held many celestial objects, except in the case of the calendar it does not seem to have occurred to them to seek for any deeply systematic explanation of what they observed. For all that they were in possession of a script, they seem to have produced no regular records of planetary movements, eclipses, or other phenomena of a plainly irregular sort. The Egyptians read legends more easily than mathematics in the stars. Decorated monuments, of which more than eighty are known that could be somehow classified as astronomical, represent the cosmic deities of mythology, including the solar and lunar deities, the planets, the winds, the constellations, Earth, air, sky, the cardinal points, and so forth. They testify to great familiarity with the constellation patterns — theirs were not identical to ours, of course. The great reputation the Egyptians have enjoyed for most of the last two thousand years is based, however, on a confusion."
 * Page 17: QUOTE: "To the Romans, 'the Egyptians' were those who lived in Egypt, and so often included those of Greek culture. Almost invariably, when Egyptian astronomy or astrology is mentioned, Hellenistic Egyptian astronomy is intended. Zodiacs in temples and tombs are Hellenistic, and take over much from Mesopotamian cultures. The first known Egyptian zodiac was a ceiling from the temple of Esna, no earlier than 246 BC, copied down during the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt but since destroyed. The best known, now in the Louvre, is from the Dendera temple, and was once part of the ceiling of a chapel on the roof of the temple of Hathor (before 30 BC). The origins of these zodiacs are clear from the constellation images they contain, such as our Capricorn and Sagittarius, which are found on much more ancient Babylonian boundary stones."
 * Page 17-18: QUOTE: "If we are to narrow our focus and consider only mathematical, theoretical, progress, then we may take calendar schemes as the strongest native tradition, so that it comes as no surprise to find that in perhaps the fourth century BC the Egyptians recognized a twenty-five-year lunar cycle. This equated twenty-five Egyptian years (9125 days exactly) with 309 months ('synodic' months, new moon to new moon). This is an excellent approximation, which slips by a day in only about five centuries. It is a finding worthy to be placed side by side with the discoveries of the mathematical astronomers of Mesopotamia. From the sixth century BC, a time of Persian domination in Egypt, the Egyptians had been adapting the Babylonian lunar months to their own civil calendar, and this fact goes some way towards explaining a result that is conspicuous by its rarity."
 * Page 18: QUOTE: "Ptolemy, the greatest astronomer of antiquity, was an Alexandrian, and belongs to a later period. After the collapse of the Roman empire, of which Egypt was for long a part, the country became largely Christianized, and Coptic literature, using a form of Greek script for native dialects, carried a very superficial form of astronomical knowledge down to Ethiopia; but again this was at heart Hellenistic, and did not have more ancient Egyptian roots. For a more truly scientific study of the heavens we must look further east, to Mesopotamia."

=Robert Chadwick's First Civilizations=


 * Chadwick, Robert. (2005). First Civilizations: Ancient Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt (Second Edition). London and Oakville: Equinox Publishing Ltd. ISBN 1904768776.

Astronomy and astrology in Egypt

 * Page 113: QUOTE: "Although many popular books over the past century have repeatedly claimed that the Egyptians possessed a highly developed astronomy and astrology, these claims are incorrect. Compared to Mesopotamian civilization, Egyptian accomplishments in the area of celestial knowledge were important, but somewhat less impressive. Nevertheless, they did make use of their observational knowledge of astronomy during the construction of pyramids (see Ch. 11) to align the four sides of these great burial structures on true or celestial north, and the cardinal points of the compass. To accomplish this feat, pyramid builders used the northern, or circumpolar, stars to determine the location of the celestial north pole. They did this centuries before the invention of the magnetic compass, which, in any case, would have been less accurate than the measurements made by the pyramid builders. However, historians of science have tended to view this technique as being less sophisticated than other forms of astronomical knowledge, arguing that using the stars to determine true north required only a familiarity with the circular movement of the stars in the northern portions of the heavens, and not a highly developed knowledge of mathematics nor any advanced theories of stellar motion. What was required was to note the rising point of one of the northern stars and its subsequent setting point some time later. Bisecting the angle between the rising and setting points yields celestial, or true north. Wooden instruments called a bay and merqet, that could have been used for this purpose have been found. Although many temples were dedicated to celestial deities in Assyria and Babylonia, there is no clear evidence that celestial objects were ever used, as they were in Egypt, to orient structures towards true north or any of the other cardinal directions."

Pyramid shafts

 * Page 113: QUOTE: "The claim that some of the shafts in the Khufu Pyramid (see Ch. 11) were used as 'tunnels' that were aimed at the polar star so that the shape and angles of the structure could be maintained by the builders during construction is likewise unsubstantiated by the evidence. Since the 19th century one of the most widely believed legends about the pyramids has been that the star Alpha Draconis (Thuban) was used by Egyptian architects to align the pyramids on true celestial north. It was imagined that architects would position themselves at the bottom of the descending passage, deep in the Khufu Pyramid, and when looking up they could see the star Thuban and use it was a kind of celestial reference point to help them control the shape of the pyramid structure. But research using sophisticated computer programs that can recreate the positions of the stars in the sky at the time the pyramids were built, has shown that the descending passage pointed to no important star that could have been used for alignment purposes."
 * Page 113-115: QUOTE: "The pyramids were built with great precision. Casing stones were fitted tightly together with great care, and the exterior angles were highly accurate. But fitting stones together properly and chiselling them to smooth and precise angles has more to do with good planning by the architects and correct deployment of skilful [sic] stonemasons than it does with the stars. There can be little doubt that circumpolar stars were used to orient the pyramids towards true north, but all other talk of alignments is open to question or simply unfounded. Some over-eager pyramid enthusiasts still insist that these great stone structures were storage houses of astrological and astronomical knowledge. However, royal pyramid building ended in Egypt around 1800 BC, more than 1000 years before the zodiac was developed, and long before the birth of either horoscopic astrology or mathematical astronomy. Nevertheless, during the Pyramid Age the Egyptians did have a keen interest in the heavens. They worshipped the sun as the god Re, and they believed that the deceased king accompanied the sun god on his daily voyage across the skies. Sometimes the deceased king was perceived as a rower in the solar boat helping to row the sun across the heavens, while at other times he is seen as the captain of the boat. Religious passages called the Pyramid Texts, inscribed in the burial chamber of the 5th Dynasty King Unas, speak of the king as becoming one of the northern stars in the afterlife. But worshipping celestial deities does not constitute either astronomy or astrology, any more than worshipping the Nile River would have made the Egyptians hydraulic engineers. This level of interest in the heavens corresponds to what historians of science refer to as 'shepherd's astronomy', practised [sic] to some extent by many ancient civilizations [sic] around the world, but it did not constitute any kind of exact science. Despite their relatively modest understanding of the heavens, ancient Egyptian sky-watchers were skilled celestial observers who fulfilled a number of important and useful functions in Egyptian society, and their calendrical and time-keeping legacies are with us to this very day. Even though the Egyptians developed a solar cult, and the star Sirius and the moon were important deities, the planets had neither the same religious importance they had in Mesopotamia, nor temples devoted to them."
 * Page 115: QUOTE: "The Egyptians seem to have had less interest than the Mesopotamians in cataloguing and recording the movements of celestial objects. Few celestial observation texts are known from Egypt before the third century BC, and there is little evidence of the earlier type of celestial divination known as 'omen astrology', similar to that of Mesopotamia, until the second or third century AD. The Egyptians eventually adopted astrology after the Persian and the Greek conquests. Most astrological texts from Egypt are from the Roman period."
 * Page 115: QUOTE: "The earliest writings of an Egyptian astronomer and astrologer come from a nobleman and scribe named Harkhebi, who lived around 250 BC. Harkhebi wrote that, 'clear-eyed', he made regular observations of the unerring stars to determine the future. Much of what he says shows a clear Mesopotamian influence. The famous low-relief sculpture of the zodiac found at the Temple of Dendera, which was once thought to contain ancient Egyptian astronomical wisdom, was fashioned about 30 BC, three centuries after the Greeks conquered Egypt. While it contains authentic forms of Egyptian astronomy, the signs of the zodiac are Egyptianized copies of Babylonian and Assyrian zodiacal figures, some of which were known in Mesopotamia as early as the second millennium BC."
 * Page 115: QUOTE: "In their writings the Egyptians made numerous references to the sun, the moon, and the stars, but they left the names of only a few identifiable constellations, the five planets visible to the unaided eye, and lists of 36 decanal stars used for telling the time. Unlike Mesopotamia, there is no indication that the moon and planets were systematically observed and recorded over long periods of time, or that there existed a network of celestial observation posts in the Nile river valley staffed by trained observers. In addition, collections that contained the technical terms necessary for specialized knowledge of the heavens that could be consulted for reference purposes were unknown in ancient Egypt."
 * Page 115: QUOTE: "Why the Egyptians showed less interest than the Mesopotamians in astrology and astronomy is unclear, but it may be because, unlike the peoples of Mesopotamia, the Egyptians were less interested in divination or fortune-telling. The underlying concept of divination, which maintained that the gods placed messages and warnings in natural phenomena that could then be detected and understood by trained divination specialists, was not a well-developed concept in Egyptian religion. Instead, the Egyptians seem to have placed more emphasis on rites performed in the temples by highly skilled priests, who, according to at least one Egyptologist, were primarily interested in repeating the orderly past, and not searching out answers concerning the future."

The calendar and astronomy

 * Page 115-116: QUOTE: "For centuries, celestial observers and calendar-makers in Mesopotamia attempted to understand the mysteries of lunar motion, and how the lunar calendar could be synchronized with the seasons and the solar year. The need for a better understanding of the lunar calendar and knowing when to add an extra month so the calendar would be in line with the solar year may have led to a more sophisticated mathematical understanding of lunar motion. In contrast, the Egyptians relied on their 365-day civil calendar and placed less emphasis on developing a system on intercalary months to bring the lunar calendar in line with the solar year and season."

The civil calendar

 * Page 116: QUOTE: "The Egyptians had several calendars. Two of the most important were the lunar calendar and the 365-day civil calendar. The Egyptians avoided the problems of attempting to calculate the lunar year and bring it in line with the solar year by creating a 'civil calendar', which some have claimed was the most intelligent calendar ever made. The civil calendar was composed of 12 months of 30 days each, plus five additional ('epagomenal') days that were added on at the end of the year, making a 365-day calendar. This made it just one quarter day short of the length of the solar year (365¼ days). Even though the civil calendar was the principle business and administrative calendar in use throughout their history, the Egyptians kept the lunar calendar to regulate religious functions such as festivals and ceremonies."

The lunar calendar

 * Page 116: QUOTE: "The oldest Egyptian calendar was based on the moon. Like the calendar-makers of Mesopotamia or any society that use a lunar calendar, Egyptian calendar-makers occasionally had to make certain adjustments to keep the lunar calendar synchronized with the cycle of the seasons. As in Mesopotamia, the Egyptians found a solution to this problem by using the bright star Sirius to help them determine when the lunar cycle had fallen behind and when it was time to add an extra month. Sirius was a very convenient and meaningful celestial object for the Egyptians since it appeared just before sunrise each year about the same time the waters of the Nile River began to rise prior to its annual flood (illustrated p. 5). When the first dim light of Sirius began to emerge in the pre-dawn light of the sun it signalled the beginning of the New Year, and the Egyptians referred to Sirius as 'the opener of the year; the inundation'. They also realized that if the last lunar month, called wep-renpet, occurred before the New Year, the lunar calendar was still accurate. However, if the calendar had already slipped into the first month of the New Year, it was time to add an extra month to the calendar."
 * Page 116: QUOTE: "Unlike other lunar calendars in the ancient Near East, the Egyptian lunar month began after the disappearance of the last thin crescent of the waning moon in the eastern sky, just before sunrise."

Thoth and Khons

 * Page 116: QUOTE: "The moon was associated with a number of Egyptian deities, the most prominent one being Thoth, the god of scribes and learning. Thoth had a cult centre at the city of Hermopolis in Middle Egypt, and was usually represented in paintings and sculptures as a man with the head of an ibis bird or as a seated baboon with a lunar disc on his head. The moon god Khons (or Khonsu) was represented in art as a young man in the form of a mummy. On his head he wore a crown shaped like a crescent moon, which held a complete lunar disc. The name Khons means 'traveller', referring to his monthly journey across the sky as the ever-changing moon. Khons was a god of lesser importance than the great Egyptian deities Amun or Osiris. His lower status is perhaps reflected in the fact that few large temples were ever built for him. Unlike Sin, their Mesopotamian counterpart (see Ch. 7), the followers of Thoth and Khons never attempted to overthrow the established hierarchy of gods. Three of the most important days in the lunar month were the day Khons was conceived, the day he was born, and the day he reached maturity at the full moon. These may be interpreted as the day when the moon is invisible in the sun's bright light, the evening of the first crescent visibility, and the day of the full moon when it reaches its maximum size."
 * Page 116: QUOTE: "Egyptian interest concentrated on the early morning rising of celestial objects on the eastern horizon. Egyptian religious beliefs maintained that the east was the direction of birth and resurrection, while the west was the direction of disappearance and death. The sun, the stars (including Sirius), and the planets rose in the east and were reborn. Anything that set below the western horizon met its end and died. This belief is reflected in the location of mortuary complexes on the west bank of the Nile River. Because the east was the direction of rebirth in the Egyptian calendar, the lunar month began when the last crescent of the waning moon disappeared in the east just before sunrise. This is the opposite of the Mesopotamian calendar, which began with the sighting of the first lunar crescent in the west, just after sundown. The Egyptian day began at dawn while the day in Mesopotamia began at twilight. Unlike the Mesopotamian calendar, where the days were only numbered, each day of the Egyptian month had its own name."

Star clocks

 * Page 116-117: QUOTE: "The ancient Egyptians developed an ingenious way of telling time using the stars. This practice came into use in Egypt during the Old Kingdom in the third millennium BC. As the earth continues its annual journey around the sun, new stars become visible. Like Sirius, when it becomes visible in the sky just before sunrise, other stars also appear on the eastern horizon just before sunrise every few days. Using the appearance of such stars, the Egyptians divided the year into 36 ten-day periods called 'decans'. Charts of these decans were drawn up and used to tell the time at night and to help ensure that nocturnal religious activities were performed at the proper times."
 * Page 117: QUOTE: "Such lists of stars are referred to as 'star clocks'. Star clocks are divided into 36 columns, each representing a period of ten days. The five additional days at the end of the year had their own special section at the end of the star lists. The Egyptians divided the night into 12 night hours as the stars passed across the heavens overhead. The night hours were not all the same length. The winter night hours were longer than those of summer because winter nights are longer and it stays dark longer, and the hours in the summer were shorter because the nights are shorter."
 * Page 117: QUOTE: "The Mesopotamians had a similar system of using the stars to tell the time of the year and the time of night. The calendar stars were called 'the three stars each', meaning that they were three stars for each month, and they functioned in a similar manner to those used by the Egyptians. Again, like the Egyptians, the Mesopotamians used rising and setting constellations, called 'ziqpu stars', as they crossed the meridian or midpoint of the heavens to tell the time of the night and establish the night watch."

The legacy of Near Eastern celestial knowledge

 * Page 117: QUOTE: "Both Egypt and Mesopotamia made important and lasting contributions to our knowledge of the heavens and the way we keep time. The Egyptians gave us the 24 hour day and, with some modifications, our 365-day year, which was borrowed from the Egyptians by the Romans during the time of Julius Caesar. This 'Julian calendar' was used for over 1500 years before it was reformed during the reign of Pope Gregory in AD 1582. The Gregorian calendar, with a few refinements, is the calendar we still use today. Egyptian celestial knowledge was passed on to other cultures as well, and Greek scholars such as Eudoxus (fourth century BC) and Oenopides (fifth century BC) studied and seem to have learned their astronomy from the Egyptians."

Healthcare, healers, and physicians in ancient Egypt

 * Page 121: QUOTE: "Like Mesopotamia, Egypt also had empirico-rational and magical-religious methods of healing the sick and treating the injured and, as in Mesopotamia, the ancient Egyptians would probably not have considered one approach more valid or effective than the other. In all pre-scientific societies empirical knowledge and magical acts were both equally valid ways of understanding and controlling situations in the real world. Most healers, from the most famous court physician to the humblest village witch-doctor, probably knew something about both systems and used them when they treated the sick. To many people, both ancient and modern, it is perfectly rational to bind wounds, administer herbs and recite prayers when treating a patient."
 * Page 121: QUOTE: "According to tradition the first, and most famous, physician in Egypt was Imhotep, chief vizier and architect of the step pyramid (see Ch. 11) of the 3rd Dynasty king, Djoser. Two thousand years after his death Imhotep was deified as the god of medicine, widsom, and learning, and he was also identified with Asclepius, a Greek god, who filled a similar capacity. His fame as a healer god reached its peak during the Greco-Roman period (332 BC - AD 395). Healers who administered drugs and emphasized the empirico-rational approach to treat men were called swnw (conveniently pronounced 'soonu') in Egyptian. As in Mesopotamia, there are no Egyptian words that correspond exactly to our words for physician or doctor, and it is perhaps more accurate to employ the terms 'healer' or 'health practitioner' when referring to the swnw of ancient Egypt. It seems clear that there were female physicians or healers as well. Priests were called w'bw (pronounced 'wabu') and emphasized prayers while s'w (pronounced 'sau') emphasized magical aspects such as amulets. Healers were also known as the 'priests of Sekhmet', a goddess depicted in art as a lion-headed woman, who possessed the powers of healing, and was the patroness of physicians and veterinarians."
 * Page 121: QUOTE: "Most swnw were probably sons of healers who followed in their fathers' footsteps and carried on the tradition and healing practices of their elders. As in Mesopotamia, there is no evidence that healers acquired any formal training in medical schools, and it seems likely that medical knowledge was passed on from father to son during a long period of apprenticeship. However, there was one institution situated close to some temples called per ankh (the 'house of life'), which may have been a place of learning and repository for medical texts."

Dental health, teeth, and "toothers"

 * Page 121: QUOTE: "The practice of healing was institutionalized in Egypt from around 3000 BC, and the first healers to appear in texts were dentists, called 'toothers'. The ancient Egyptians had few dental caries or cavities, probably due to their diet, which contained no refined sugar. Throughout the entire 30-century span of Egyptian history teeth show extreme attribution from the fine grit that made its way into the bread consumed by everyone. Flour for making bread had to be ground between stones and, as a result, minute particles of stone were transmitted into the daily bread of the entire land, and caused severe wear on the teeth, often wearing them down to the gums. Evidence from well-preserved mummies indicates that caries (cavities) were rare, but tooth abscesses were common and few people died with all of their teeth still intact. Abscesses of a few sufferers were relieved by drilling holes into the jawbone (mandible) near the root of the infected tooth to drain off accumulated pus deposits."

Causes of disease

 * Page 122: QUOTE: "Unlike in Mesopotamia, the concept of contagion, the touching or contact with a sick person or contaminated object as a means of spreading diseases, seems to have been unknown in ancient Egypt. It was thought that diseases were caused by occult or magical forces, sorcery, or immoral behaviour; another cause, seemingly unique to Egypt, was 'foreign women', who could cast spells on unsuspecting local men. One Egyptian text speaks of disease being caused by the 'breath' of a god, which brings to mind the Babylonian idea that diseases were caused by the 'hand of a ghost' (see above). Although Egyptian concepts about the causes of disease were in many cases on the same level of sophistication as those of other pre-scientific societies, they also developed what was probably the first empirical theory of the causes of disease."
 * Page 122: QUOTE: "The Egyptians believed that putrefaction and rotting were associated with death, disease, and infection. One of the major causes of disease was the food consumed by humans. It exited the body either as faeces [sic], urine, or some other form of decay. Intestinal decay was the result of whdw (pronounced 'wekhedu'), and one way to improve or restore health was to rid the body of whdw, which would stop putrefaction and disease. Whdw could either develop inside the body or it could invade it from the outside. Once in the body whdw could attach itself to some form of putrefaction such as faeces or pus, and then travel throughout the body via a series of tubes. As the whdw spread through the body it left behind dental abscesses, suppurating sores, intestinal cramps, eye infections, fevers, and other maladies. Because whdw caused disease, it was only reasonable that the cure was to rid the body of toxic waste materials, and healers often prescribed laxatives to clean out the body's system. Medical texts repeatedly advise healers to prescribe remedies that will expel waste or disease from the body, or empty the stomach of disease. Removal of whdw meant that much care and attention had to be placed on the anus. Proper evacuations would remove harmful amounts of whdw, and were believed to be basic for the suitable maintenance of health. Nearly every surviving medical papyrus deals with the anus, and many prescriptions involved enemas or purges. There were even men called the 'Shepherds of the anus', whose task it may have been to administer enemas and release excess amounts of whdw."
 * Page 122: QUOTE: "Along with enemas, purgatives, and expectorants, which were commonly used to cleanse or rid the body of offensive substances, both spitting and vomiting were thought to rid the patient of disease. In some cases it was believed that whdw was caused by parasitic worms in patient's stools. By examining mummies modern researchers have determined that worms were a persistent problem among the ancient Egyptians. Guinea worms, roundworms, tapeworms, and hookworms have all been found in the mummified remains. Parasitic worms were probably observed by Egyptian swnw and their patients, who deduced that these worms were the cause of whdw."
 * Page 122: QUOTE: "Although the ancient Mesopotamian healers from Sumer, Babylonia, and Assyria recognized some non-spiritual causes of disease, they had no comprehensive theory based on physical causes that attempted to account for the origins or treatment of ailments. The situation seems different in the case of Egyptian medicine. Egyptologist Robert Ritner has argued convincingly that the Egyptian idea of whdw as the cause of illness constituted the first empirical and comprehensive disease theory in history. Accordingly, the concept of whdw offers a physical explanation for the onset of disease, as well as ageing and death. The concept of whdw as a weay of explaining disease in a purely physical manner was a major departure from the more traditional ideas about disease and sickness known in places like Mesopotamia."

Anatomical knowledge

 * Page 122: QUOTE: "Egyptian anatomical knowledge is reflected in the more than 200 anatomical terms that refer to parts of the body and specific organs. Despite this large number of technical terms, organs such as the kidneys and some individual bones are not mentioned. It was traditionally believed that Egyptian knowledge of anatomy, and medicine in general, came from mummification, the treatment of battlefield wounds by physicians who accompanied the pharaoh's armies into the field, or at construction sites, where the swnw would have been observed and treated broken bones and severed limbs. It has been argued that mummification was important for learning about the body, because much knowledge of anatomy would have been acquired by removing internal organs and preparing the cadaver for burial. This interpretation is, however, open to question, since the mummifiers who prepared the dead for burial were considered unclean outcasts, and it is doubtful that the swnw would have had much contact with them. Nevertheless, mummies have proved an important tool for modern medical researchers, helping them to understand the nature and extent of a number of medical problems encountered by the ancient Egyptians. By examining some of the thousands of mummies in ancient Egypt, a number of illnesses have been identified. Since people in other parts of the ancient Near East did not preserve corpses to the same extent as they did in Egypt, this valuable means of studying past illnesses (palaeopathology) is unavailable to medicine outside Egypt."
 * Page 122-123: QUOTE: "Although there was no special term for veterinarian in ancient Egyptian, it has been argued that much anatomical knowledge came from the practice of veterinary medicine, and that the treatment of humans and animal medical problems was not as clearly defined in ancient times as it is today. This argument may have merit because farmers and herders often had to slaughter animals and would quickly learn about their organs and bone structure."
 * Page 123: QUOTE: "A number of Egyptian medical texts (papyri) were straightforward, hands-on manuals on how to deal with medical problems. In the second half of the first millennium BC, increased trade with the outside world expanded the range of medicinal plants used to treat illnesses, and at the time Egyptian healers were considered among the best in the world. From the Persian period onwards, Egyptian medical knowledge did much to prepare the way for advances in later Graeco-Roman [sic] medicine."

Medical papyri

 * Page 123: QUOTE: "Much of our knowledge about Egyptian medical practices has been preserved on a number of papyri housed in museums and private collections around the world. Medical papyri, such as the Ebers Papyrus, containing 877 prescriptions for largely herbal remedies, and the Papyri Ramesseum IV and V, dealing with contraception, birth, and neonatal care, have survived the ages and offer important clues to understanding ancient Egyptian medical practices. One of the most informative of these, the Ebers Papyrus, indicates that the healers knew about the beating of the heart and blood vessels that went to all the limbs and extremities of the body. The healer was instructed to place his hands in various places on the body to pick up the beating of the heart. The text explains that the heart 'speaks out' of the vessels that go to the arms and legs and other bodily extremities. The vessels were thought to be tubes of some kind that carried blood, sperm, air, urine, tears, and even faeces, to the various parts of the body. The Ebers Papyrus mentions that there are four blood vessels to the nose: two contain mucus and two contain blood. Four vessels give blood to the temples and the eyes. Another four vessels go to the anus and when they overflow with faeces the excess finds it [sic] way to other bodily extremities, causing medical complications."

Surgery and the treatment of traumatic injuries

 * Page 123: QUOTE: "The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, is a well-preserved section of a medical text containing instructions on how to deal with traumatic injuries. The appearance of the word 'surgery' in the modern title is somewhat misleading since no actual surgical incisions are mentioned in the original papyrus document; complex surgery was probably only attempted in extreme cases in pre-scientific medicine. For example, there is no evidence that more radical forms of surgery such as amputations and trephination were practised [sic] in ancient Egypt."
 * Page 123: QUOTE: "Although the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus never mentions surgery, it does refer to sewing wounds closed. Other than a suturing needle and a tool for cauterizing or burning wounds to close them, no other tools are mentioned. Along with a few magical incantations, the text contains instructions for many sound medical practices recognizable by modern physicians. Written in simple language, with clear descriptions of actual cases, it has been argued that the text was a training manual for apprentice physicians, or a first-aid manual for 'medics' employed in first-aid work on construction sites or on the battlefield. This interpretation is supported by the fact that in a number of instances the text refers to a 'teacher' who seems to be giving on-site instructions to students. It may be that on the battlefield the healers were not swnw, but simply soldier-medics. Another indication that the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus is a teaching text is shown by the rather basic language, which would not have been employed if the text has [sic] been written for experienced physicians. In simple terms, skull fractures are said to be like breaks in a pot, exposed brain tissue is said to resemble molten copper, and counting pulse beats is said to be like counting quantities with the fingers. The text contains 48 cases, systematically divided into sections on injuries to the cranium, the forehead, the nasal bones, the cheeks and upper jaw, and the spine, dislocated and broken bones, abscesses, and others."
 * Page 123: QUOTE: "Even though the text is written in simple language, it contains a large amount of sophisticated medical knowledge. The healer is instructed to observe the patient and determine his condition, then proceed with the steps necessary to treat the wound and ameliorate the situation. This is clear in one case where the swnw must set a broken arm. He is instructed to lie the patient down with something to spread the shoulders so the two parts of the broken arm can fall into place. Then he has to place a splint over the break and bind it for support."
 * Page 123: QUOTE: "The text divides cases into two categories: those which can be treated with a good possibility of being cured, and those that cannot be cured due to the severe nature of the injury. One section of the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus gives detailed descriptions of a number of open wounds to the head. One clause explains that if a man has a head wound that fractures his skull and exposes the brain, the wound should be palpitated or massaged, to better observe and understand the nature of the wound. If the head wound is severe and the victim bleeds from the nose and the ears, it states that this type of wound cannot be treated or cured. One symptom that shows up a number of times with head wounds is stiffness of the neck. This, again, is a symptom that accompanies head wounds and is known to modern medical practitioners."
 * Page 123-124: QUOTE: "Other injuries to the head mention a shuffling walk and the dragging of the feet, indicating the patient had suffered damage to that part of the brain controlling movement. Still other injuries include brain damage that causes spasms of the limbs, as well as loss of control of some limbs and shoulders. These severe injuries are among those that cannot be treated. As a result of skull injuries caused by falling on the head, the text mentions cervical vertebra crushed together, resulting in the patient's inability to speak. This type of accident could also cause paralysis in the arms and legs. Accidents of this kind came into the category of injuries that could not be treated by Egyptian healers. The fate of the untreated patient is not given, but it seems they were to be stabilized as much as possible. It is doubtful they were deserted or abandoned to their fate without at least being made as comfortable as possible under the circumstances."

Pregnancy, childbirth and abortion

 * Page 124: QUOTE: "The Kahun Papyrus is the earliest text to discuss pregnancy and contains 17 cases of which some are concerned with the problems with fertility. It recommends that in order to conceive a woman place [sic] a clove of garlic in her vagina. If the next day her breath smells of garlic then she will conceive. Another instructs the healer to verify if the muscles of the woman's breasts are firm; if they are she will conceive, but if they are soft she will have difficulty conceiving. Another case study claims that a diagnosis for fertility can be made by smelling the woman's urine. Details of how this was to be done are unclear. Another pregnancy test requires the woman to urinate in a container filled with emmer wheat. If the seeds sprout the woman is pregnant; if the seeds die she is not. The Berlin Papyrus tells healers how to determine if a woman is pregnant and how to determine the sex of the baby while still in the womb. Both the Kahun Papyrus and the Berlin Papyrus contain a measure of sound medical knowledge mixed with much folklore. The Ebers Papyrus also has advice on contraception; a woman not wishing to become pregnant was instructed to place a mixture of acacia leaves, honey and some kind of moist cloth into the vagina."
 * Page 124: QUOTE: "Impotence seems to have been a problem in both Egypt and Mesopotamia. Lack of potency was usually attributed to sorcery. If the sorcerer's spell could be broken through incantations and rituals, sexual power could be restored. One Egyptian treatment for impotence was to wrap the penis in a concoction of fruit juices, fats, and salt mixed with sawdust. In Mesopotamia there are a number of texts that refer to the 'lifting of the heart', meaning the man was suffering from erectile dysfunction. To remedy the situation a potion made from parts of sexually charged or excited animals, including bats and birds, was consumed, and incantations recited. Other remedies required rubbing potions on the genitals."

=Adolf Erman's Ancient Egyptian Literature=


 * Erman, Adolf. (2005). Ancient Egyptian Literature: A Collection of Poems, Narratives and Manuals of Instructions from the Third and Second Millenia BC. Translated by Aylward M. Blackman. New York: Cambridge University Press. London: Kegan Paul Limited. ISBN 0710309643.

The Development of the Literature

 * (Skipped opening remarks on xxiii and xxiv)
 * Page xxiv-xxv: Be careful about using Adolf Erman's work, which was published in the 1920s (a lot of ancient written material has been uncovered since then). He mentions an Old Kingdom text which has survived, but says QUOTE: "the full development of the literature appears only to have been reached in the dark period which separates the Old from the Middle Kingdom, and in the famous Twelfth Dynasty (1995-1790 B.C.). It is the writings of this age that were read in the schools five hundred years later, and from their language and style no one dared venture to deviate. The feature which, from an external standpoint, gives its character to this classical literature—it cannot be called by any other name—is a delight in choice, not to say far-fetched, expressions."
 * Page xxv: After skipping some, QUOTE: "We have no intention of blinding our eyes to the fact that a great deal must be lost of precisely this old literature; we cannot well suppose that there were no love-poems at that time, or that collections of proverbs were much more frequent than hymns to kings. To this phenomenon there apparently contributed, besides blind chance, a special circumstance, which gives to what is scholastic in the literature a prominence beyond its due. Our papyri are derived mostly from tombs, and it would be natural enough for a boy to have his exercise-books placed with him in the grave, whereas books of another character were retained for the living."
 * Page xxv: QUOTE: "However that may be, in the second period of the literature also, that of the later New Kingdom (since about 1350 B.C.) the schools are no less to the fore."
 * Page xxv-xxvi: Here Erman differentiates between Middle Egyptian (the classical literary language of the ancient Egyptian language) and Late Egyptian which developed as a literary language in the New Kingdom: QUOTE: "This later literature grew up in opposition to the old tradition. Until then, through all the centuries, the language of the classical literature had been retained as the literary language, and at most it had permitted itself to approach the actual colloquial language in documents of everyday life or in popular tales. Finally, however, the difference between the two languages became so great, that the classical language could scarcely be understood by ordinary people. In the great revolution at the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty, which we associate with the name of Amenophis IV, these shackles also were broken. Men began to write poetry in the actual language of the day, and in it is composed the beautiful hymn to the sun, the manifesto of the reformed religion. But whereas the other innovations of the heretical régime disappeared after its collapse, this particular one survived, doubtless because the conditions hitherto existing had become impossible. Under the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties there burst forth into flower a vigorous literature, written in the new language, which we call New Egyptian, and to which belong almost all the writings contained in the second half of our book."
 * Page xxvi-xxvii: QUOTE: "New Egyptian literature, which, as we might suppose, had set out to be really popular, did not long pursue this course, and soon the same striving after refinement of expression, which characterized the older literature, is active in it also. The language of the educated person was again adorned with far-fetched words and phrases, and he delights in embellishing it with foreign words. For something like five centuries this later literature appears to have been cultivated, and then its language also became a dead one, which the boys at school had to learn; and with that the literary life in decadent Egypt seems to have expired. It was not till several centuries later, perhaps only in the Greek period, that a new literature appears, the so-called demotic, which does not come within the scope of this book."
 * Page xxvii: QUOTE: "I have spoken above of the foreign words, of which the writings of the later New Kingdom are full. They are almost all borrowed from the inhabitants of Palestine, and show, as is known to us from other sources, in what close relationship Egypt and Palestine then stood. We may therefore suppose that Canaan was also influenced by Egypt in the sphere of literature, just as it was in that of sculpture. We should certainly encounter Egyptian influence in the literature of the Phoenecians, were that preserved; but in Hebrew literature also, which belongs to so much later a period, there are a number of features that strikingly remind one of the body of Egyptian writings—namely, in the wisdom-literature of the Hebrews, in the Psalms, and in the Song of Songs. It might be supposed that similarities of this sort are to be traced, at least indirectly, to Egyptian prototypes. That being so, then even we ourselves must, without suspecting it, have all along been under the influence of the intellectual life of Egypt."

The Learned Scribes

 * Page xxvii-xxviii: QUOTE: "I have spoken in the preceding paragraphs of the cultured classes as the upholders of the older and later literature, and possibly this expression may strike many as being too modern. And yet it is correct. Through the Egyptian people from the earliest period there ran a deep cleavage, which separated him who had enjoyed a higher education from the common mass. It came into existence when the Egyptians had invented their writing, for he who mastered it, however humble his position might outwardly be, at once gained a superiority over his fellows. Without the assistance of his scribes even the ruler was now of no account, and it was not without good reason that the high officials of the Old Kingdom were so fond of having themselves represented in writing posture; for that was the occupation to which they owed their rank and their power. The road to every office lay open to him who had learnt writing and knew how to express himself in well chosen terms, and all other professions were literally under his control."
 * Page xxviii: QUOTE: "There thus developed among the scribes a pride and a caste-consciousness that are very evident in the old literature which they created (more so in fact than accords with our taste), and that also distinguish all their inscriptions. Still we ought not to condemn this mandarinism, for it did set up an ideal of the official, which possesses some elements of greatness. The official is to be impartial, one who protects the insignificant against the powerful; the clever person, who knows a way out even in the midst of the greatest difficulties; the humble one, who never thrusts himself forward, and yet whose opinion is heard in the council. His every writing and utterance, too, must be distinct from the vulgar. In this spirit generation after generation of scribes did their work, and they brought up the younger members of their class on the same principle. And in the New Kingdom, likewise, the tendency of the bureaucracy and its schools remained the same, and, despite all external differences, the preceptors' letters preach nothing but what the old wisdom-books had preached, except that their teaching is clothed in a wittier garb, and that the arrogance of their outlook is, if possible, more strongly evinced in them than ever."

Singers and Story-Tellers

 * Page xxviii-xxx: I won't quote any of this, but I will summarize Erman's main point that people other than scribes had an influence on literature, those being musicians and singers (whether in the harem or in working conditions), as well as story-tellers who entertained commoners.

The Forms of the Poetry

 * Page xxx-xxxiv: Once again, Erman includes in this section a bunch of information that will not be pertinent to your writing of an Egyptian literature article. Nevertheless, his main points should be summarized. Although we do not know exactly how the words sounded or would have rhymed, Egyptian poetry can be discerned from other forms of literature by the following attributes: (1) short lines of text written at roughly equal length; (2) many stanzas have same opening word; (3) "parallelism of the members" which Erman describes as an idea expressed in one sentence that is repeated in a following sentence. Erman gives this example on page xxxii: QUOTE "The judge awakeneth, Thoth lifteth himself up...Then spake these friends of the king, and they made answer before their god." Although Erman calls the second sentence in this model "quite superfluous", he adds that "In the process of time it became an established fashion, that will have been regarded as the natural ornamentation of dignified speech." In other words, speaking in this fashion distinguished one as being cultured and learned in ancient Egypt. On page xxxiii he makes a final remark about this: QUOTE: "However, this parallelism was never consolidated into an established form for poetry, but remained always just a decoration, which was employed, to be sure, without stint, whenever it was desired to express oneself in dignified language."

Writing and Books

 * Page xxxv: QUOTE: "We must at least make some brief mention of that invention of the Egyptians, without which their intellectual life would never have been able to expand, namely, writing. It began as a system of picture-writing, such as other peoples also have devised—a very inadequate expedient, that serves well enough to recall something to one's own mind, but from which another will have difficulty in discovering the idea that it is desired to express. Thus, to take a purely imaginary example, if two people agree that the one is to supply an ox in three months' time, in return for which the other will pay five jars of honey, pictures of the moon, the ox, the bee, and the jar, in addition to some small strokes indicating the numbers, suffice as tokens for them both, but a third person would never be able to explain these signs with certainty. This preliminary structure must therefore undergo considerable development. Individual peoples have proceeded on very different lines, and have thereby arrived at all sorts of writings and words and syllables. The Egyptians alone were destined to adopt a remarkable method, following which they attained the highest form of writing, the alphabet."
 * Page xxxv: QUOTE: "The method was fundamentally very simple. It was desired to write words which it would have been difficult or impossible to draw, and so the idea was arrived at of substituting for such a word another, that could easily be drawn and that had a similar sound. The reader then recognized from the context what was really meant, especially when the usage had become stereotyped and every one was accustomed to think in the case of the swallow wr, of wr 'great', and, in the case of the beetle   khpr, of khpr, 'to become.' Since in Egyptian, as in the related languages, the meaning of a word is attached to its consonants, whereas the vowels decide its grammatical form, regard was only paid to the fact that the word which had been substituted for another had the same consonants as it, while the vowels were disregarded. It was as if—to take an English example—'heed' were written with the picture of a 'head,' and board with that of a loaf of 'bread.'"
 * Page xxxv-xxxvi: QUOTE: "Many signs, which were thus employed, were in process of time transferred to so many words, that they were scarcely any longer used for special ones; and they became purely phonetic signs. Thus the swallow is used not only, as in the first instance, for wr 'great,' but also to write the consonants w and r in words like hwr, swr, wrs, wrryt, etc. Thereby the writing obtained phonetic signs of two consonants."
 * Page xxxvii: After skipping much, QUOTE: "The writing, which had thus developed, could be read by an Egyptian with ease and with certainty; so much can be seen from the fact that no attempt was ever made to simplify the system and to make way for a purely alphabetical writing. But it certainly had its deficiencies, form which we who are not Egyptians, and yet want to understand Egyptian books, suffer severely. I return to that point again."
 * Page xxxvii: QUOTE: "We are accustomed in accordance with Greek precedent, to call Egyptian writing 'sacred signs,' hieroglyphs, and to speak in addition of a special 'hieratic' script. Both names have been adopted into our language, and no one will therefore be ready to discard them, though they are both somewhat absurd, particularly the latter. For this 'hieratic,' in which almost all that is translated in this book is written, is not a special script at all; it is just the cursive form of hieroglyphic writing, and to distinguish the one from the other is as if we were to explain our own handwriting as something different from our printed type."
 * Page xxxvii: QUOTE: "Egyptian literature found great assistance in the excellent material with which its scribes worked. They had not, like their colleagues in Babylonia, to imprint their signs on clay, a proceeding which has produced the ugly shapes of cuneiform; they could really 'write,' as our world has learnt to do from them. They had a black ink of indestructible permanence, which they ground on a wooden palette; they had a reed, the tip of which they fashioned into a brush; and they had above all else an admirable smooth paper, which they manufactured from the pith of papyrus-stalks. All this was of assistance in writing, and in a good manuscript it can still be seen with what pleasure the writer has drawn his round, firm signs."
 * Page xxxvii: QUOTE: "Papyrus made it possible for books to be made of any length, by gumming separate sheets together; and there are magnificent manuscripts measuring twenty and forty metres."
 * Page xlii (bunch of pages skipped due to pics and diagrams): QUOTE: "Properly only one side of a roll was written on, that upon which the fibres run horizontally and where the pen consequently met with least resistance. But not everybody could afford such extravagance, and we meet with remarkable instances of thrift. The man to whom we are indebted for the, to us, most interesting Papyrus Harris, No. 500, supplied himself with paper by taking an old volume and washing off the ink; he then wrote on its recto three collections of love-songs and the old drinking-song. Later on, another person used also the verso of the papyrus, to make himself a copy of two stories. A different procedure was adopted by the writer of the two Leningrad papyri, which have preserved to us the Instruction for King Merikerē and the Prophecy of Neferrohu. He was a scribe of accounts, and he simply took documents of his department, gummed them together, and copied out the two works on their empty reverse side as a goodly possession for himself and for a 'dear trusty brother.'"
 * Page xlii: QUOTE: "For him who could not acquire paper there existed that cheap substitute, which we have acquired the habit of calling by the high-sounding name of 'ostracon'. This is either the sherd of a largish pot, or merely a smooth flake of limestone—either of which may be found lying about anywhere in Egypt. Since these ostraca were naturally used by schoolboys for their exercises, much of what is translated in this book is obtained from them."

Our Understanding of Egyptian texts

 * Page xlii-xliv: To cut a long story short, Erman explains that Egyptian texts, even some written in hieroglyphs, are plagued with mistakes and errors on the part of learned scribes and copying schoolchildren alike. With the use of multiple versions of the same text, modern scholars can pick out the obvious mistakes and correct them. The schoolboys who had to copy various texts as part of their exercises have preserved countless pieces of literature and stories that otherwise would have been lost to modern scholars. The only downfall to this is that the schoolboys (naturally) weren't always very careful when they copied a text!

From the Oldest Poetry

 * Page 1: QUOTE: "It must be taken for granted that songs and hymns and well-ordered discourses were not lacking even in that very early period, when the Egyptians were gradually developing their civilization; indeed, in the poetic forms and in the language of the historic age there is much that harks back to that remote epoch. Of this old poetry, however, but little survives, and then not that which reveals it in its pristine freshness, for we possess only formulae and hymns of religious content. Yet the student, who knows how to read them, can gain from them some conception of what the corresponding secular poetry would have been like—something very different to what the later classical literature of Egypt with its rhythmical cadences would lead us to expect. The vivacity and power of expression, the naīveté of simile, the play of thoughts, and the unexpected change of personal pronouns—all these have something fresh and youthful about them; and he who can overlook the rawness and strangeness of the contents of these old formulae will sometimes detect a breath of wild poetry, which is lacking in the productions of a more refined period."

From the Pyramid Texts

 * Page 1-2: QUOTE: "The so-called Pyramid Texts are collections of very ancient formulae, concerned with the destiny of the blessed dead—dead kings in particular—and preserved to us in five pyramids dating from the end of the Old Kingdom (circa 2600 B.C. or earlier). In the first instance, these formulae were for the most part quite short, but later on several were often combined and mixed up with one another, even when they were mutually incompatible."
 * Page 2: QUOTE: "The Pyramid Texts are mainly concerned with the desire of the august dead to avoid leading a gloomy existence in the underworld—the fate of ordinary dead mortals—and to dwell in the sky like the gods. There he might voyage with the sun-god in his ship, or dwell in the Fields of the Blessed, the Field of Food-Offerings, or the Field of Iaru. He might himself become a god, and the fancy of the poets strives to depict the king in this new role. No longer is he a man whom the gods graciously receive into heaven, but a conqueror who seizes heaven from them."
 * Page 2: QUOTE: "Intermingled with these conceptions are others that have to do with the god Osiris, the prototype of all dead persons. He was once murdered, but was recalled to life and became the ruler of the dead. In that capacity the Pyramid Texts conceive of him as now dwelling in the sky."
 * Page 2: QUOTE: "The language of the Pyramid Texts is extremely archaic, and the understanding of it, therefore, still presents great difficulties."

To the Crowns

 * Page 10: QUOTE: "The different crowns of the king, and the serpent which he wore as a diadem, were regarded as goddesses, who fought for him. They were therefore from the earliest times regularly called upon to succour the monarch."

Morning Hymns

 * Page 10: QUOTE: "The gods in the temples were greeted in the morning with a hymn, consisting mainly of the constantly repeated summons 'Awake in peace,' followed each time by a different name of the divinity. Accordingly, it was assumed that the gods were also thus awakened in heaven, and moreover, by goddesses, a circumstance which enables us to conjecture what this hymn originally was: the song with which the women in earliest Egypt awakened their sovereign in the morning."
 * Page 10: QUOTE: "One may suppose that such words as 'Thou king, thou lord of Egypt, thou lord of the palace,' took the place of the divine names in the original version of the hymn, and that in this form it will have been chanted by the women in front of the dwellings of the primitive king, monotonously and endlessly, as long as suitable names occurred to the singer."

Narratives

 * Page 14: QUOTE: "Material of a varied sort has been brought together in this section. The stories of King Kheops and the Magician, and that of the Deliverance of Mankind, are of an entirely unsophisticated character; the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, as indeed its high-flown language shows, lays claim to being a more serious work, and in the Story of Sinuhe there is absolutely nothing that is unsophisticated. The last named is, in fact, the finished product of a poet who was less concerned with the contents than with the form of his work. The Founding of a Temple illustrates the style of an official account of a solemnity."

(1) The Story of Sinuhe

 * Page 14: QUOTE: "If among the accidentally preserved fragments of Egyptian literature we encounter the same work over and over again, if we know of three manuscripts of the Middle Kingdom, and a papyrus, and at least ten ostraca, of the New Kingdom, then we can be sure that we have before us a masterpiece of Egyptian poetry, the admiration for which not even the passage of five hundred years could dim.4"
 * Page 14-15: CITATION #4 QUOTE: "Quotations from it are to be found in inscriptions of the New Kingdom. The dwellers int he incense-country say to the sailors of Queen Hatshepsut as they draw near: 'Wherefore, pray, are ye come hither?' employing the very words with which the barbarous prince greets Sinuhe. In the biography of the general Amenemheb the death of Thutmosis III is described int he same words as that of Amenemhet, and into a list of Palestinian localities, dating from the reign of Thutmosis III, are incorporated the countries of Yaa and Kedemi, about which we otherwise possess no information."
 * Page 15: QUOTE: "Wherein lay the attractions of this book for the Egyptian reader? Certainly only to a lesser degree in its matter, which could actually be related in a few sentences. It is full of unusual expressions, which strike us as highly artificial, but which will have greatly taken the fancy of the Egyptians. Another attraction we, too, are still able to appreciate—the art displayed in telling the story. It does not occur to this poet to relate to us in detail the life of his hero, although he could have furnished his readers with all sorts of interesting facts about foreign countries; he only picks out single episodes, which he depicts minutely, and then cleverly and not ungracefully strings together. The humour also which he displays in treating of the contrast between the elegant courtier and his new friends with their dirt and their bellowing, still has the same effect upon us as it will once have had upon Egyptian readers."
 * Page 15: QUOTE: "Sinuhe lived during the Middle Kingdom under the famous king Amenemhet I (1995-1965 B.C.) and under his son Sesostris I."

(2) The Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor

 * Page 29: QUOTE: "This is actually a tale of the simplest character, but in the form preserved to us, it has been adapted to suit the taste of the educated reader, as its carefully chosen phraseology plainly shows. Hence, too, the remarkable dressing-up which it has undergone: an Egyptian of high rank has been sent South by the king, but on this voyage has met with little success. He is now in grave anxiety as to the reception awaiting him. But one of his comrades speaks to him and exhorts him to face his sovereign with more confidence. He will then fare just as well in the king's presence as he himself did on a similar occasion. He now gives an account of this voyage of his, namely, our tale.—Into this tale a second has been incorporated, but in the Leningrad manuscript it is abbreviated to a few sentences."
 * Page 29-30: QUOTE: "A noteworthy feature of this book is the fact that it leaves the reader to form his own ideas as to the characters and their circumstances. It might, therefore, be supposed that we have here only an extract from a longer chain of stories, and that the travelling companions had previously recounted to the prince other narratives, in order to console him in his affliction."

(3) The Story of the Herdsman

 * Page 35: QUOTE: "That this fragment has been preserved to us is due solely to the fact that a scribe of the Middle Kingdom, who wished to clean a papyrus in order to re-use it, did not complete his task, and left intact twenty-five lines from the middle of the book—unfortunately, too few for us to be able to conjecture their purport. Perhaps a goddess waylays one of the herdsman, who live with their cattle in the swamps of the Delta."

(4) King Kheops and the Magicians

 * Page 36: QUOTE: "This tale, in contrast with the narratives that have so far been presented to the reader, does not belong to the higher literature. It is of a popular character, as is shown both by the simplicity of its style and of its matter, which, at times, is burlesque, and by the fact that it is written in the vernacular; it might well be ascribed to a public story-teller."
 * Page 36: QUOTE: "In spite of the loss of the beginning and the end of the book, the plot is easily reconstructed. King Kheops, the builder of the Great Pyramid (about 2900 B.C. at the latest), makes his sons tell him tales of the wonders which had been wrought by magicians in the past. Finally, one of his sons informs him of his acquaintanceship with a still living magician, who then works his miracles in the king's presence. But unfortunately this sage also knows the future, and so the Pharaoh is informed by him, though unwillingly, of the disaster threatening his line: at this very time three children will come into the world who will drive it from the throne. The children are then actually born and—here the papyrus breaks off—grow up notwithstanding all Kheops' machinations; it is the pious kings of the Fifth Dynasty whose origin is here recounted."

(5) The Deliverance of Mankind

 * Page 47: QUOTE: "The following myth, which is a good example of a popular tale, has survived owing to the author of a charm against snakes having used it as an introduction to the same. It thus had the honour of being included among the texts inscribed on the walls of two royal tombs of the New Kingdom, and so has been preserved for us."

(6) The Founding of a Temple

 * Page 49-50: QUOTE: "That Sesostris I (1965-1934 B.C.) undertook building operations in the temple of Heliopolis we can see from his fine obelisk, the only noteworthy relic of the famous temple that has survived the passing of the centuries. This building of Sesostris must have been a large one, for the king erected a special monument in order to record to posterity his resolve to undertake the work, and its inauguration. The actual stone has not come down to us, but we probably possess a copy of it, made by some one in the time of the Eighteenth Dynasty. The copy was made, no doubt, because the text was regarded as an example of good literary style. Anyhow, it was then further made use of in the schools, for, in the manuscript with which we are concerned, it is divided up into verses and sections, and the orthography has been changed into that of the New Kingdom—not without serious perversion of the text."

(7) The War of King Kamōse

 * Page 52: QUOTE: "This beginning of a narrative is to be found on a schoolboy's writing board. As far as can be decided on palaeographical grounds, it dates from the time in which the events recorded took place, namely, the seventeenth century B.C."
 * Page 52: QUOTE: "It deals with a war which Kamose, the king of Thebes, waged against the Asiatic people known as the Hyksos, who had conquered a large part of Egypt, and whose capital, the city of Avaris, lay in the north-eastern Delta. The late tale of King Apophis and Sekenenre, which I give below, is concerned with an incident of the same date. But what occurs on our writing board is not a tale, but an historical narrative, which the teacher may well have copied from an inscription of Kamose."

Instructions in Wisdom

 * Page 54: QUOTE: "The writings which compose this section bear the name 'sbōyet,' 'instruction,' and are conceived of as the addresses of a sage, in which he instructs his son. In some instances we have to do with a discourse on worldly prudence and wisdom, and such books will have been intended merely for schools; unquestionably so the Instruction of Duauf, which is simply a commendation of the schools. But the customary designation 'sbōyet' also covers writings of different content; what King Amenemhēt committed to his son far exceeds the bounds of school philosophy, and there is nothing whatever to do with school in a great warning his children to be loyal to the king."

(1) The Instruction of Ptahhotep

 * Page 54-55: QUOTE: "This book professes to have been composed by a vizier of King Issi (about 2675 B.C.; according to other calculation about 2870 B.C.), and, as a matter of fact, that king did have a vizier of this name, whose tomb is still known to us. Though it may rightly be doubted whether the book can really claim this man as its author, it is certainly very ancient, and by the time of the Middle Kingdom had already been re-edited, obviously with a view to making it more intelligible. In this form it was still used as a school-book as late as the Eighteenth Dynasty."
 * Page 55: QUOTE: "It has a twofold object. It is intended to instruct the schoolboy in wise conduct and in good manners, but, at the same time, it sets out to be his model for the appropriate expression of ideas; he is to be an 'artist' in speech, and is to express himself in such a choice language as befits an official."
 * Page 55: QUOTE: "In my translation I have preferred sometimes the older, and sometimes the newer, version, according as one was more easy to understand than the other. I have only too often had to forgo translating altogether."

(2) The Instruction for Kagemni

 * Page 66: QUOTE: "This must have been a similar work to the Instruction of Ptahhotep. In the lost beginning it was probably related that the old king Huni (dating from the end of the Third Dynasty) commanded his vizier to put his life's experiences in writing for the benefit of his children, among whom was included the future vizier Kagemni. There actually was a vizier of this name, though several hundred years later, and the author of this work will have had some dim recollection of his name."

(3) The Instruction of Duauf

 * Page 67: QUOTE: "This Instruction was a favourite work in the schools of the late New Kingdom, and it is, moreover, preserved only in schoolboys' exercises of the Nineteenth Dynasty (about 1300 B.C.)—completely in two papyri, and in parts on several ostraca. The way in which the boys have mangled the text baffles description. There are not many passages in it with regard to which one does not despairingly ask what can have been written there originally; for what the boys have written are only too often meaningless words—they simply do not understand what they had to copy out. Of many paragraphs, therefore, I can only translate a small portion."
 * Page 67-68: QUOTE: "It is not surprising that this work was such a favourite school textbook, for it is written to extol schools and a school-education, exactly as are the fictitious letters to and from the schoolmasters in the New Kingdom. It can be seen from the personal names contained in this Instruction, that it is to be dated to the time between the Old and Middle Kingdom."

(4) The Instruction of King Amenemhet

 * Page 72: QUOTE: "This book also seems to have been held in high esteem during the New Kingdom, for it is preserved in four different papyri, and extracts from it are found on at least nine ostraca. Unfortunately there is no older manuscript, and, with one exception, they are all writing-exercises of schoolboys of the Nineteenth Dynasty (circa 1300 B.C.) and teem with mistakes."
 * Page 72: QUOTE: "The great king Amenemhet I (1995-1965 B.C.) in the twentieth year of his reign, as we know from other sources, made his son Sesostris I co-regent, and withdrew from the outward activities of political life."
 * Page 72: QUOTE: "Our document represents the aged king as recounting to his son on this occasion, by way of admonishment, the events which induced him to take this step; he had reaped ingratitude, and an attempt had been made on his life."

(5) The Instruction of King Merikere

 * Page 75: QUOTE: "Although this work is only known to us from an Eighteenth Dynasty copy, we need not hesitate to assign it to an earlier date. As to Merikere, we only know that he lived in the confused period between the Old and Middle Kingdoms—in the second half of the third millennium B.C.—and was one of the kings of Herakleopolis. The kings of the Eleventh Dynasty ruled at Thebes contemporaneously with these monarchs, and, as our book asserts (an assertion now confirmed by inscriptions from Thebes), they fought with one another for the possession of the city of Thinis. The name of the father of Merikere, who here presents his son with his life's experiences, is unknown to us."
 * Page 75: QUOTE: "It is worth noting that we meet with religious conceptions in this composition that are practically non-existent in the other works of the same class."
 * Page 75: QUOTE: "Only scanty fragments survive of the beginning of the book. It can be seen that the father who addresses Merikere is himself a king. Further on, also, long lacunae make interpretation difficult."

(6) The Instruction of Sehetepibre

 * Page 84: QUOTE: "This poem to King Amenemhet III (1844-1797 B.C.) is included in this section, because its author claims to have composed it for the instruction of his children. He was a high official in the treasury, and must also have been brought into personal contact with the king, for he speaks of himself as 'one whom his lord exalted in front of millions, a real confidant of his lord, to whom hidden things were spoken.' He, moreover, proclaims this close connection with his lord by placing—against all precedent—the following verses on his tomb-stone, which he scholastically designates his 'Instruction.'"

Meditations and Complaints

 * Page 85: QUOTE: "The first treatises in this section are perhaps the most interesting to be found in the whole of Egyptian literature. They deplore the misery which the world brings upon the individual, and depict the frightful distress of a nation that has suffered from a complete collapse: it is best for mankind not to be born. Such a mood can come upon a nation only as the result of dire misfortune, and we shall not be mistaken, therefore, in regarding the end of the Old Kingdom and the period before the Twelfth Dynasty as times of great catastrophes, times at the thought of which a generation, that had survived them, still shuddered."
 * Page 85: QUOTE: "Quite different in tone to these writings are the Complaints of the Peasant. Here again the subject, it is true, is the wickedness of those who oppress the poor, but over the bad officials stands a good minister and a good king. Moreover, the author is not quite in earnest about all this; his interest lies in the ever new and eloquent words in which his hero contrives to frame his complaints. The book is an exercise in rhetoric and a school product."

(1) The Dispute with his Soul of one who is tired of Life

 * Page 86: QUOTE: "This strange work is based upon the conception that the soul is an independent being apart from the man; it can leave him at death, but it can also stand by him faithfully."
 * Page 86: QUOTE: "In the lost beginning of the book it must have been related how a man was impoverished, deserted, and calumniated, and how in his distress he wished to bring his life to an end, and that by burning. His soul itself had urged him to take that step, but it declined to remain by him when death was actually at hand; for, in the case of so poor a person it feared that it would fare badly. No tomb would protect him, and no survivor would bring him victuals, and thus it was threatened with hunger, cold, and heat. So the unfortunate man endeavours to persuade his soul not to desert him in death. Where the treatise at present begins, both are arguing before certain judges, whose tongue is not biased; the soul has turned to them, instead of answering its master."

(2) The Admonitions of a Prophet

 * Page 92-93: QUOTE: "We have only the one very inferior manuscript, in which both the beginning and end of the book are missing; thus the narrative of events which called forth the prophet's utterances is lost to us. Various restorations have been proposed on the basis of indications in the text, and that here offered is also not to be regarded as certain in all respects."
 * Page 93: QUOTE: "Under a ruler of ancient times a terrible calamity overtakes the country; the people rebel against the officials and those in high places; the foreign mercenary troops are in revolt, and possibly also the Asiatics threaten the Eastern frontier. Thus ordered government breaks up completely in Egypt; but the aged king lives on peacefully in his palace, for he is being regaled with lies. Then a sage, Ipuwer by name, appears on the scene at court and tells the whole truth. He depicts the misery already prevailing, and foresees what is still to come; he urges his hearers to fight against the enemies of the realm, and reminds them that the worship of the gods must be restored. And then he addresses the king himself, that he, too, 'may taste of this misery'."
 * Page 93: QUOTE: "The time in which this break-up of ordered government in Egypt is to be imagined as taking place, must be the end of the Old Kingdom. At the conclusion of the Sixth Dynasty (circa 2500 B.C.) Egypt is suddenly blotted out from our sight in obscurity, as if some great catastrophe had overwhelmed it; furthermore, the few remains known to us from the centuries immediately following show that civilization, formerly at so high a level, has declined—exactly as one would expect from the descriptions in our book. And that the ruler, whom the sage addresses, is apparently an aged man, is also perfectly in agreement with the facts, for the monarch, with whom the Old Kingdom disappears from our ken, is none other than the second Phiops, who came to the throne at the age of six, and who, according to Egyptian tradition, reigned for ninety-three years."
 * Page 93: QUOTE: "The approximate date of the Admonitions can be determined from two passages therein, recurring also in other old poems. One, in the Dispute with his Soul of One who is tired of Life, is far more in place there than here; with the other, the reverse is the case, for on external grounds it certainly belongs to our book, whereas, in the Instruction of Amenemhet, it is interpreted in a corrupt form. The Admonitions is thus later than the Dispute of One who is tired of Life, and older than the Instruction of Amenemhet."
 * Page 93-94: QUOTE: "The book consists of prose sections, and of six poems, these forming its actual kernel; for their formation see above, pp. xxx. and xxxiii. f."

(3) The Complaint of Khekheperre-sonbu

 * Page 108: QUOTE: "As is evident from his name, Khekheperre-sonbu ('Khekheperre is in health'), the author lived under King Sesostris II, i.e. about 1900 B.C. As the text is written on the writing-board of a school-boy of the Eighteenth Dynasty, it was evidently regarded at that time also as a classical work."
 * Page 108: QUOTE: "The introduction alone is preserved, and in it the author expresses a desire to discover new and unheard-of utterances, with which to adorn his complaint. This book is in the form of the colloquy of a man with his own heart as his only true friend. It is thus reminiscent of the Dispute with his Soul of One who is tired of Life (above, pp. 86 ff.), in whose case also his soul is the only companion left to him. We know nothing, apart from this work, about the calamity which the writer deplores, though, to be sure, in view of our inadequate knowledge of Egyptian history, we cannot exactly be surprised at this."
 * Page 108: QUOTE: "That the book is later than the other writings of this description, is distinctly to be concluded from the fact that the man's complaint is somewhat vague and generalizing. It might almost be supposed that to lament over the misery of the world had already become a literary convention. With this would agree the author's wish to surpass his predecessors in his phraseology."

(4) The Prophecy of Neferrohu

 * Page 110: QUOTE: "This work is known to us from a papyrus of the time of Thutmosis III, and from two writing-boards and three ostraca of the New Kingdom. It belongs, therefore, to the literature cherished in the later schools. The approximate date of its composition is revealed by its ending: the sage, who describes to the old king Snefru the distress of the south-eastern Delta, foresees that a defender will rise up for it in the person of King Amenemhet I (1995-1965 B.C.). To the poet this king is not a far-away figure, one out of the long series of Pharaohs, but stands close to him; for he mentions him familiarly by his nickname, as though he were his contemporary. One might, therefore, suppose that these prophecies were written under this king himself, whom they set out to glorify, or at least under one of his immediate successors. The horrors also, which the sage foresees at the time of Snefru, and which Amenemhet is to bring to an end, must correspond with events of the poet's own period."
 * Page 110: QUOTE: "The book begins with a scene, which is employed as an introduction in all periods of Egyptian history, even in official inscriptions: the king sits with his court and deliberates upon a matter, or has some story told him. That, as a result of his inquisitive searchings into the future, he also succeeds in hearing something that he had rather not know, is to be found elsewhere."

(5) The Complaints of the Peasant

 * Page 116: QUOTE: "The fact that we know of four manuscripts of the Complaints of the Peasant belonging to the Middle Kingdom, shows that they were highly esteemed at that time. None dating from the New Kingdom are so far authenticated, and so we may suppose that the work had by then fallen out of favour. The reason for this is fairly obvious—these complaints are monotonous and the contents lacking in interest Indeed, the book is primarily an example of that rhetoric which is entirely given up to elegant expression. The main point of it is that a person 'who is eloquent in very sooth' delivers, on account of the matter that has occurred, nine speeches of most beautiful words. That in these speeches right is praised, and the baseness of officials condemned, is almost forgotten by us in face of the flood of far-fetched expressions. Monotonous, obscure, and far-fetched as these nine speeches may appear to us to-day [sic], they really may not have sounded so to an Egyptian. He was sensible of much in them that was elegant and witty, which quite escapes us who only understand the book very incompletely."
 * Page 116: QUOTE: "The event described occurred in the reign of Nebkaure, one of the kings of Herakleopolis, who bore the name of Akhtheos (toward the end of the third millennium B.C.; see p. xxiv, note 2). The man whom, according to custom, I designate 'the peasant' is really not one, but is a 'dweller in the field,' an inhabitant of the salt-field. The salt-field is the Wadi Natrun, the small oasis west of the Delta, the 'Desert of Natron' of the Christian period. He lives in this wilderness and brings its products to Egypt, in order to exchange them for corn. That a man of such humble rank should have the gift of eloquence accords, however, with what the learned Ptahhotep teaches, namely, that fine expressions may be learnt even from slave-girls (see above, p. 56)."

(1) Songs of the Workers

 * Page 181: QUOTE: "Several of the little songs, with which the Egyptian accompanied his tasks (see above, pp. xxviii f.) are preserved in the tombs as inscriptions appended to representations of the task in question."

(2) Songs at Banquets

 * Page 132: QUOTE: "When the deceased's survivors celebrated a festival in his tomb, a meal was provided, at which he was conceived of as being present, a meal which was lacking in none of the requirements appertaining to such an occasion—wine, music, and song, flowers and perfumes."
 * Page 132: QUOTE: "A tombstone of the Middle Kingdom has preserved the beginning of one of the songs with which the guests were entertained at these banquets. A corpulent harpist is depicted on it singing:"
 * O grave, thou art built for festivity,
 * Thou art founded for what is fair.


 * Page 132-133: QUOTE: "But we possess complete a remarkable song, which was sung on the same occasions, and which describes the transitoriness [sic] of all earthly things, in order to warn the listeners to make the most of life. The New Kingdom, which has preserved it for us, knew of it as coming from the House of King Antef, i.e. from his tomb, where it was also written in front of the Harpist. An amplified version of it is to be found among the songs of the New Kingdom."

(3) Hymns to King Sesōstris III

 * Page 134: QUOTE: "The first four of these fine songs were probably composed for the entry of the king into 'his city,' and they greet him in the name of its inhabitants. From the beginning of the fourth song we can see that the city is one in Upper Egypt, and that the king has come there in order to be crowned ruler of the Upper Country."
 * Page 134: QUOTE: "The fifth and sixth songs were apparently not written for any special purpose."

Religious Poems

 * Page 137: QUOTE: "The Egyptians regarded the religious writings of their ancestors as sacred; hence any such compositions of their own closely imitated these in both form and language. It is therefore very difficult for us to be certain about the age of a religious text, of which we do not possess an early version. Accordingly it is in itself possible that one or other of the hymns here given should have been assigned a place among the remains of the earliest poetry above. On the other hand, the great Hymn to Amun, which I have assigned below to the New Kingdom, may actually date from as early a period as the Middle Kingdom. However, I think that on the whole I am right in my divisions."

(1) To Min-Horus

 * Page 137: No commentary, just the translation.

(2) To the Sun

 * Page 138: QUOTE: "In the tombs of the New Kingdom it is the custom to furnish the deceased with two songs—either in the form of an inscription, or else written out in a so-called Book of the Dead—in which he praises the morning and the evening sun; for to be able to look upon these was the earnest wish of all dead persons. It is probably not to be doubted that these songs, which exist in various versions, are intrinsically ancient, although no example dating from the Middle Kingdom has hitherto been found."

(3) To Thoth

 * Page 140: QUOTE: "In the form of a schoolboy's exercise written on a writing-board of the Eighteenth Dynasty, but probably of earlier date." He then translates the text.

(4) Hymns to Osiris

 * Page 140: QUOTE: "Osiris, the most popular of all gods, was originally a god of vegetation, which dies away, it is true, but is revived again by the inundation. But he came to be generally regarded as an almost entirely human figure, and he usually appears as such in the hymns also."
 * Page 140: QUOTE: "He was the son of the earth-god Keb and the sky-goddess Nut, and succeeded his father as king of Egypt. His reign was prosperous, and he was also victorious in war. But his brother, the god Sēth, murdered him and threw his corpse into the water."
 * Page 140-141: QUOTE: "Isis, his sister and spouse, sought for it for a long time, and when she had at last found it, and so restored Osiris to a sort of life. She became pregnant by him and bore a son, Horus, whom she brought up in a hidden place, that he might escape the persecutions of Sēth. When he was grown up, she led him before the tribunal of the gods, where he defended himself against Sēth, who contested the legitimacy of his birth. The gods decided in his favour and assigned to him the kingdom of his father. Since then, Osiris reigned as king of the dead in their realm, which was thought to be in the underworld or even in the sky. He has many sanctuaries on earth, the chiefest being Busiris in the Delta, and Abydos."

(5) To the Nile

 * Page 146: QUOTE: "The Nile was, it is true, regarded as a god, but unlike the other great divinities he had no regular organized cult. Thus, this hymn, which is designated Adoration of the Nile, is different in character from the old hymns to divinities; it thanks the god for all the blessings which he bestows on men. It must have been composed for an inundation festival. This, according to the hymn, took place in Thebes, at a time when it was the city of 'a sovereign,' thus possibly in the later Hyksos period."

(1) The Tale of the Two Brothers

 * Page 150: QUOTE: "In form and contents this is more naïve and more racy of the soil than any Egyptian tale that we possess, and we may congratulate ourselves that the young scribe Ennana, who was a pupil of the scribe of the treasury Kagabu, copied out so entirely an unliterary piece of writing."
 * Page 150: QUOTE: "This delightful story is certainly based on a myth, as is shown by the names of the two brothers. The one is called Anubis, like the ancient jackal-god of the dead; and if the other, Bata, does not possess so distinguished a namesake, he is also, however, a divine being, for in the Upper Egyptian town of Saka, in the period of the New Kingdom, a god called Bata was worshipped side by side with the chief local divinity Anubis."
 * Page 150: QUOTE: "It will accordingly be a myth belonging to this town that the story-teller has here transferred to the sphere of human activities, a transference, thanks to which it has acquired a charm that it could scarcely have possessed as a mere legend about the gods."
 * Page 150: QUOTE: "The world, however, in which the events related take place is, naturally, not the actual world, but the supernatural world of faerie, in which the cedar has large blossoms, oxen speak, and all kinds of marvellous and impossible things occur. Two incidents in the story, which are puzzling at first, have been unexpectedly explained by comparison with other folk-tales."

(2) The Enchanted Prince

 * Page 161: QUOTE: "I have not changed the title under which this tale was first introduced into Germany by Georg Ebers. It is, of course, quite unsuitable, for mention is never made of any enchantment. The tale would more rightly be entitled The Foredoomed Prince, as, although the end is missing, it is obvious that, in spite of all precautions, the prince was overtaken by his fate."
 * Page 161: QUOTE: "The story has something of what might be called a romantic air about it, and if the crocodile were eliminated and the names changed, it might quite as well belong to our world of fairy tales as to that of Ancient Egypt."

(3) King Apophis and Sekenenre

 * Page 165: QUOTE: "Sekenenrē was a prince of Thebes under the suzerainty of the Hyksos, whose yoke he finally succeeded in throwing off. The tale is probably a narrative of the events leading up to this struggle with his overlord, he Hyksos king Apōphis. Unfortunately, only the beginning of the tale is preserved, and even that is full of long lacunae; it has, moreover, been sadly corrupted by the ignorant schoolboy who had to copy it out."
 * Page 165: QUOTE: "The papyrus was written under King Merneptah (circa 1230 B.C.), and the composition itself is not necessarily much older."

(4) The Capture of Joppa

 * Page 167: QUOTE: "The tale is concerned with an otherwise unknown incident in the wars of Thutmosis III (1478-1447 B.C.). On the other hand, we are probably acquainted with the hero of the tale, General Thutii. Among the contemporaries of Thutmosis III, whose tombs are preserved to us at Thebes, there is also a Thutii, who must have been one of this sovereign's most important generals and diplomatists. He speaks of himself as Confidant of the King in all Foreign Countries and in the Isles in the midst of the Sea; he was Superintendent of the Northern Countries; he was also General and accompanied the King in all Foreign Lands. His dagger is in the possession of the Museum of Darmstadt, and a gold dish, which the king presented to him, is in the Louvre. He was apparently a great personality, whose name was familiar even to subsequent generations."
 * Page 167: QUOTE: "Joppa is the well-known port in southern Palestine, on the road to the north."
 * Page 167: QUOTE: "Only the end of the tale is preserved, but the situation is quite clear. The king himself is still in Egypt, the general is besieging Joppa, and, since he cannot take the town by assault, he has recourse to a stratagem. He entices its prince out of the city to a conference, entertains him, and tells him in confidence that he will come over to his side; he will also hand over to him his wife and children."
 * Page 169: The tale ends with Thutii tricking the prince of Joppa into letting him into the city, which is summarily captured by Thutii in the name of Pharaoh.

(5) Concerning Astarte

 * Page 169: QUOTE: "The Phoenician goddess Astarte was a familiar figure to the Egyptians of the Nineteenth Dynasty; under Ramesses II she possessed a special temple in his residence, and such will have been the case in other cities also. This intrusion of a foreign goddess may have given rise to a tale, of which, unhappily, only small fragments are preserved. It seems to have related how Astarte was brought to Egypt from abroad."

(6) A Ghost Story

 * Page 170: QUOTE: "Three fragments of a story are preserved to us in very faulty copies of four ostraca—not enough for us to be quite certain that we fully understand the purport of it."
 * Page 170: QUOTE: "The matter treated of is the appearance of a person, who had died long since, to a high priest of Amun, and his commanding him with threats to restore his ruined and forgotten tomb. After persistent search, the tomb is found."
 * Page 170: QUOTE: "King Rehotep, under whom the dead man lived, belongs to the obscure period at the end of the Middle Kingdom; we must place the high priest, however, in view of his name, in the Nineteenth or Twentieth Dynasty."

(7) Concerning a King and a Goddess

 * Page 172: QUOTE: "Miserable fragments of a papyrus in Berlin and in Vienna tell of a king, a goddess, and an official named Harmin. I give here, as a mere curiosity, the bits that permit of translation; the imagination of the reader must fill in the rest."
 * Page 172-173: QUOTE: "I might add that the official in Memphis, bearing the rare name of Harmin, with whom the king spends ten days, and in whose house the beautiful girl appears, involuntarily recalls an actual person, the eminent 'Superintendent of the Royal Women's Apartment of the Harîm of Memphis," Harmin. This personage was rewarded with the gold by his king, Sēthos I, when he had attained 'a long life and a goodly old age, without becoming childish and without having committed a fault in the royal house.' All museums have been enriched from his tomb at Sakkârah. A folk-tale may have attached itself to this man no less than to the officer Thutii (see p. 167)."

(8) The Quarrel of the Body and the Head

 * Page 173-174: QUOTE: "On a writing board, which may date from the Twenty-Second Dynasty, a schoolboy has written, with many mistakes, the beginning of a tale, in which the parts of the body squabble about their procedure. That this poem recalls the fable of the quarrel of the belly and the limbs, has been observed by its first editor, though it is impossible to ascertain how far this similarity went."

(9) The Voyage of Unamun

 * Page 174: QUOTE: "The directness of this narrative testifies to its being the account of a traveller's actual experience, although he will certainly have devoted more space to them here, and given them a more telling form, than in the original report, in which he must have offered excuses for his misadventures to those who had sent him on this errand."
 * Page 174-175: QUOTE: "The famous old state-barge Userhēt, which Amūn of Thebes made use of at his festivals, had in course of time constantly to be restored, or else replaced by an entirely new construction. For such a purpose, cedar-wood, which had to be obtained from Lebanon, was required. This presented no difficulty so long as Egypt was a great power, for the prince of Byblos was only too ready to render such service to the god, though, of course, for payment. But about 1100 B.C. the days of Egypt's greatness were over. At Thebes the last of the many Ramessids still nominally reigned, though actually Egypt was subject to various petty rulers."
 * Page 175: QUOTE: "At Thebes, Hrihor, the high priest of Amūn, held sway, and Tanis, the important city of the north-eastern Delta, belonged to a certain Smendes and a woman Tentamūn. When the sacred barge of Amūn once more needed completely renovating, Thebes was in dire straits. There was insufficient money and insufficient influence to procure the wood needed for the rebuilding. However, the money was raised by subscriptions from the different rulers of Egypt, though a state embassy was not feasible as in better days."
 * Page 175: QUOTE: "In this necessity the idea was adopted of sending Amūn himself to Byblos, and there was chosen for that purpose an image of the god, which, as it was called 'Amūn of the Road,' had probably been sent away from Thebes on other occasions also. With this image was dispatched a temple official, 'the Eldest of the Hall, Unamūn,' but even he was left to depend upon charity for his journey. He was sent with letters of introduction to Smendes and Tentamūn, who were then to further him on his way to Byblos."
 * Page 175: QUOTE: "This document presents us with a vivid picture of the voyage, and of trading operations in the eastern Mediterranean; it enables us to see, as it actually was, that world, the reflection of which still delights us in the Odyssey. Its author writes the simplest prose, without any learned and archaistic emellishments; but so much the more does he appeal to us, and not least by his delicate humour, which often unaffectedly breaks out in the course of the narrative."

The Schools and Their Writings

 * Page 185: QUOTE: "We have frequently throughout this book pointed out that we in great measure owe our knowledge of the old and later literature to the papyri, writing-boards, and ostraca, upon which the schoolboys of the New Kingdom copied out extracts from standard or didactic compositions. Our sincere thanks are therefore due to the compulsory energy of these lads. But the body of writings, which the schools of the New Kingdom produced themselves, and which I have gathered together in this section, supplies us with much that is interesting, and the reader might well like to know something about the system of education which has bequeathed us all this."
 * Page 185: QUOTE: "It consisted apparently of two stages. In the lower, which corresponds more or less to what we call 'school,' the boys learnt writing and the ancient literature. For their writing exercises they used potsherds and limestone flakes, which cost nothing, rather than expensive rolls of papyrus."
 * Page 185-186: QUOTE: "About one such school at least we possess a certain amount of information. It was attached to the temple which Ramesses II built for Amūn on the west bank of Thebes, the so-called Ramesseum, and it was included in the great groups of offices surrounding the temple on three sides. A strikingly large number of such ostraca have been found there, particularly on a small rubbish mound; apparently the temple-school stood there, and what the lads had finished writing out, they threw away on the spot. If we examine the material which the boys in this school had placed before them, we find that, besides certain later compositions, it consists of three books, which turn up repeatedly: the Instructions of King Amenemhēt (p. 72), the Instruction of Duauf (p. 67), and the Hymn to the Nile (p. 46), and it is interesting that the same three compositions occur all together in two school papyri, whose provenance is apparently Memphis—they thus formed the usual main subject of the school-curriculum.. In these papyri they are complete, on the ostraca we invariably find only short selections from them and from other writings, and for the most part always the same selections; perhaps they were the choice passages, which every educated person had to know."
 * Page 186-187: QUOTE: "When the schoolboys had finished with this elementary course of instruction, and was entered as 'scribe' in some administration, he received there also yet further instruction, and that at the hands of an older official, possibly his immediate superior. While undergoing this higher education, the pupil had still to write out model compositions, though not, as heretofore, a few lines a day only, but larger portions, in one case three pages a day. What the pupil thus wrote out his teacher corrected in the margin of the papyrus, unfortunately but seldom paying attention to the nonsense which the pupil had written, but so much the more to the shape of his characters; we might really think that we are merely concerned with an exercise in calligraphy! Of course it was not that alone, and the contents of most of these 'school manuscripts' clearly show what objects were actually had in view: eduction on the one side, and training in commercial style and in orthography on the other. The orthography was no light matter, for scarcely any system of writing provides so many possibilities for mistakes as the hieroglyphic. How the writing of the individual word was imparted to the schoolboys, can still be seen in a book, which must have been much used in the schools, and which 'the scribe of the God's Book in the House of Life, Amenemōpe, son of Amenemōpe, devised.' It bears the long-winded title: 'The teaching that maketh clever and instructeth the ignorant, the knowledge of all that existeth, what Ptah hath created and Thōth hath written (?), the heaven with its stars, the earth and what therein is, what the mountains disgorge, and what floweth forth from the ocean, concerning all things that the sun enlighteneth and all that groweth on the earth.' This sounds grandiose enough, yet the work is nothing more than a large collection of substantives and names of frequent and rare occurrence, placed in tolerably systematic order. First comes the heaven and what is in it: 'Heaven, sun, moon, star, Orion, Great Bear, Ape, Giant, Sow, clouds, tempest, dawn, darkness, sun, shadow, . . .sun's rays.' THen follow expressions for water and fields, and then in six groups the words which denote individuals. First, 'God, goddess, blessed dead (male and female), king, queen,' etc.; next come the highest officials, the high priests and learned men, then the great mass of lower officials and artisans, and lastly the expressions for mankind and for troops, and the names of foreign peoples and localities. The pupil then gets to know ninety-six Egyptian cities, forty-two expressions for buildings and their parts, designations for lands and fields, and then all that one may eat and drink, including forty-eight different baked meats, twenty-four drinks, and thirty-three sorts of flesh. In the concluding portion which is destroyed, the different birds and the numerous words for cattle were listed, and of course much else besides. All this Amenemōpe carefully compiled, in order to show the world all that exists, thanks to Ptah and Thōth, though, to be sure, only with the very simple object of imparting to his pupils the correct writing of the individual words."
 * Page 187-188: QUOTE: "A serious obstacle, even for advanced students, must have been presented by the many foreign words and barbarous names, in which New Egyptian abounded, and therefore particular attention was paid to the learning of them. A schoolboy of the Eighteenth Dynasty had to busy himself on his writing-board with the 'drawing up of Keftiu-names'; and the model letters on pp. 205 ff., were set before the schoolboy so that, through the foreign words which they contained, he might acquire this difficult art."
 * Page 188: QUOTE: "Special importance was also attached to the learning of the correct style for letter-writing. Accordingly the schoolboy had to copy out model letters of all kinds, actual and fictitious, and even the admonitions and warnings, which appertained to this instruction, he wrote out in the form of letters. What the schoolboy thus compiled on his papyrus, obtained the title of 'epistolary teaching,' and he often inserts in the individual letters his own name and that of his teacher, as if they were actually corresponding with one another. The schoolboy accordingly writes to himself that he is lazy and dissolute and deserves a hundred blows."
 * Page 188: QUOTE: "We find that officials of the most varied kind were thus occupied with the education of schoolboys—a 'scribe of the treasury of Pharaoh,' a 'chief registrar of the treasury,' a 'scribe of the workshop of Pharaoh,' and the like; and he who reads the Literary Controversy below, will see that even an official in the royal stable can be a famous teacher. So when the tomb of Ramesses IX was being hewn out of the rock in the desert valley of Bibân el-Mulûk, an official, who was employed on this work, could not give up teaching even in this solitude. On the large limestone flakes, which the work provided, his assistant had to write out all kinds of things for practice: a model letter, an old poem to Ramesses II, and the beautiful Prayers of one unjustly persecuted (see pp. 302 ff.). And the teacher himself has made a certain number of corrections."

(1) Exhortations and Warnings to Schoolboys

 * Page 188: QUOTE: "These short compositions have rightly aroused great interest, as describing contemporary, social conditions. The reader must not lose sight of their object; the pictures which they paint of the happy lot of the scribe and the misery of the other professions, are of course thoroughly biased and exaggerated."
 * Page 188-189: QUOTE: "The epistolary formulae, which in many manuscripts precede the various compositions, have been omitted. The reader can gain a sufficient knowledge of them from the genuine letters in the next section."

(2) Actual Letters as Models for Schoolboys

 * Page 198: QUOTE: "Among the letters, which the teacher set his pupils to copy, are several apparently real business, or private, letters, similar to a number of fairly well-preserved originals still in our possession. If they have gained the distinction of being employed as models, the teacher at any rate must have considered their style to be good, and besides, his pupil could learn from them the various forms of epistolary composition."
 * Page 198: QUOTE: "That the teacher selected them from his own family or official correspondence is quite clear from the fact that these letters occur in only one of the schoolboy manuscripts, whereas the fictitious letters, dealt with later, recur in various manuscripts."
 * Page 198: QUOTE: "Here, only certain specimens are given. The differences in the formulae employed in the letters are to be noted; these being determined by whether, as in the first example, persons of the same standing are writing to one another, or, as in the second, a superior to an underling, or, as in the third, an underling to 'his master.'"

(3) Fictitious Model Letters

 * Page 205: QUOTE: "Besides actual letters, which schoolboys were given to copy out, literary productions in the form of letters were placed before them. Firstly, all the exhortations and warnings given above on pp. 189 ff.; these have in every case been given an epistolary form, having prefixed to them 'The official A. saith to the scribe B.' Secondly, compositions, which from their contents might really be letters, but in which the business element almost escapes notice, as it is cloaked in such flowery language, and is so spun out and expanded."
 * Page 205: QUOTE: "Many of these texts recur in different manuscripts—one at a considerably later date—and were thus certainly prized as examples of elegant style. In the case of several, the suspicious is unavoidable that the whole purport of the mass of unusual names and words, which they contain, was to familiarize the schoolboy with the writing of them."

(4) Greetings to Teachers and Superiors

 * No comments here by the author.

(5) A Literary Controversy

 * Page 214: QUOTE: "I put this remarkable composition immediately after the school-letters, because, like them, it was actually used in the schools as a standard work, and the spirit which it breathes is the same as that which prevails in them. On the other hand, it is not to a young scholar that the official of the royal stable, Hori, recommends, in the capacity of instructor, good style and clear ideas, but to the scribe in command of the army, Amenemōpe. Nor does Hori cherish the hope of converting Amenemōpe, but makes fun of him. The work is a satirical letter, and indeed originated in an actual correspondence, which gradually developed into a literary controversy."
 * Page 214: QUOTE: "Hori, it would seem, had last written to his adversary bidding him furnish corn for the soldiers, and the latter had not properly carried out the instructions, but had sent back a reply which aimed at being malicious, but which was, in Hori's opinion, a mere jumble of praise and blame. To this Hori again makes answer in his long dispatch, telling his opponent what he on his part thinks of him as regards both his knowledge and the deeds about which he brags. At the same time he defends himself against the attack which his adversary has directed against him."
 * Page 214: QUOTE: "This ink-slinging on the part of two officials can in itself have possessed no interest; it must therefore have been the style and the humour which gave the work its value. Though we naturally cannot fully appreciate either, yet even a modern reader will enjoy the polite and ironical way in which Hori deals with his luckless victim. He is an educated Egyptian, to whom crudity was a thing to be avoided. If the work strikes us as monotonous in parts, it yet atones for this by presenting us with a series of remarkable pictures of the civilized world of the day, particularly in the account of the journey through Palestine. When reading this work, it must never be forgotten that the author is presenting us with an over-coloured and exaggerated description."
 * Page 214: QUOTE: "The work belongs to the time of Ramesses II; that the author was actually called Hori, and his opponent Amenemōpe, cannot be doubted, for the different manuscripts all agree in giving them the same names."

(6) The Wisdom of Anii

 * Page 234-235: QUOTE: "This book is a late imitation of the old books of wisdom, and resembles them in this respect also, that in it, as in them, a father is propounding his teaching to his son. But the scope of this work seems to be wider and its tone livelier—I say 'seems,' for, unfortunately, unless a new manuscript turns up, we shall never be able to understand more than isolated fragments of this wisdom. The schoolboy, who copied out the papyrus, has made mistakes in the writing of most of the words, and for the length of whole passages one has absolutely no idea of what is the subject under discussion. Possibly he did not understand much of what his book contained, for although it is written in New Egyptian, this language already belonged to a period separated some three to four hundred years from a schoolboy of the Twenty-First or Twenty-Second Dynasty, and thus much of it might have been obscure to him. We have evidence, moreover, that this was actually the case. The Berlin Museum possesses the writing-equipment of a schoolboy, who likewise lived in the Twenty-Second Dynasty, comprising a writing-board, upon which are written what were originally the opening words of our book. And yet he already had to add to these words a rendering in the language that was familiar to him. 'Beginning of the exhortatory instruction (the commencement of the exhortatory instructions) composed by the scribe Anii (which the scribe Anii composed) of the house of Nefer(ke)rē-teri.' With this last name we might possibly associate a similarly named king at the end of the Old Kingdom, and suppose that the author of the work wished to place his sage in that period, although he gave him and his son names belonging to the New Kingdom."

Love Songs

 * Page 242: QUOTE: "Though the love songs of the earlier period are still unknown to us, as many as five small collections survive from the New Kingdom. However, much chance may have had a hand in the game, there can be but little doubt as to that period having been the golden age of this kind of lyric poetry; if for no other reason than that all these songs strike one as being productions of a similar tendency."
 * Page 242: QUOTE: "They are mostly short songs without any rigid structure, simple discourses, in which now the beloved speaks, and now the lover. Every song was followed, so one is led to suppose from indications in the manuscripts, by the playing of some musical instrument, and that probably accounts for the fact that the song which follows hardly ever bears any relation to that which precedes."
 * Page 242: QUOTE: "Associated with love in this poetry is a joy in nature, in the trees and flowers in the garden and on the water. But other often very pretty and naïve pictures and ideas occur, and on the whole a great deal of pleasure can be derived from these songs."
 * Page 242: QUOTE: "Their tone, allowing for the southern point of view, is markedly decent; though one cannot avoid the suspicion that behind many a striking expression some double meaning was concealed for the enjoyment of the audience!"
 * Page 242-243: QUOTE: "The resemblance of these songs to the Song of Songs will strike every reader, and a connection is favoured by another feature also, namely, that the lovers call themselves there as here 'brother' and 'sister.' When we read in the Voyage of Unamūn (p. 174 ff.) that the prince of Byblos (circa 1100 B.C.) had acquired for himself an Egyptian female singer, we can well imagine along what road the lyric poetry of Egypt found its way into Canaan."
 * Page 243: QUOTE: "Let me find a place here for a couplet, too pretty to be left out. On the verso of a papyrus, containing all manner of high-flown stuff out of the schools (Pap. Anastasi, ii.), is cursorily jotted down in a running hand:"
 * When the wind cometh, he desireth the sycamore:
 * When thou comest, - - - -


 * Page 243: QUOTE: "thou desirest me," so the line might be completed.

(1) Discourses of the Lovers. First Collection

 * Page 243: QUOTE: "Some little songs, which have no connection with one another. Sometimes it is the one, sometimes the other, of the amorous pair who laments his or her pain and expresses his or her desire."

(2) Discourses of the Lovers. Second Collection

 * No comment by the author.

(3) The Maiden in the Meadow

 * Page 246: QUOTE: "This time the maiden alone speaks, and her several songs have, it may be conceded, some sort of connection with one another. The bird-catching spoken of in these poems is not carried out on a large scale, as, for example, when geese and duck were captured in the swamps for utilitarian purposes; it was just a pastime, requiring only the employment of a small trap."

(4) The Flowers in the Garden

 * Page 248: QUOTE: "The girl looks at the flowers of the garden—is she weaving a garland?—and with each one thinks of her love. Every song begins with the name of a flower, to which the first verse is attached by a pun."

(5) The Trees in the Garden

 * Page 249: QUOTE: "The trees in the maiden's garden speak to her and to the beloved, and invite them to the feast in their shade. Possibly the maiden had spoken to the trees in the lost beginning, for one of them complains that it was not regarded as 'first.'"
 * Page 249: QUOTE: "The manuscript, as is shown by a note at the end, belonged to an official whose duty it was to issue copper to the metal-workers."

Various Songs

 * No preliminary notes here.

(1) Songs of the Threshers

 * Page 251: QUOTE: "As the thresher drives his oxen round and round the threshing-floor, that they may tread out the grain, he suggests to them that something will accrue to them out of this labour, and sings:"

(2) Songs at Banquets

 * Page 251: QUOTE: "This charming song, which bids one enjoy this fleeting life, and comes down to us from an earlier period (see p. 133), is to be found in an amplified version in the tomb of a Theban priest:"
 * Page 252: QUOTE: "Fragments of songs with which the musicians are entertaining the guests, are occasionally to be found appended to other pictures representing a banquet held in the tomb. There is, for example, the well-known painting in the British Museum, showing three girls singing, while a fourth accompanies them on the flute, and two others dance. The words of their song come, apparently, from one which celebrates the blessing of the recent inundation:"

(3) The Good Fortune of the Dead

 * Page 253: QUOTE: "The old drinking song, with its advice to make the most of life, seeing that no one knows how it fares with the dead, must have painfully affected a pious Egyptian. So a song was composed which protested against the drinking song. If the harp-player at the banquet did sing these old profanities, he also sang after them by way of apology, as it were, the following song, which begins with an address to the dead and to the gods of the Theban necropolis—for they hear what is sung at the banquet in the tomb."

Poems to the King

 * Page 254: QUOTE: "The poems of this nature that I lay before my readers are only single examples. They might be greatly increased, for whatever its purport in other respects, every inscription of a New Kingdom Pharaoh contains a hymn in praise of him."

(1) The Victories of Thutmosis III

 * Page 254: QUOTE: "This hymn, composed about 1470 B.C., in the old language and on the old lines, must have been a famous composition, for two later kings, Sēthos I and Ramesses II, have reproduced it on monuments of their own and applied it to themselves."
 * Page 254: QUOTE: "It consists of an introduction and a conclusion written in poetic language, with ten intervening strophes composed in the strictly regular form discussed on p. xxxi."

(2) Hymn to Ramesses II

 * Page 258: QUOTE: "This fine poem is to be found on various stelae near to, and inside, the rock temple of Abu Simbel, in Nubia. Since it has no special connection with the temple or a district, we must suppose that this poem, like that on the battle with the Khatti, was one which particularly took to the king's fancy and accordingly was immortalized."
 * Page 258: QUOTE: "The beginning contains actually only the king's names, which, however, by the addition of epithets, are expanded into a hymn. Then follow five strophes of varying length, each of which ends with 'King Ramesses.'"

(3) The Battle of Kadesh

 * Page 260: QUOTE: "The long and bitter war, which Ramesses II (circa 1300-1234 B.C.) waged with the Asiatic kingdom of the Khatti and their allies, culminated in a battle fought at Kadesh in the valley of the Orontes. Inscriptions and representations in Egyptian temples supply us with ample information as to the course of events in the battle. The king had pressed on ahead with the first of his four armies, without any suspicion that the whole of the enemy forces lay in wait for him behind the fortress of Kadesh. He was surrounded and was in terrible danger, but succeeded in holding out until an unexpected body of troops came to his help. Finally, when a second army was brought up, the defeat was turned into a victory for the Egyptians."
 * Page 260: QUOTE: "This victory of the young king was celebrated in a long poem written in the ninth year of his reign by an unknown poet. The poet has dealt freely with the actual happenings, in order to give more prominence to the king's achievement. The poem must have met with the king's approval, for he has had it introduced into his great temples."

(4) Poems on the City of Ramesses

 * Page 270: QUOTE: "Ramesses II built himself a new residence in the extreme northeastern corner of the Delta, on the site of what was probably the later Pelusium (thus east of the Suez Canal). This is the often-mentioned 'House-of-Ramesses-Great-of-Victories,' which, in accordance with Jewish tradition, we call the city of 'Ramesses'. Its geographical position permitted it to be regarded as the capital of a dominion which embraced Palestine and Egypt. Both hymns are preserved as school writing-exercises, and, as they were written under Merneptah, the successor of Ramesses II, the boys have inserted his name Binerē, instead of Usimarē, that of his father—See also the letter on p. 206."

(5) Poem on the Victory of Merneptah

 * Page 274: QUOTE: "This poem is engraved on a memorial tablet, the so-called Israel Stela, set up in the funerary temple of the king, and also is as shown by a fragment, on one erected in the temple of Karnak. It was, therefore, without doubt a poem to which the king attached a great value."
 * Page 274: QUOTE: "It is mainly a glorification of the great victory which the king won over the Libyans in his fifth year (circa 1230 B.C.), and by which Egypt was rescued from grave peril."

(6) Shorter Poems

 * No comment here by the author.

Religious Poems

 * Page 281-282: QUOTE: "The old hymns to the gods still continued to be used by the priests all through the New Kingdom, and survived in the ritual as long as there was an Egyptian religion. But side by side with them a new tendency is apparent, that is as alive and multiform as the old was rigid and uniform. In it are to be seen the effects of the religious revival, for which the New Kingdom affords other evidence,—relationship with God becomes a personal one,—but there is also to be seen in it the new sentiment, which affects us so pleasantly in the other branches of the lyric poetry: joy in nature and a warmth of human feeling."

(1) The Great Hymn to Amun

 * Page 282: QUOTE: "My readers will expect to find a hymn to Amunrē, the state god of the New Kingdom, among the poems of this period, and on that account I have placed it here. Moreover, individual passages in the hymn, with their joy in nature and their warmth of feeling, vividly remind me of hymns which certainly originated at this time, above all the Hymns to the Sun from El-Amarnah. No argument against this view is afforded by the fact that our hymn is composed in the old language; for this was still the literary language in the Eighteenth Dynasty, the period when the papyrus in question was written."
 * Page 282: QUOTE: ""

(2) The Hymn to the Sun from El-Amarnah

 * Page 288-289: QUOTE: "As is well known, Amenōphis IV, the last king of the Eighteenth Dynasty (circa 1380 B.C.), attempted to establish a reformed religion, which permitted only the sun to be worshipped. The fullest statement of this faith that we possess is the following beautiful hymn, which is preserved in its entirety in a tomb at El-Amarnah, the heretic king's capital. It appears there as a prayer of the deceased, later known as King Ai. Shorter versions of this hymn are to be found in other tombs at El-Amarnah."

(3) Prayer to the King in El-Amarnah

 * No comment by the author.

(4) Poems on Thebes and its God

 * Page 293: QUOTE: "This work, of which the beginning and end are lost, might have once borne the title of The Thousand Songs, for, contrary to all precedent, its individual sections bear each a number. Of these numbers, only two are wanting to complete the thousand, and they will have stood in the break at the end of the last page. As a matter of fact, there were not really a thousand songs, for the author only attained this high figure by a strange artifice; he merely counted the units, tens, and hundreds, so that the thousand is actually only twenty-eight."
 * Page 293: QUOTE: "That he attached some importance to his numbers can be seen from the fact that he begins and ends every poem with a pun, which is meant to guide the hearer to the number in question. The effort to find puns on the numbers has apparently also influenced the sequence and choice of the subjects treated of. These poems are shown by their content to be the production of a learned poet, who was not altogether a bad one either. They were written at the beginning of the Nineteenth Dynasty, as the episode of Amenōphis IV was still not forgotten."

(5) From the Prayers of One Unjustly Persecuted

 * Page 302: QUOTE: "On the ostraca of a teacher, found in the tomb of Ramesses IX (see above, p. 188), are written a number of charming hymns, of which four, at least, possess a common feature, indicative of their being the poems of one and the same person. They begin with a somewhat long laudation of the god, and at the end entreat his assistance against a powerful personal enemy who has maliciously deprived the writer of his post. The god is to resist this enemy, he, the 'righteous judge, that taketh no bribe'; thou helpest the needy, but 'thou extendest not thine hand to the powerful.' 'Comfort the wretched, O vizier, let him be in favour with Horus of the Palace.' It might well be supposed that this man, whose verses the schoolboy was set to copy out alongside of poems dating from the time of Ramesses II, was a well-known Egyptian man of letters, a poet who had fallen into disfavour."

(6) Shorter Hymns and Prayers

 * Page 305: QUOTE: "These short poems are preserved to us for the most part in the form of school writing-exercises, and many of the cares and aspirations which they lay before the gods are in accord with their origin. I give first place to those which are addressed to the celestial colleague and patron of scribes, Thōth."

=Paul H. Chapman's "Case Seven of the Smith Surgical Papyrus"=


 * Chapman, Paul H. "Case Seven of the Smith Surgical Papyrus: The Meaning of TPȝW," Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt, Vol. 29, (1992), pp. 35-42.

Introduction to Smith Surgical Papyrus

 * Page 35: QUOTE: "The manuscript which has become known as The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus was first published by James Breasted in 1930. It contains on the recto the only extant copy of a medical treatise comprising seventeen columns of hieratic text. Though the manuscript dates to the late Second Intermediate Period or early New Kingdom, the text seems to be of a much earlier date. The treatise contains forty-eight medical case descriptions which deal almost exclusively with the results of trauma. A consistent format is used for each case. The title is followed by a catalogue of physical observations characterizing the injury and the condition of the victim: more than one set of findings may be presented, depending on the presence of a complicating factor such as infection. Next come instructions for declaring the nature of the problem and its potential for treatment: therapies are indicated if appropriate. The majority of cases are followed by at least one gloss clarifying an obscure word or phrase."
 * Page 35: QUOTE: "The orderly composition of the manuscript is striking. This relates not only to the format of each case but also the overall arrangement of cases within the treatise. The cases are presented in topographical order beginning with injuries of the head and face (cases 1-27) and continuing with the neck (cases 28-33), clavicle (cases 34-35), upper arm (cases 36-38), chest (cases 39-46), shoulder (case 47), and spine (case 48). In the middle of case 48 the text inexplicably breaks off, leaving 39 cm. of blank recto after column XVII."
 * Page 35: QUOTE: "Although our copy of the treatise is apparently incomplete, it has fortuitously provided us with an intact set of fifteen head injuries. There are four cases of scalp laceration without skull fracture (1, 2, 10, 18), two open linear fractures (4, 21), three open comminuted depressed fractures (5, 9, 22), one open depressed fracture exposing the surface of the brain (6), four open skull perforations (3, 7, 19, 20), and one closed depressed fracture (8)."
 * Page 35: QUOTE: "Once the cases have been grouped topographically, they are then arranged according to the nature of the scalp and skull injury. The case titles provide this information using consistent terminology to specify the type of tissue disruption. The scalp wound (wbnw) is usually described as penetrating to the bone. This is not surprising since the physician is able to probe the wound with his fingers to determine the state of the skull. More extensive scalp lacerations are characterized as wbnw n kft. Ultimately, it is the condition of the skull which dictates the order in which cases are discussed within a topographical group, beginning with those in which the skull is uninjured (w d ȝ) and progressing to the most extensive comminuted fractures (s d )."
 * Page 36: QUOTE: "Virtually all of the injuries described are what we would still consider common in a modern large city emergency room. Many are typical of an assault with a weapon and were presumably incurred during warfare. Case seven is of particular interest. It is not only the most detailed of the head injury cases but also the longest one in the entire manuscript. There are ten explanatory glosses. It is also the only head injury for which alternative prognostic verdicts are given (potentially treatable versus fatal outcome) based on specific clinical findings. A prominent feature of case seven is the use of the problematic word...tpȝw (plural) which first appears in the title. Proper interpretation of this term is essential to understanding the entire case. Various meanings have been proposed, beginning with Breasted. None of these is entirely appropriate from a medical perspective. For this reason I have undertaken a reexamination of the term tpȝw, taking into account personal experience with the types of injuries described in papyrus Smith."

=Logan Clendening's Source Book of Medical History=

Clendening, Logan. (1960). Source Book of Medical History. Mineola: Dover Publications, Inc. ISBN 0486206211.

The Egyptian Papyri

 * Page 1: QUOTE: "The first written accounts of medical experience are found in the Egyptian papyri. According to the dates assigned by modern scholarship (more recent than were at first estimated) they are: Kahun Papyrus, 1900 B.C., three columns, gynecology, discovered by Sir Flinders Petri, 1889, at Fayum; Edwin H. Smith Papyrus, 1600 B.C., surgical, forty-eight descriptions of disease, incomplete, discovered at Luxor in 1862, now at New York; Ebers Papyrus, 1550 B.C., medical prescriptions and charms, one hundred and eight columns, apparently complete, largest and best preserved, discovered at Thebes, in 1862, by Georg Ebers, now at Leipzig; Hearst Papyrus, subject same as Ebers, calculated to be about the same date as the Ebers, because many of the prescriptions are identical, fifteen columns, discovered at Deir el-Ballas in 1899, now at the University of California; Berlin Papyrus, late but probably a copy of an earlier document, two hundred and four columns, mostly obstetrical, very magical; London Papyrus, late, largely medical, now in the British Museum."

Kahun Papyrus

 * Page 1-2: This is the only thing that is written here, and it is a direct quote of the Kahun Papyrus: QUOTE: "Knowledge of a woman whose back aches, and the inside of her thighs are painful. Say to her, it is the falling of the womb. Do thou for her thus: uah grains; shasha fruit 1-64, hekt, cow's milk I henu, cook, let it cool, make it into gruel, drink four mornings."

Edwin Smith Papyrus

 * Page 2: QUOTE: "A series of case histories all arranged in a formal stereotyped manner. First the surgical condition is described. Then advice as to whether the surgeon should or should not attempt to treat it. If treatment is advised it is then described."

Ebers Papyrus

 * Page 3: QUOTE: "The Ebers Papyrus is a materia medica, or rather a formulary. Under the heading of diseases are given a number of prescriptions with some hints (not always very definite) of how and when to apply them. The first section is entitled 'Internal Medical Diseases'; it gives directions on how to open the bowels, to close the bowels, to expel worms, to expel fevers, etc. Other sections are 'Diseases of the Eye,' 'Diseases of the skin,' 'Diseases of the Teeth,' 'Diseases of women,' 'Diseases of the Ears.' At the beginning of the Papyrus is an incantation to be recited by the physician or the priest when giving the remedies. Thus the Papyrus represents both the magical and the empirical forms of primitive medicine."

=Plinio Prioreschi's A History of Medicine=


 * Prioreschi, Plinio. (1991). A History of Medicine: Volume I: Primitive and Ancient Medicine. Omaha: Horatius Press. ISBN 1888456019.

Egyptian Medicine

 * Page 298: QUOTE: "Our knowledge of ancient Egyptian medicine rests on several documents that have reached us, the so-called medical papyri, written at different times and often transcriptions of older documents or records of older ideas. The most important medical papyri, their subject, and approximate date of writing are:"
 * 1. Kahun, 1900 BC - Gynecology and pregnancy
 * 2. Smith, 1600 BC - Surgery
 * 3. Ebers, 1550 BC - Medicine, some anatomy and physiology
 * 4. Hearst, 1550 BC - Medicine
 * 5. Zaubersprüche für Mutter und Kind, 1550 BC - Charms for childbirth and care for infants
 * 6. London, 1350 BC - Recipe book with incantations
 * 7. Berlin, 1350 BC - Medicine, tests of pregnancy and fertility
 * 8. Chester Beatty, 1250 BC - Recipes for anal diseases. Many incantations


 * Page 298: QUOTE: "The Kahun Papyrus consists of fragments of a monograph devoted to obstetrics and diseases of women, plus a section on veterinary medicine. It is often referred to as 'The Gynecological Papyrus of Kahun.'"
 * Page 298-299: QUOTE: "The Smith Papyrus is, with the Ebers Papyrus, the most important source of information about Egyptian medicine that has reached us. Probably found in a tomb at Thebes, it was purchased in 1862 at Luxor from a native dealer by Edwin Smith, a pioneer of American Egyptology. It was published in 1930 by James H. Breasted in a beautiful edition that included facsimile, translation, and commentary. It is a large fragment, 4.68 meters long (the Ebers Papyrus, which is complete, is 20.23 meters), consisting of 377 lines on the recto and 92 lines on the verso. The document is written in hieratic, the cursive form of hieroglyphic script."
 * Page 299: QUOTE: "There is considerable difference between the text written on the recto, which is referred to as the Surgical Treatise, and the one on the verso. The Surgical Treatise begins with the head and skull and, proceeding a capite ad calcem, continues with the nose, face and ears, neck, clavicle, humerus, thorax, shoulders, and spinal column, where the text stops abruptly. It discusses forty-eight cases, most of them injuries. Case 1-17 (the first incomplete) concern lesions to the head; Cases 28-33 of the throat and neck (including cervical vertebrae); Cases 34 and 35 of the clavicle; Cases 36-38 of the humerus; Cases 39-46 of the chest; Case 47 discusses a wound of the shoulder; and the incomplete Case 48 an injury of the vertebra. There are no cases of supernaturalistic medicine in the Surgical Treatise except in one case (Case 9 - see below). The text of the verso, however, consists of eight incantations against 'the pest of the year,' a 'Recipe for Female Troubles' (a case of interruption of Menses), two 'Recipes for the Complexion,' a 'Recipe for Transforming and Old Man into a Youth,' and a 'Recipe for some Ailments of the Anus and Vicinity.'"
 * Page 299: QUOTE: "It is believed that the original text of the Smith Papyrus was first written in the Old Kingdom (2700-2200 BC), possibly even in the early part of that age. A few centuries later, to explain some passages, and because many words and expressions had become antiquated and were no longer clearly intelligible, an unknown surgeon equipped the document with a commentary in the form of explanations appended to each case. The copy that has reached us was written at the end of the Hyksos period or at the beginning of the Eighteenth Dynasty, that is, around 1600 BC."
 * Page 299: QUOTE: "The Ebers Papyrus (named after the German Egyptologist Georg Ebers, who purchased it at Luxor in 1873) was published in facsimile edition in 1875 by Ebers himself and translated by H. Joachim in 1890. This remained the only version available until B. Ebbell published a new translation in 1937..." Unfortunately, Google Books does not include page 300! This skips both the Ebers Papyrus and the Hearst Papyrus.
 * Page 301: QUOTE: "Zaubersprüche für Mutter und Kind, Charms for Mother and Child, deals, as the title indicates, with magic incantations for childbirth and the care of infants. It is a short piece of papyrus, with 9 pages of text on the recto and 6 on the verso, written at the end of the Hyksos period or at the beginning of the New Kingdom. It is a compilation from two sources, one of incantations against diseases of infants, the other of charms to facilitate childbirth and of prescriptions and incantations for infants."
 * Page 301: QUOTE: "The London Medical Papyrus deals mainly with magic although it also contains non-magical recipes (25 out of 61)."
 * Page 301: QUOTE: "The Berlin Medical Papyrus is an incomplete text that, on the recto, contains repetitions of parts of the Ebers and Smith as well as sections on rheumatism and overeating, while the verso, in another hand, contains a few tests for pregnancy and fertility and a few paragraphs on diseases of the ear."
 * Page 301: QUOTE: "The Chester Beatty Papyrus contains a series of recipes for diseases of the anus. There are also some recipes for ailments of the breast, heart, and bladder, as well as many incantations."

=James P. Allen's Middle Egyptian=


 * Allen, James P. (2000). Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521653126.

Egyptian language and writing

 * Family
 * Page 1: QUOTE: "Egyptian is the ancient and original language of Egypt. It belongs to the Afro-Asiatic language family, and is related both to Asiatic (or 'Semitic') languages such as Arabic, Ethiopic, and Hebrew, and to North African (or 'Hamitic') languages such as Berber and Cushitic."


 * History
 * Page 1: QUOTE: "Egyptian first appeared in writing shortly before 3000 BC and remained in active use until the 11th century AD. This lifespan of more than four thousand years makes it the longest continually attested language in the world. Beginning with the Muslim conquest of Egypt in AD 641, Arabic gradually replaced Egyptian as the dominant language in Egypt. Today, the language of Egypt is Arabic. Egyptian is a dead language, like Latin, which can only be studied in writing, though it is still spoken in the rituals of the Coptic (Egyptian Christian) Church."
 * Page 1: QUOTE: "Throughout its long lifetime, Egyptian underwent tremendous changes. Scholars classify its history into five major phases:" [Note: All of this is on p. 1, does not spill over to p. 2]
 * 1) QUOTE: "Old Egyptian is the name given to the oldest known phase of the language. Although Egyptian writing is first attested before 3000 BC, these early inscriptions consist only of names and labels. Old Egyptian proper is dated from approximately 2600 BC, when the first connected texts appeared, until about 2100 BC."
 * 2) QUOTE: "Middle Egyptian, sometimes called Classical Egyptian, is closely related to Old Egyptian. It first appeared in writing around 2100 BC and survived as a spoken language for some 500 years, but it remained the standard hieroglyphic language for the rest of ancient Egyptian history. Middle Egyptian is the phase of the language discussed in this book."
 * 3) QUOTE: "Late Egyptian began to replace Middle Egyptian as a spoken language after 1600 BC, and it remained in use until about 600 BC. Though descended from Old and Middle Egyptian, Late Egyptian differed substantially from the earlier phases, particularly in grammar. Traces of Late Egyptian can be found in texts earlier than 1600 BC, but it did not appear as a full written language until after 1300 BC."
 * 4) QUOTE: "Demotic developed out of Late Egyptian. It first appeared around 650 BC and survived until the fifth century AD."
 * 5) QUOTE: "Coptic is the name given to the final phase of Egyptian, which is closely related to Demotic. It appeared at the end of the first century AD and was spoken for nearly a thousand years thereafter. The last known texts written by native speakers of Coptic date to the eleventh century AD."