Toby Wilkinson - Writings from Ancient Egypt

Translated and with an Introduction by
Toby Wilkinson

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WRITINGS FROM ANCIENT EGYPT

PENGUIN CLASSICS

TOBY WILKINSON has been a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge since 2003. He is the author of State Formation in Egypt (1996), Early Dynastic Egypt (1999), Royal Annals of Ancient Egypt (2000), Genesis of the Pharaohs (2003), The Thames & Hudson Dictionary of Ancient Egypt (2nd edition, 2008), Lives of the Ancient Egyptians (2007), The Egyptian World (ed. 2007), The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt (2010), which won the Hessell-Tiltman Prize, and The Nile (2014).

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Round brackets ( ) indicate words inserted by the translator to facilitate understanding or flow.

Square brackets [ ] indicate gaps due to damage to the original manuscript or monument; the text inside the brackets is a restoration on the basis of remaining traces or context, often drawing on parallel passages in the same or other texts.

Angled brackets < > indicate an erroneous omission by the ancient scribe; the text inside the brackets is a restoration by the translator.

An ellipsis indicates a missing portion of the text where restoration is impossible, or a passage which defies translation (often owing to scribal error or misinterpretation).

Internal headings and italic interpolations in the translations are included to subdivide or explain sections of the text for the benefit of the reader.

Ancient Egypt is a civilization famous for its monuments. The Great Pyramid and Sphinx at Giza, the tombs in the Valley of the Kings, the rock-cut temples of Abu Simbel: these define pharaonic culture in our imagination, conjuring up a world of god-kings, esoteric religion and vaulting ambition. They are rounded out by an image of ancient Egypt derived from museum visits: a civilization of mummies and gold masks, sarcophagi and statues, with only the occasional object of daily life to remind us that the ancient Egyptians were real people. Architecture and art are the dominant themes, suggesting that ancient Egypt was a culture where the concrete took precedence over the abstract, the practical over the theoretical.

While these impressions are, to an extent, accurate, there is a huge missing dimension in such a view of ancient Egypt: the life of the mind, as expressed in the written word. Of course, writing is everywhere in pharaonic culture. Just about every tomb and temple wall, every coffin or statue, is inscribed with hieroglyphs. (This is the reason why, until comparatively recently, the discipline of Egyptology was dominated by philologists, often with a training in the Classics: nobody, it was argued, could understand or appreciate the civilization of ancient Egypt without being able to read its numerous inscriptions.) Papyri, too, are a quintessential product of the ancient Nile Valley although museums often display them as artefacts rather than texts. Despite the preponderance of writing in ancient Egypt, we are often tempted to look upon it as mere decoration, rather than engaging with it as meaningful words.

There are good reasons for this accustomed blindness to the written tradition of ancient Egypt. First is the strangeness and apparent impenetrability of the script. Hieroglyphs are indeed pictures they formed part of a unified system with art but their magic is their ability to serve as expressions of complex thoughts as well as pictorial representations. Hieroglyphic writing can convey concepts every bit as sophisticated, grammatical constructions every bit as complex, as Greek or Latin script.