Ancient Egyptian literature was written in the Egyptian language from ancient Egypt’s pharaonic period until the end of Roman domination. Along with Sumerian literature, it is considered the world’s earliest literature. Some genres of Middle Kingdom literature, such as fictional tales, remained popular in the New Kingdom.
About Ancient Egyptian literature in brief
Ancient Egyptian literature was written in the Egyptian language from ancient Egypt’s pharaonic period until the end of Roman domination. Along with Sumerian literature, it is considered the world’s earliest literature. The creation of literature was monopolized by a scribal class attached to government offices and the royal court of the ruling pharaoh. Some genres of Middle Kingdom literature, such as fictional tales, remained popular in the New Kingdom, although the genre of prophetic texts was not revived until the Ptolemaic period. The area of the floodplain of the Nile is under-represented because the moist environment is unsuitable for the preservation of papyri and ink inscriptions. On the other hand, hidden caches of literature, buried for thousands of years, have been discovered in settlements on the dry desert margins of Egyptian civilization. It is possible that the overall literacy rate was less than one percent of the entire population. The Egyptians called their hieroglyphs \”words of god\” and reserved their use for exalted purposes, like communicating with divinities and spirits of the dead through funerary texts. In the Twelfth Dynasty, the Egyptians believed that disfiguring, and even omitting certain hieroglyPhs, brought bad or good, to certain tomb occupants. Like cursive form of Egyptian hieroglyophs, hieratic is a simplified, simplified, form of cursive, in which a person’s name is written on the surface of a stone or other object. It was not until the early Middle Kingdom that a narrative Egyptian Literature was created.
The acknowledgment of rightful authorship remained important only in a few genres, while texts of the \”teaching\” genre were pseudonymous and falsely attributed to prominent historical figures. The writing of commemorative graffiti on sacred temple and tomb walls flourished as a unique genre of literature. It employed formulaic phrases similar to other genres. By the Early Dynastic Period in the late 4th millennium BC, Egyptian hierglyphs and their cursiveform hieratic were well-established written scripts. For example, The Narmer Palette, dated c. 3100 BC during the last phase of Predynastic Egypt, combines the hieroglyngs for catfish and chisel to produce the name of King Narmer. The Egyptians believed that omitting the name would deprive his or her soul of the ability to read the funerary text and condemn that soul to an existence in the afterlife. For the Egyptians, removing every instance of a venomous snake, or other dangerous animal, removed a potential threat to the soul of a deceased person. This is believed to have happened in and following the 12th and 13th Dynastic Dynastic periods. The death of a person would deprive the deceased person of the source of nourishment in the underworld, and the spirit of that person would condemn him or her to anexistence in an alternate life. In the 14th and 15th dynasties, the dead person would be buried in a new tomb.
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This page is based on the article Ancient Egyptian literature published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 04, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
