The ancient Egyptians viewed literature as a source of spiritual nourishment and a unique way to elevate style of expression. Ancient Egyptian literature tackled almost all aspects of life. Literary works were classified by subjects into various “genres” such as novels, short stories, poetry, folkloric tales, proverbs, wise-sayings, moral teachings, philosophical meditations and literary messages. The latter were divided into title, introduction, body and conclusion.
The oldest literature preserved, the Pyramid Texts, are mortuary texts carved inside the pyramids of kings and queens of the later part of the Old Kingdom; they were designed to ensure the dead ruler’s rightful place in the afterlife. These texts incorporate mythology, hymns to the gods, and daily offering rituals.
Secular literature includes stories; instructive literature, known as wisdom texts; and poems. Some of the stories include elements of mythology and may owe much to an oral story telling tradition. There are simple stories from Egypt that have survived thousands of years. Turquoise Amulet -Pharaoh Snefru’s trip down the Nile with the maiden who lost her amulet is one such example.
Ancient Egypt always had at least two scripts in operation, one for securing eternity, deployed together with formal art (hieroglyphic script), one for more day-to-day purposes (cursive scripts, first hieratic, later demotic)
From both the First Intermediate period and the Middle Kingdom come instructional texts, each written in the name of a reigning king, telling his son and successor how various specific historic events influenced the kingship and how the son should profit by the father’s mistakes.
Among the stories composed during the Middle Kingdom are The Story of Sinuhe, a palace official who fled to Syria at the death of King Amenemhet I and became a rich and important man there. The earliest preserved medical and mathematical papyri also date from this period.
The Egyptians were the first people of the ancient world who wrote books, and read books; who possessed books, and loved them. And their literature was of the most varied character, scientific, secular, and religious. It comprised moral and educational treatises; state-papers; works on geometry, medicine, astronomy, and magic; travels, tales, fables, heroic poems and love-songs.
The Book of the Dead is a famous literature of ancient Egypt. The three oldest Homeric texts previously known come from the land of the Pharaohs. Other papyri found within the present century contain fragments of Sappho, Anacreon, Thespis, Pindar, Alcæus, and Timotheus; and all, without exception, come from graves.
