page_title: Ancient Egyptian literature
section_title: Preservation of written material
hierarchical_section_title: Ancient Egyptian literature / Scripts, media, and languages / Preservation of written material
context_page_description: Ancient Egyptian literature was written in the Egyptian language from ancient Egypt's pharaonic period until the end of Roman domination. It represents the oldest corpus of Egyptian literature. Along with Sumerian literature, it is considered the world's earliest literature.
  Writing in ancient Egypt—both hieroglyphic and hieratic—first appeared in the late 4th millennium BC during the late phase of predynastic Egypt. By the Old Kingdom, literary works included funerary texts, epistles and letters, hymns and poems, and commemorative autobiographical texts recounting the careers of prominent administrative officials. It was not until the early Middle Kingdom that a narrative Egyptian literature was created. This was a "media revolution" which, according to Richard B. Parkinson, was the result of the rise of an intellectual class of scribes, new cultural sensibilities about individuality, unprecedented levels of literacy, and mainstream access to written materials. However, it is possible that the overall literacy rate was less than one percent of the entire population.
context_section_description: Underground Egyptian tombs built in the desert provide possibly the most protective environment for the preservation of papyrus documents. For example, there are many well-preserved Book of the Dead funerary papyri placed in tombs to act as afterlife guides for the souls of the deceased tomb occupants. However, it was only customary during the late Middle Kingdom and first half of the New Kingdom to place non-religious papyri in burial chambers. Thus, the majority of well-preserved literary papyri are dated to this period.
  Most settlements in ancient Egypt were situated on the alluvium of the Nile floodplain. This moist environment was unfavorable for long-term preservation of papyrus documents. Archaeologists have discovered a larger quantity of papyrus documents in desert settlements on land elevated above the floodplain, and in settlements that lacked irrigation works, such as Elephantine, El-Lahun, and El-Hiba.
  Writings on more permanent media have also been lost in several ways. Stones with inscriptions were frequently re-used as building materials, and ceramic ostraca require a dry environment to ensure the preservation of the ink on their surfaces. Whereas papyrus rolls and packets were usually stored in boxes for safekeeping, ostraca were routinely discarded in waste pits; one such pit was discovered by chance at the Ramesside-era village of Deir el-Medina, and has yielded the majority of known private letters on ostraca. Documents found at this site include letters, hymns, fictional narratives, recipes, business receipts, and wills and testaments. Penelope Wilson describes this archaeological find as the equivalent of sifting through a modern landfill or waste container. She notes that the inhabitants of Deir el-Medina were incredibly literate by ancient Egyptian standards, and cautions that such finds only come "...in rarefied circumstances and in particular conditions."
  John W. Tait stresses, "Egyptian material survives in a very uneven fashion ... the unevenness of survival comprises both time and space." For instance, there is a dearth of written material from all periods from the Nile Delta but an abundance at western Thebes, dating from its heyday. He notes that while some texts were copied numerous times, others survive from a single copy; for example, there is only one complete surviving copy of the Tale of the shipwrecked sailor from the Middle Kingdom. However, Tale of the shipwrecked sailor also appears in fragments of texts on ostraca from the New Kingdom. Many other literary works survive only in fragments or through incomplete copies of lost originals.
caption: Egyptian peasants harvesting papyrus, from a mural painting in a Deir el-Medina tomb dated to the early Ramesside Period (i.e. Nineteenth dynasty)
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS Macintosh", "Image DateTime": "2007:05:15 15:52:48", "Image ExifOffset": "164", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "302", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "10163", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1246", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1095"}