Egypt is in many ways unique within the study of the ancient world. Much of its surface area is desert, where rainfall is minimal, and this has preserved countless objects which would have perished in a different climate. Wooden ships, furniture, and children’s toys survive, often intact, and there is no need to reconstruct such things from two-dimensional art or our imagination. In addition, stone was plentiful, and whole temple complexes still stand which in other regions would have been made out of mud brick or other less permanent materials. Temples and tombs are the major source of monumental inscriptions, and this is the basis for much of our information about the official side of ancient Egypt. However, this brings dangers with it, and there is no doubt that our picture of how that society functioned is biased as a result. Most towns and cities, for example, were situated in the floodplain close to the Nile, and consequently our knowledge of these is limited. The popular image of the Egyptians as obsessed with death and arcane rituals is part of this bias: there is some truth in the conception, but it is also something of a caricature, which can get in the way of a better understanding. Anyone familiar with Egyptian literature will know that here was a culture with a pronounced sense of humor, and one which valued the life that was vouchsafed to it. Morbid they were not.
The situation is helped to a considerable extent by the survival of texts on papyrus. Papyrus as a medium is vulnerable to dampness, fire, and the actions of insects, but the dry sands of Egypt have enabled many texts to survive which would have perished elsewhere. The same is true of ostraka (inscribed potsherds or flakes of limestone), which tend to contain ephemeral or less formal texts. It is possible for an Egyptologist to excavate an inscription with his own hand, and to become the first person for millennia to know what it says. A letter may be found sealed, in which case the student who works on it will perhaps be the first person to read it, since the intended recipient never did. Sometimes the name of a scribe will be unknown, but his inky thumbprint will still be there on the potsherd which he used to record his thoughts. Here
A Companion to Ancient History Edited by Andrew Erskine © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-13150-6
Too the circumstances of where most texts are found can determine the nature of the information they contain. Funerary guides to the underworld, for example, exist in many copies, and it would be tempting to trade a few of them in for something which more closely reflects a modern view of history. However, we are not in a position to impose on the ancients our own sense of what is important, and we must be content with the way the past chooses to reveal itself.
One of the advantages of Egyptian texts is that they are not subject to the process of transmission which we find in other societies. In much of the ancient world, texts would be copied and recopied, since they had a limited life. A work which contained ideas which were thought unacceptable or out of fashion would simply cease to be reproduced. In effect a process of censorship is at work, whether conscious or unconscious. In Egypt much the same process applied, but discarded or marginal texts can still come down to us. It is no accident that many of the most subversive or heretical texts from early Christianity are the product of the Egyptian deserts. Egypt can preserve for us voices which in most other societies would have fallen silent long ago.
The Egyptian language has the longest history so far attested, stretching from around 3100 bc until the disappearance of texts in Coptic, its medieval descendant, around the time of the Crusades. The linguistic aspect of this long history deserves to be better known. Almost all periods are well represented in our sources, with the exception of short interludes where political anarchy or social upheaval affected the production of texts or their survival. Administrative texts are commonly attested, as are most of the familiar genres of literature, with the exception of epic poetry, which made its appearance in Egypt at a late date, apparently under the influence of Greek models. The biggest gap in our knowledge is technical. Temple libraries, for example, certainly existed, but none have been found before the end of the Hellenistic or the beginning of the Roman period. Nevertheless, a handful of medical papyri are known, and these at least give a glimpse of the wealth of expertise which there must have been. The same is true of mathematics and topography. Similarly, the sources for reconstructing the legal system are patchy, and often reflect the interests of the party that is doing the narrating rather than the underlying principles of justice. In spite of this, what remains is considerable, and the story of excavation in Egypt is far from over. It is good to think that new discoveries may still overturn our knowledge.
In spite of the vicissitudes of time, climate and the chances of survival, the sources which have come down to us are extremely numerous, even if many of them are fragmentary or elliptical in their content. The following short summary can be nothing but highly selective, although I have tried to make the selection representative. The quotations from Egyptian texts are the author’s own translations.
World History
