There are several major groups of letters surviving from the Middle Kingdom (Wente 1990: 58-88): the Heqanakhte letters (Allen 2002) date from the early Twelfth Dynasty and vividly portray the business affairs and family quarrels of a gentleman-farmer at Thebes and his family. Mostly from the late Twelfth Dynasty come a significant number of letters, both real and model, from the pyramid town of
Lahun (e. g. Luft 1992; Collier and Quirke 2002), including a number of letters copied into the administrative day-book of the temple. A papyrus from the Ramesseum tomb contained the ‘‘Semna dispatches,’’ an administrative document with copies ofletters sent between the governors of forts in Nubia (Smither 1945). The tradition of writing ‘‘letters to the dead’’ and depositing them in tombs, although not as well attested as in preceding periods, continued in the Middle Kingdom (e. g. Wente 1990: 215-16).
A significant number of technical treatises, mostly magico-medical, survive from the Middle Kingdom from the Ramesseum tomb (Gardiner 1955) and from Lahun (Collier and Quirke 2004: 53-98), and it is possible that some medical texts preserved in early New Kingdom manuscripts were written earlier. Magico-medical texts were designed to confer healing and protection, often mixing magical incantations with medical remedies. An isolated magical text from the late Second Intermediate Period, the Spells for Mother and Child, contains some fairly dramatic speeches where the speaker interrogates the illness demons and refuses to let them harm the child (Parkinson 1996: 154). Dramatic, performative speeches of this sort are frequent in magico-medical literature. A magical text genre of a rather different sort is the ‘‘execration text’’; these were used in cursing rituals, with the names of the accursed being written on clay figurines and vessels before being ritually destroyed (Posener 1987). Surviving execration texts seem to have been part of the ‘‘official” magic undertaken by the governing class against enemies of the state.
Other kinds of technical treatise included those on mathematics, evidenced by the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus from the late Second Intermediate Period (Robins and Shute 1987). Another important class of‘‘knowledge text’’ is the list, and it is likely that certain lists (such as king lists) were some of the earliest components of the Egyptian stream of tradition (Baines 1988). The list gives rise to one of the most characteristically Egyptian ways of codifying knowledge, the onomasticon, which consisted of a list of words arranged into various classificatory categories. The Ramesseum tomb contained an early example of this genre (Gardiner 1947: 6-23).
Major sets of Middle Kingdom administrative texts include a set of early Twelfth Dynasty papyri deposited in a tomb at Naga ed-Deir, dealing with shipyard records, accounts and building projects (Simpson 1963, 1965 and 1986). From the later Middle Kingdom come temple-related administrative texts, accounts and private documentary texts from Lahun (e. g. Quirke 1990: 155-73; Collier and Quirke 2004: 99-124 and 2006), a register of forced-labor fugitives from Thebes (Hayes: 1955), and P. Boulaq 18 consisting of palace administrative records from Thebes in the Thirteenth Dynasty (Quirke 1990).
World History
