The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians

It is truly more important that the entire collection be made accessible as a whole, than for every minor detail and every individual sentence to be translated with absolute accuracy.

At the same time, a translator should, of course, present nothing to the reader as a certainty if it is not truly so. I have tried to achieve this goal by omitting passages that are impossible to understand, using special fonts original: "special type"; this likely refers to italics or brackets to indicate uncertain readings where there is uncertainty, and frequently using question marks. On the other hand, I have had to resist the urge to provide my reasoning for choosing specific translations in doubtful cases or to engage in other scholarly original: "scientific" debates. For—and I want to emphasize this point—I have not written this book for the small circle of Egyptologists,¹ but for the many people who are interested in the ancient world but have previously been denied access to the field of Egyptian literature. I must ask these readers, however, not to misuse this book or to expect more from it than it can provide. Its purpose is to acquaint the reader with the texts as a complete body of work. Therefore, I ask any student wishing to investigate specific points to also consult the works of the Egyptologists I have cited for each individual piece.

As a rule, I have only mentioned two of my predecessors: the one who first identified the content of the text, and the one whose work is currently considered the best and most thorough. From these sources, one can see what is currently reliable or unreliable in previous scholarship, as well as alternative translations proposed for specific passages. Many of these texts were first edited as long as sixty years ago, and a full understanding of them has only been reached gradually—moving from initial guesswork to grammatical clarification, and from there to an appreciation of their literary style. The

¹ Most of my colleagues will likely feel as I did: they will be amazed by the sheer number of literary texts that have been collected. Furthermore, an Egyptian work has a very different impact when read in its entirety than when it is painstakingly translated sentence by sentence, as is our usual practice.