The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians

...to ensure that the remains of the actual literature were not obscured by what is unimportant.¹

I would have preferred to spare the reader these explanatory and introductory notes and let the Egyptians speak for themselves. However, the world I am leading you into is so strange that a reader would not be able to navigate it entirely alone. Furthermore, without help, a reader would likely miss the subtle details original: "niceties" that Egyptian authors were so fond of including in their work. Nevertheless, I have limited myself in this regard as much as possible. Specifically, I have not gone deeper into matters of religion, history, or geography than was strictly necessary for a proper understanding of the passages involved.

Translation is always an imperfect task. No one has ever yet succeeded in both preserving the stylistic features of a foreign original and producing a clear, natural translation of its content in straightforward language. I have tried not to wander too far from the Egyptian text, although I have often taken the liberty of emphasizing how sentences relate to one another. Where it could be done safely, I have inserted "particles" small connector words like "so," "then," or "but" that clarify the flow of logic to show these relationships in our own language. On the other hand, I often wanted to make the arrangement of words and sentences match our modern style more closely, but I could not do this without hiding the evidence of the original poetic structure versification: the system of rhyme, rhythm, and meter in poetry (see below, page xxxi, note 2).

Regarding titles and various technical terms, I have often had to settle for inexact translations. This is always the case with the ancient names of peoples and countries which the Egyptians kept using from the earliest periods of their history, often applying them quite vaguely. Accordingly, when terms like Nubian, Negro, Asiatic, Bedouin, Palestine, or Syria appear in my translation, the reader should be careful not to draw too many specific conclusions from them. Before assuming these terms mean exactly what they do today, one should...

¹ Therefore, even in the case of actual literary texts, I have not included every minor or meaningless fragment.