Ancient Egyptian Literature

Catalog description

In the history of human civilization, literature in the sense that we still understand it today started being written down very roughly 1800 BCE, about 3800 years ago. Never before had there been literary writings. There had been full-fledged writing for many hundreds of years. But none of it was literature in the modern sense. What triggered the arrival of literature is not clear. The arrival happened more or less at the same time in two places: 1) in Egypt; 2) across the Red Sea from Egypt in Mesopotamia. This is the story of one half of the world’s oldest literature, ancient Egypt’s.