Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read.
Start by marking “The Literature of Ancient Egypt: An Anthology of Stories, Instructions, Stelae, Autobiographies, and Poetry” as Want to Read:
The Literature of Ancient Egypt: An Anthology of Stories, Instructions, Stelae, Autobiographies, and Poetry
An anthology of Ancient Egyptian literature, revised to offer fresh translations of all the texts as well as some 25 new entries, including writings from the late literature of the Demotic period at the end of classical Egyptian history. It also includes an extensive bibliography.
Paperback
,
Third Edition
,
624 pages
Published
October 11th 2003
by Yale University Press
(first published September 10th 1973)
Reader Q&A
To ask other readers questions about
The Literature of Ancient Egypt
,
please sign up
.
Be the first to ask a question about The Literature of Ancient Egypt
This book is not yet featured on Listopia.
Add this book to your favorite list »
Community Reviews
(showing
1-30
of
273)
It all started because of Daniel Radcliffe and his QI episode, where he talked about the Westcar Papyrus. It didn’t take long to read said papyrus, which then led me to the Story of Sinuhe, and then to save myself from randomly clicking Wikipedia links, I looked around for an anthology and found this book, which I think is a pretty decent anthology of Ancient Egyptian literature. I know nothing about Egyptology (I’ve seen the Brendan Fraser movies so I know that much) so any anthology really wou
...more
This is an adequate survey of translations of material from ancient Egypt and a useful jumping-off point for interested readers. There is not much in the corpus of Egyptian writing remotely approaching the quality of the Greeks or Semitic tribes, or the Babylonians.
The translations are mostly readable though a little awkward. The translators intentionally attempt to preserve something of the grammatical structure of the Egyptian, which strikes me as odd. One does not translate into bad English, ...more
The translations are mostly readable though a little awkward. The translators intentionally attempt to preserve something of the grammatical structure of the Egyptian, which strikes me as odd. One does not translate into bad English, ...more
I didn't read all of this but I really enjoyed what I did.
A pretty good balance, for an anthology of ancient stories. It's a difficult genre to manage, and some of the translations are rather antiquated themselves. But if you're looking for some good stories, it's a good place to look. Lichtheim can be better, but really, if you don't want to read scholarly articles about the texts, then look at both and the truth is probably between them.
view 2 comments
A pleasant diversity of material from Ancient Egypt, translated into very readable modern English. I'm skimming some of the it, because the book is ginormous, but I'm finding a lot of the selections fascinating.
Awesome for referencing obscure Ancient Egyptian lit. It gives a more complete look at the culture of the time than other things I have referenced.
There are no discussion topics on this book yet.
Be the first to start one »
