Ancient Egyptian literature
by Miriam Lichtheim · first published 1973
50% recommend17% neutral33% critical
"First published in 1973 - and followed by Volume II in 1976 and Volume III in 1980 - this anthology has assumed classic status in the field of Egyptology and portrays the remarkable evolution of the literary forms of one of the world's earliest civilizations. Volume I outlines the early and gradual evolution of Egyptian literary genres, including biographical and historical inscriptions carved on stone, the various classes of literary works written with pen on papyrus, and the mortuary literature that focuses on life after death. Introduced with a new foreword by Antonio Loprieno. Volume II s
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…Book was poorly put together and it was pretty much the same stuff as the Sumerian book I'd just finished, which wasn't a huge surprise but man that book is bad. I read all three volumes of Lichtheim's Ancient Egyptian Literature first, though, so that may have spoiled me. It's dry as hell but way better than either of those other volumes. Was good enough that I remember quite a few details and individual works from it years later,…
on “What Do Our Oldest Books Say About Us?” ↗Sorry for the delay, busy few days. 1) The three volumes of Lichtheim's Ancient Egyptian Literature 2) Stephen Mitchell's Gilgamesh 3) Black et al, The Literature of Ancient Sumer 4) Foster's From Distant Days (Akkadian) After that there should be some major works from India, but I haven't gotten…
on “How Should Secular People Approach Sacred Art?” ↗…Ancient Egyptian history could want, and then some—might be interested in Miriam Lichtheim's work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miriam_Lichtheim I've got, and have read, the three-volume edition of Ancient Egyptian Literature. Almost everything before the Greeks, as far as Western and near-East literature, reads alien as hell and is pretty hard to get a grasp on, largely (I think) because so much of it exists absent context,…
on “Now Showing, an Ancient Spell Book for the Dead” ↗I arrange mine chronologically by author's first major work (or rough date of the first work in it in the case of collections, like Lichtheim's Ancient Egyptian Literature) so my very shelves are didactic. Even if I can't tell you exactly when a book was written I can probably imagine where it is on the shelves and pin it down to "after Fielding, before Dickens... after…
on “Are paper books really disappearing?” ↗Lichtheim edited a 3-volume "Ancient Egyptian Literature" which contains a lot of funerary inscriptions. I'd second wl's post above: if you don't have tolerance for really dull writing, avoid. Almost all of that "genre" is of the "seen one, seem them all"…
on “Pharaoh Ramesses VI Tomb” ↗Pretty sure the oldest stuff I've read was around 4,500 years old (in translation, but still). Volume I of Lichtheim's Ancient Egyptian Literature. There are a couple incomplete tales in that 3-volume work and I really wish they'd had a more stable storage medium, because now I'm stuck with accidental millennia-old cliffhangers.
on “Microsoft team creates 'revolutionary' data storage system that lasts millennia” ↗…read long fiction books (mostly “classics”) that’d bore a lot of folks to tears. My favorite book is To the Lighthouse and about a third of it’s about an empty house. I finished every page of Lichteim’s Ancient Egyptian Literature (all three volumes!) and hot damn was a lot of that boring. I like the Telemachus books of The Odyssey. LOTR, though, was too boring for me, just couldn’t keep going. I couldn’t stomach one more elf…
on “W. H. Auden’s 1954 review of The Fellowship of the Ring” ↗