Writings from Ancient Egypt

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For example, there are many well-preserved Book of the Dead funerary papyri placed in tombs to act as afterlife guides for the souls of the deceased tomb occupants.

Texts preserved and unearthed by modern archaeologists represent a small fraction of ancient Egyptian literary material. A raised-relief depiction of Amenemhat I accompanied by deities; the death of Amenemhat I is reported by his son Senusret I in the Story of Sinuhe. The first major effort to translate the hieroglyphs of the Rosetta Stone was made by Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) in 1822. However, both Perdu and Greenstein assert that autobiographies of the ancient Near East should not be equated with the modern concept of autobiography.Menena, a draughtsman working at Deir el-Medina during the Twentieth dynasty of Egypt, quoted passages from the Middle Kingdom narratives Eloquent Peasant and Tale of the shipwrecked sailor in an instructional letter reprimanding his disobedient son. As rulers became more powerful, they were better able to coordinate labor and resources to construct major projects, and more people required larger supplies of food.

Penelope Wilson describes this archaeological find as the equivalent of sifting through a modern landfill or waste container. In addition to stone, ceramic ostraca, and papyrus, writing media also included wood, ivory, and plaster. Parkinson asserts that there is evidence that teaching texts were not created primarily for use in scribal education, but for ideological purposes. Markings and symbols found at various sites of the Indus Valley Civilisation have been labelled as the Indus script citing the possibility that they were used for transcribing the Harappan language. Scholars believed that all writing originated in ancient Sumer (in Mesopotamia) and spread over the world from there via a process of cultural diffusion.The privileged status of the scribe over illiterate manual laborers was the subject of a popular Ramesside Period instructional text, The Satire of the Trades, where lowly, undesirable occupations, for example, potter, fisherman, laundry man, and soldier, were mocked and the scribal profession praised. Actual writing is first recorded in Uruk, at the end of the 4th millennium BCE, and soon after in various parts of the Near East. Through acts of priestly ritual, like burning incense, the priest allowed spirits and deities to read the hieroglyphs decorating the surfaces of temples. Even after the Neolithic, several cultures went through an intermediate stage of proto-writing before they used proper writing. Debate surrounds the Indus script of the Bronze Age Indus Valley civilisation, the Rongorongo script of Easter Island, and the Vinča symbols dated around 5500 BCE.