Ancient Egyptian Literature - Literary Functions: Social, Religious and Educational

Literary Functions: Social, Religious and Educational

Throughout ancient Egyptian history, reading and writing were the main requirements for serving in public office, although government officials were assisted in their day-to-day work by an elite, literate social group known as scribes. As evidenced by Papyrus Anastasi I of the Ramesside Period, scribes could even be expected, according to Wilson, "...to organize the excavation of a lake and the building of a brick ramp, to establish the number of men needed to transport an obelisk and to arrange the provisioning of a military mission". Besides government employment, scribal services in drafting letters, sales documents, and legal documents would have been frequently sought by illiterate people. Literate people are thought to have comprised only 1% of the population, the remainder being illiterate farmers, herdsmen, artisans, and other laborers, as well as merchants who required the assistance of scribal secretaries. 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. A similar demeaning attitude towards the illiterate is expressed in the Middle Kingdom Teaching of Khety, which is used to reinforce the scribes' elevated position within the social hierarchy.

The scribal class was the social group responsible for maintaining, transmitting, and canonizing literary classics, and writing new compositions. Classic works, such as the Story of Sinuhe and Instructions of Amenemhat, were copied by schoolboys as pedagogical exercises in writing and to instill the required ethical and moral values that distinguished the scribal social class. Wisdom texts of the "teaching" genre represent the majority of pedagogical texts written on ostraca during the Middle Kingdom; narrative tales, such as Sinuhe and King Neferkare and General Sasenet, were rarely copied for school exercises until the New Kingdom. William Kelly Simpson describes narrative tales such as Sinuhe and The shipwrecked sailor as "...instructions or teachings in the guise of narratives", since the main protagonists of such stories embodied the accepted virtues of the day, such as love of home or self-reliance.

There are some known instances where those outside the scribal profession were literate and had access to classical literature. 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. Menena's Ramesside contemporary Hori, the scribal author of the satirical letter in Papyrus Anastasi I, admonished his addressee for quoting the Instruction of Hardjedef in the unbecoming manner of a non-scribal, semi-educated person. Hans-Werner Fischer-Elfert further explains this perceived amateur affront to orthodox literature:

What may be revealed by Hori's attack on the way in which some Ramesside scribes felt obliged to demonstrate their greater or lesser acquaintance with ancient literature is the conception that these venerable works were meant to be known in full and not to be misused as quarries for popular sayings mined deliberately from the past. The classics of the time were to be memorized completely and comprehended thoroughly before being cited.

There is scant but solid evidence in Egyptian literature and art for the practice of oral reading of texts to audiences. The oral performance word "to recite" (šdj) was usually associated with biographies, letters, and spells. Singing (ḥsj) was meant for praise songs, love songs, funerary laments, and certain spells. Discourses such as the Prophecy of Neferti suggest that compositions were meant for oral reading among elite gatherings. In the 1st millennium BC Demotic short story cycle centered on the deeds of Petiese, the stories begin with the phrase "The voice which is before Pharaoh", which indicates that an oral speaker and audience was involved in the reading of the text. A fictional audience of high government officials and members of the royal court are mentioned in some texts, but a wider, non-literate audience may have been involved. For example, a funerary stela of Senusret I (r. 1971–1926 BC) explicitly mentions people who will gather and listen to a scribe who "recites" the stela inscriptions out loud.

Literature also served religious purposes. Beginning with the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom, works of funerary literature written on tomb walls, and later on coffins, and papyri placed within tombs, were designed to protect and nurture souls in their afterlife. This included the use of magical spells, incantations, and lyrical hymns. Copies of non-funerary literary texts found in non-royal tombs suggest that the dead could entertain themselves in the afterlife by reading these teaching texts and narrative tales. See also Egyptian influences in the Hebrew Bible.

Although the creation of literature was predominantly a male scribal pursuit, some works are thought to have been written by women. For example, several references to women writing letters and surviving private letters sent and received by women have been found. However, Edward F. Wente asserts that, even with explicit references to women reading letters, it is possible that women employed others to write documents.