The Middle Kingdom was the classic age of Egyptian writing. Its language, Middle Egyptian, became the model that scribes copied and studied for the rest of Egyptian history, rather as later Europeans studied Latin. Its stories and teachings were read for a thousand years.
Key idea
| Work | Kind | What it is about |
|---|---|---|
| Tale of Sinuhe | story | an official flees Egypt when Amenemhat I is killed, lives in the Levant, and comes home in old age to be buried in Egypt |
| Eloquent Peasant | story with speeches | a farmer robbed on the road pleads for justice in nine beautiful speeches |
| Shipwrecked Sailor | story | a sailor cast away on a magical island meets a giant serpent |
| Teaching of Ptahhotep | teaching | advice from an old vizier to his son: listen, be modest, speak well |
| Teaching of Khety | teaching | a father praises the scribe's life over every other trade, with comic pictures of other jobs |
Why it works
How these texts survive
Some Middle Kingdom papyri survive, but many works are known from New Kingdom copies: schoolboys and scribes copied passages of Sinuhe and the teachings on papyri and on ostraca, flakes of limestone. That is strong evidence that these texts were classics, studied centuries after they were written.
Worked example: Why copy old texts?
- People do not copy texts for centuries unless they value them.
- Copying was also how scribes learned to write and to use the classical language.
- So Sinuhe had become a classic, part of a scribe's education.
Answer: That it was a classic, studied and copied in school.
Middle Egyptian stayed the language of formal inscriptions long after people stopped speaking it. If you study it in Middle Egyptian I, you will read the same language as Sinuhe.
Common mistake