Anonymous Egyptian Poets

The Egyptian poets are unnamed scribes, priests and court writers who set down hymns, laments and funerary songs in hieroglyphic and hieratic script on temple walls, tomb steles and papyrus. Their work spans the Middle and New Kingdoms, roughly the second millennium BC, and includes sun-hymns and litanies from the Book of the Dead, hymns to Amen and Osiris, and the festal songs sung at banquets for the dead.

The pieces given here are taken from Epiphanius Wilson’s collection Egyptian Literature (New York and London, The Colonial Press for the Co-operative Publication Society, 1901). Each is shown in the English version of the translator named in that volume (Budge, Chabas, Birch, Cook, Goodwin, Stern, Lushington, De Horrack, Naville). Several are printed there as continuous prose, and the Book of the Dead pieces appear without their rubrics.