Tales from Ancient Egypt: The Birth of Stories

The Egyptian tales witness to some of the great moments in the history of Egyptian literature and represent the earliest beginnings in world literature. Many literary critics do not seem to know the importance of Egyptian prose tales told for entertainment (including C. S. Lewis who does not know that the marvelous that knows itself as myth was alive and well by 1800 BCE). Unlike some other ancient states both Israel and Egypt wrote epic tales in prose. And these great prose stories are important for the study of the Hebrew Bible. Some of the most exciting narrative prose parallels to the Hebrew Bible are found in the stories from Egypt. The details may vary but in the setting the purpose the vocabulary and the genre of the stories one can find many similarities.. The ancient Egyptians were masters of the prose story from short-story to novelette. These stories are windows into history to be sure and as such informative of the biblical world. They are at the same time works of wisdom magnificent examples of the literary art. They are `telling in every sense of the word. Loren Fisher has brought the best of them together in an engaging and insightful form enabling us to read these very old stories as if they were recounting the recent past.---Baruch A. Levine New York University. Fisher is at it again making the history and literature of the ancient Near East alive for us now. Here are stories from ancient Egypt that transcend historical distance. We recognize our own interests strengths and weaknesses in these stories. We see also a deep kinship between the storytellers of Israel and the even earlier storytellers of Egypt. This book is of value both to the ordinary reader and to the scholar.---John B. Cobb Jr. Emeritus Claremont School of Theology