November 14, 2022 King Tut family tree

The ancient Egyptians told stories both for entertainment and to convey a message. Storytelling in Egypt was as old as culture itself. However, the earliest written history of confidence-preserved ancient Egypt is the Middle Kingdom, it was composed in Middle Egyptian, the classical language of this period. The remaining pieces of ancient Egypt are fewer than those that the ancient Egyptians themselves knew, simply because the majority of their literary tradition was oral, or spoken, and has never been written.

One of the oldest tales and most favored of Egypt was the story of Sinuhe, which was preserved in six papyri and two dozen ostraca. The tale was written in the form of the biography of a courtier who fled from Egypt to Western Asia to the death of King Amenemhet the first for reasons Sinuhe never divulged. After many years in the Levant, Sinuhe felt homesick and wrote a long letter asking forgiveness of King Senusert First, which allowed Sinuhe to return and be reinstated in the royal court.

Autobiography was the oldest form in Egyptian literature and there are many examples of high-quality sound. An example is the autobiography of Weni official, coming out of his tomb-chapel at Abydos. Weni long career spanned the period of King Teti at the time of King Merenre. Weni exaggerated his closeness to his lord, King Pepi I, who hired him to investigate Weret Yamtes Queen, who was apparently involved in a plot against the king. The Book of the Cow of Heaven or the destruction of humanity, which was written in the late eighteenth dynasty on the golden altar of Tutankhamun, was an example of the mythological tale in Egyptian literature.  

The story describes how the sun god, Ra, was faced with a rebellion of humanity, so he sent his "eye," Hathor, or in a later version, Sekhmet, down to earth as a lioness, which proceeded to devour men. When Re called her back, she refused, so he had to deceive her. One night, he created a red-colored beer that looked like human blood. Sekhmet drank it all and got drunk. In this way Re saved humankind. Egyptian literature also provides examples of what might be called fairy tales or folk tales, like the "Tale of Two Brothers," "The Prince and his destiny", or later, the story of Khamwas Setne, a son of Ramses II.

The final story describes how Khamwas Setne was fascinated by the magical texts of the past, and so meet the ghost of a long dead magician in his tomb at Saqqara. In a story in history, he learned from an episode of the magician's life.