This 12 th BCE century Ramesside papyrus, from the 19–20 th dynasty, is the oldest and most authoritative excuse philosophers and intellectuals of today have for prioritizing reading and writing over securing offspring or respecting priests. A book is more effective than a well-built house or a tomb-chapel, better than an established villa or a stela in the temple! But writings make him remembered in the mouth of the reader. Man perishes his corpse turns to dust all his relatives return to the earth. Thinking and writing is more important than religion, materialism, and – even more controversial – one own’s family:

The existential message of the “The Immortality of Writers,” written by Irsesh¹, echoes through the centuries and millennia, over sand dunes and oceans, before finally reaching us now in the 21 st century. They seem composed to be read aloud, as the Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson points out in his new Penguin Books translation. The paper containing the twenty horizontal lines of “The Immortality of Writers” is divided into sections by rubrication. Fittingly, this intellectual village was originally known as Set Maat: “Place of Truth.” New research indicates that Plato and Aristotle were right: Philosophy and the term “love of wisdom” hail from Egypt.Ī remarkable example of classical Egyptian philosophy is found in a 3,200-year-old text named “The Immortality of Writers.” This skeptical, rationalistic, and revolutionary manuscript was discovered during excavations in the 1920s, in the ancient scribal village of Deir El-Medina, across the Nile from Luxor, some 400 miles up the river from Cairo.

Ancient egypt african stolen legacy