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Ancient Egypt has long been recognized for its importance as one of the world’s earliest ‘literate’ societies. However, it is only relatively recently that modern scholarship has begun to emphasize pharaonic Egypt’s ties to its pre-literate, prehistoric past and the many ways in which oral modes of behaviour continued to influence Egyptian society throughout the Pharaonic period and beyond. The educational process through which individuals were trained to read and write was itself heavily dependent upon oral recitation. Ritual and literary texts were intended for oral performance, and legal and business documents served to record an oral act. Over time, however, we do find a movement towards the independent use of such documentary texts as binding in their own right. The Ptolemaic and Roman periods witnessed particularly significant change, with writing being mobilized in new ways to support the foreign government’s control of a conquered population.

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Although Egypt was ruled by foreigners during most of the Late and Greco-Roman periods, native religious traditions remained strong and the period witnessed the production of a wide variety of religious texts written in the Egyptian language. This article presents many of the major religious texts of Egypt's Late and Greco-Roman periods and comments on the trends of continuity and change that they suggest. It is divided into three sections. The first discusses texts written on temple walls or on papyri stored in temple scriptoria which speak to the ritual and theological activities of the priesthood. The second examines different types of oracle requests and divinatory texts which represent the practical religion of the living. The third focuses on mortuary texts recited over the deceased and funerary texts placed in the grave. 1