By roLaNd eNmarch this paper discusses some features of the Kamose military narrative which relate to earlier Second Intermediate period theban royal texts, and to the middle egyptian literary corpus. It is suggested that the Kamose inscriptions mobilise various established Königsnovelle topoi, but also incorporate literary themes in some ways which do not seem to have been generally followed in royal inscriptions of the following eighteenth dynasty.

The sole surviving manuscript of The Dialogue of Ipuwer and the Lord of All is the Ramessid P. Leiden I 344 recto. The papyrus is damaged, and it is unclear how much has been lost at both the beginning and end. As currently preserved, the papyrus is divided into seventeen columns, and would originally have contained at least 236 lines of text. Following Gerhard Fecht's metrical analytical principles, this amounts to some 660+ verses. The content of the text may be divided into two literary formats: strophes and more discursive sections of dialogue. The majority of the text consists of strophes (poetic stanzas) of varying lengths, where each strophe is introduced by a repeated refrain (termed an ‘anaphor’). These anaphora are repeatedly written in red ink in the first nine columns of the text, whereas in the later columns rubrics are only used for the first occurrence of each new refrain. The poem has been the subject of considerable debate, including its unity of the text, its compositional date, and the identity of the speakers mentioned in it.

The Dialogue of Ipuwer and the Lord of All is one of the major works from the golden age of Egyptian literature, the Middle Kingdom (c. 1980–1630 bc). The poem provides one of the most searching explorations of human motivation and divine justice to survive from ancient Egypt, and its stark pessimism questions many of the core ideologies that underpinned the Egyptian state and monarchy. It begins with a series of laments portraying an Egypt overwhelmed by chaos and destruction, and develops into an examination of why these disasters should happen, and who bears responsibility for them: the gods, the king, or humanity. This volume provides the first full literary analysis of this poem for a century. It provides a detailed study of questions such as: its date of composition; its historicity; the identity of its protagonists and setting; its reception history within Egyptian culture; and whether it really is a unified literary composition, or a redacted collection of texts of heterogenous origin.

The Tale of Sinuhe was written in the Egyptian Middle Kingdom (c. 1975–1640 bce ). It is the tale of an Egyptian courtier who, in a moment of abject terror during a political crisis, deserts his Egyptian lord, and abandons Egyptian culture and Egypt itself. He travels into Syria‐Palestine, and builds a new life for himself as a tribal leader among foreign peoples, adopting local culture. The vividly told tale is an exciting story of adventure in foreign climes, but it is also a profound reflection on what it means to be an Egyptian, and an examination of the complex (and often incomprehensible) motivations that drive human action. The ancient Egyptians considered this tale to be one of the “classic” literary works of their culture, and read it over a period of at least 750 years.

‘Laments’ have long been recognised as an important and long-lived part of Egyptian written culture, appearing in widely differing contexts, including as captions to mourning scenes in tombs from the Old Kingdom onwards, as liturgical laments uttered by Isis and Nephthys in mortuary texts, and as an important component of the literary style of Middle Egyptian pessimistic literature. The heterogeneous nature of these sources presents problems in arriving at a satisfactory definition for a ‘lament’ genre as a whole, and raises questions as to just how closely related these different written traditions are. While the style of literary laments in particular has often been described as originating from funerary dirges, the evidence for this is chronologically problematic and other generic influences have alternatively been posited. This chapter establishes stylistic and structural criteria to enable a more detailed analysis of the different kinds of lament, and their possible interrelationship.