Most of the literature that survives from ancient Egypt is written in hieratic script. Little of it remains, and we are forced to estimate it from the fragments that do it only the blind justice of chance; perhaps time destroyed the Shakespeares of Egypt, and preserved only the poets laureate. A great official of the Fourth Dynasty is called on his tomb “Scribe of the House of Booksâ€;142 we cannot tell whether this primeval library was a repository of literature, or only a dusty storehouse of public records and documents. The oldest extant Egyptian literature consists of the “Pyramid Textsâ€â€”pious matter engraved on the walls in five pyramids of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties.*143 Libraries have come down to us from as far back as 2000 B.C.—papyri rolled and packed in jars, labeled, and ranged on shelves;145 in one such jar was found the oldest form of the story of Sinbad the Sailor, or, as we might rather call it, Robinson Crusoe.
“The Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor†is a simple autobiographical fragment, full of life and feeling. “How glad is he,†says this ancient mariner, in a line reminiscent of Dante, “that relateth what he hath experienced when the calamity hath passed!â€
I will relate to thee something that was experienced by me myself, when I had set out for the mines of the Sovereign and had gone down to the sea in a ship of 180 feet in length and 60 feet in breadth; and therein were 120 sailors of the pick of Egypt. They scanned the sky, they scanned the earth, and their hearts were more . . . than those of lions. They foretold a storm or ever it came, and a tempest when as yet it was not.