The Immortality of Writers is an Ancient Egyptian wisdom text likely to have been used as an instructional work in schools. It is recorded on the verso side of the Chester Beatty IV papyrus (BM 10684) held in the

British Museum The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...

. It is notable for its rationalist skeptical outlook, even more emphatic than in the Harper's Songs, regarding an afterlife. The scribe advises that writings of authors provide a more sure immortality than fine tombs."''Ancient Egyptian Literature''",

Miriam Lichtheim Miriam Lichtheim (3 May 1914, Istanbul – 27 March 2004, Jerusalem) was a Turkish-born American-Israeli Egyptologist, known for her translations of ancient Egyptian texts. Biography Miriam was born in Istanbul on May 3, 1914, to Richard Lichtheim ...

, Volume II The New Kingdom, p. 175-178, University of California Press, 1976, The text is dated to the transition period between the

19th Dynasty The Nineteenth Dynasty of Egypt (notated Dynasty XIX), also known as the Ramessid dynasty, is classified as the second Dynasty of the Ancient Egyptian New Kingdom period, lasting from 1292 BC to 1189 BC. The 19th Dynasty and the 20th Dynasty fur ...

and the 20th Dynasty.

...Those writers known from the old days, the times just after the gods. Those who foretold what would happen (and did), whose names will endure for eternity. They disappeared when they finished their lives, and all their kindred forgotten. They did not build pyramids in bronze with gravestones of iron from heaven. They did not think to leave a patrimony made of children who would give their names distinction, rather they formed a progeny by means of writing and in the books of wisdom they left...''"Ancient Egyptian Literature: An Anthology"'', John Lawrence Foster, p. 226, University of Texas Press, 2001, ISBN 0292725272

They gave themselves he scroll as lectorpriest, the writing board as loving son. Instruction are their tombs, the reed pen their child, the stone surface their wife..... Man decays, his corpse is dust. All his kin have perished; But a book makes him remembered through the mouth of its reciter. Better is a book than a well built house...

The oratorical style of its writing is evidenced by the metrical structure of the text.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Immortality of Writers 2nd-millennium BC works Ancient Egyptian texts African literature