The instructions of Kagemni's Father and Ptahotep

This is going to be a drag.

It's two pieces of literature preserved on a single Middle Kingdom papyrus. It is 214 lines of hieroglyphs on a scroll that was cut up into eighteen pages. The first two of those pages are the end portion of instruction of some vizier to his children. One of the instructions mentions a man named Kagemni, apparently one of his children who becomes a vizier himself. Then there's a blank page and the rest of the papyrus is devoted to the instruction of another vizier named Ptahotep. These viziers were like mini kings themselves. They controlled vast stretches of land, and everything that happens on them, nomes, such as feudal baronies. These were very important people, way up there on the pecking order, and their behavior had to be exemplary so they produced these instructions, maxims to live by very much like Confucius and Machieveli together.

They're boring as hell.

But what is interesting about them is something Deb noticed. If you choose to bother with it, you'll see similarities here and there with Jewish and Christian sacred books and you'll start to wonder just how much of the old testament has its source in the early Jewish enslavement. These stories, histories, philosophies, proverbs and psalms came from somewhere. What we see is a kind of syncretism. They took the best of what was around them and claimed it for their own. Blended the best into their own culture. And then under another period of slavery their culture began falling apart, dissipating into the larger and stronger culture so their priests re-worked their collected writings and created for themselves an historic national hero by amalgamating the feats and the history of several biblical characters into one. David. Do you honestly believe it was David who killed Goliath? The septuagint leaves traces of another name. The priests weren't 100% careful in their redactions. And they were using scrolls, you can't just flip back through pages. Nor use the computer's "find" feature. It's impossible to keep track of every detail. Do you honestly think David wrote all of the psalms? The same songs appear elsewhere in other languages predating David.

The Egyptians are doing the same thing here. Within the works they are  claiming  origin in an earlier dynasty, an earlier era,  to give their new work back then the authority of being classic, while the style and the language, the phrasing, the usages, pegs the work at late Middle Kingdom.

Fine. We'll go along with your propaganda just to see how you said things over there and back then. Because we're curious how you got on.

This first bit exists in only one copy while the Ptahotep portion exists in several other copies. The first portion contains four maxims, and the second portion contains a long introduction and thirty-six maxims, and then a long conclusion. Both are difficult of comprehension in places and translations are uncertain.

In the modern book, this goes on for sixty-five pages.

That's a lot of pages for pedantic instructions. Kind of like living on Air Force Bases, rules all over the place. Every minute of the day. Every building you go into. For everything. Including washing your car and cutting your lawn, and cleaning your windows, and rolling up your garden hose. What a drag. Being a viziers son, being a courtier, was a total drag. We know that by all their stinking rules.