Book of the Dead
Writing in Egypt goes back to pretty much the earliest writing anywhere. Nobody really knows yet whether the Egyptians figured out how to write for themselves. They might have learned about writing from the Sumerians, who also began writing about the same time, about 3000 BC. But the Egyptian form of writing, hieroglyphs, does not look the same or work the same as the Sumerian form of writing, cuneiform. So if they did get the idea from the Sumerians, the Egyptians certainly changed it a lot.
What we have left of Egyptian writing, like Egyptian art, mostly comes out of tombs. Because it comes from tombs, most of the Egyptian writing we have left is prayers. That’s the kind of thing you put in people’s tombs. Other kinds of writing like laws, letters to your mom, and tax receipts or temple records mostly got recycled or composted, over the years.
Buy your own real Egyptian papyrus to draw hieroglyphs!
The most famous prayer from Egyptian tombs is the Book of the Dead. The Book of the Dead was a set of instructions for how to get from the world of the living to the world of the dead. In the New Kingdom, starting about 1500 BC, people put copies of the Book of the Dead in their tombs to help them along the way.
Bonus fact: did you know that the earliest version of the famous story of Cinderella comes from ancient Egypt? and that in this version, the reason she’s being excluded is that she’s white?
