The Radical Philosophy of Egypt: Forget God and Family, Write!

by Dag Herbjørnsrud

New research indicates that Plato and Aristotle were right: Philosophy and the term “love of wisdom” hail from Egypt.

A remarkable example of classical Egyptian philosophy is found in a 3,200-year-old text named “The Immortality of Writers.” This skeptical, rationalistic, and revolutionary manuscript was discovered during excavations in the 1920s, in the ancient scribal village of Deir El-Medina, across the Nile from Luxor, some 400 miles up the river from Cairo. Fittingly, this intellectual village was originally known as Set Maat: “Place of Truth.”

The paper containing the twenty horizontal lines of “The Immortality of Writers” is divided into sections by rubrication. They seem composed to be read aloud, as the Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson points out in his new Penguin Books translation.

The existential message of the “The Immortality of Writers,” written by Irsesh¹, echoes through the centuries and millennia, over sand dunes and oceans, before finally reaching us now in the 21^st century. Thinking and writing is more important than religion, materialism, and – even more controversial – one own’s family:

Man perishes; his corpse turns to dust; all his relatives return to the earth. But writings make him remembered in the mouth of the reader. A book is more effective than a well-built house or a tomb-chapel, better than an established villa or a stela in the temple!

This 12^th BCE century Ramesside papyrus, from the 19–20^th dynasty, is the oldest and most authoritative excuse philosophers and intellectuals of today have for prioritizing reading and writing over securing offspring or respecting priests. Because “the writer is chief.”

For the last decades, the only copy of Irsesh’s manuscript, formally known as “Chester Beatty IV” (EA 10684, verso) and also named “Be a Writer”, has been stored at the British Museum in London. In 1997, it was removed from public display. New translations from hieratic – Egypt’s ancient cursive writing system – have made the text accessible to the public. Yet “The Immortality of Writers” and other significant Egyptian philosophical manuscripts await detailed scrutiny by dedicated philosophers.

After all, Irsesh’s text is symptomatic of the era during and following the revolutionary pharaoh Akhenaten (died 1336 before the common era, BCE) and his wife Nefertiti (1370–1330 BCE). These two New Kingdom rulers abandoned Egypt’s traditional polytheistic religion and introduced a rather monotheistic worship of the Sun, Aten, instead. Shortly after Nefertiti’s death, their successors returned to polytheism.

The ideological upheavals in Egypt caused new ideas and philosophy to flourish. In the tomb of Neferhotep (ca. 1300 BCE) three different perspectives on death are presented in the “Harpist’s Song,” a text initially stating that the ancient tombs were “extolling life on earth and belittling the region of the dead.” A skeptical view on the after-life is also witnessed in the tomb-chapel of Paatenemheb at Saqqara, dating from the era of Akhenaten. This harpist text argues in a rather hedonistic way, a thousand years prior to Epicurus:

Follow your heart as long as you live! … Heap up your joys, Let your heart not sink! Follow your heart and your happiness. Do your things on earth as your heart commands!

One of the most vibrant eras in Egyptian history was this period spanning the two hundred years from Akhenaten and Nefertiti in the mid-14^th century until the economic and political decline from the mid-12^th century BCE; ancient Egypt’s last “Golden Era.” We can discover this in the love poetry of the middle-class village Deir El-Medina. Based on a reading of these poems from ordinary women and men, Renate Fellinger concludes that the “fairly equally distributed freedom of speech, action and movement as reflected in the poems may suggest that gender roles were perceived as equal.”

After all, women owned property, could buy land, and were equal to men in the ancient Egyptian court. One evidence of this, is the will – dated November 1147 BCE – of the woman Naunakht, who described herself as “a free woman of the land of Pharaoh.” She owned an impressive library of papyri; including the Dream Book, the world’s oldest interpretations of dreams. In Naunakht’s will, presented for a court of fourteen witnesses, she disinherits three of her adult children as they did not care enough for her. One of the disinherited was her workman son; she also rejected to give him any property from her first husband.

Furthermore, one of the most powerful pharaohs in Egyptian history was the woman Hatshepsut (1507–1458 BCE) of the 18^th Dynasty. While the female pharaoh Twoseret (d. 1189 BCE) was the last ruler of the 19^th Dynasty, as Kara Cooney attests in her new book When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt.

When it comes to writing, the Egyptian texts are “often consciously intellectual, making abundant use of wordplay through homophones and homonyms, in which the Egyptian language is particularly rich,” as Wilkinson underscores. Metaphors, idioms, and epigrammatic utterances are some of the other literary techniques applied.

Hence, it should come as no surprise that not only the oldest but also some of the most original ancient philosophical texts in writing stem from Egypt. A similar point was also made by the foremost of the Greek philosophers: Isocrates (b. 436 BCE) states, in Busiris, that “all men agree the Egyptians are the healthiest and most long of life among men; and then for the soul they introduced philosophy’s training…”

Isocrates was 16 years Plato’s senior, a founder of the rhetoric school in Athens, and he declared that Greeks writers traveled to Egypt to seek knowledge. One of them was Pythagoras of Samos who “was first to bring to the Greeks all philosophy.”

These Greek descriptions of Egypt have often been disregarded in the past couple of hundred years. But the scholarship of the 21^st century has opened up a new possibility: the founding Greek word philosophos, lover of wisdom, is itself a borrowing from and translation of the Egyptian concept mer-rekh (mr-rḫ) which literally means “lover of wisdom,” or knowledge.

In 2005, The Book of Thoth was finally collected and translated into English. This text originates partly from the 12^th century BCE, as Egyptologist Joachim Quack has pointed out. And in this book, “the-one-who-loves-knowledge” (mer-rekh) is a central figure. The philosopher (mer-rekh) is the scholar who desires to know the wisdom of Thoth, the author of books.

The translators of the Thoth book, Richard Jasnow and Karl-Theodor Zauzich, note the word mer-rekh and its “striking Egyptian parallel to Greek Philosophos.” As Ian Rutherford pointed out in 2016, Quack has demonstrated that the Pythagorean concept of akousmata is indebted to Demotic wisdom, arguing “even that the Greek term ‘philosophos’ is based on Egyptian.”

The Greek respect for the Egyptian love of wisdom, philosophy, is a context that can explain Plato’s statement in Phaedrus that the Egyptian Thoth “invented numbers and arithmetic… and, most important of all, letters.” This also makes it easier to understand Socrates, who in Plato’s Timaeus quotes the ancient Egyptian wise men when the law-giver Solon travels to Egypt to learn: “O Solon, Solon, you Greeks are always children.”

In addition, Aristotle attests to Egypt being the original land of wisdom, as when he states in Politics that “Egyptians are reputed to be the oldest of nations, but they have always had laws and a political system.”

In 2018, projects are under way to translate several ancient Egyptian texts for the first time. Yet we already have a wide variety of genres to choose from in order to study the manuscripts from a philosophical perspective:

The many maxims in “The Teaching of Ptahhotep”, the earliest preserved manuscript of this vizier of the fifth dynasty is from the 19^th century BCE, in which he also argues that you should “follow your heart”; “The Teaching of Ani”, written by a humble middle-class scribe in the 13^th century BCE, which gives advice to the ordinary man; “The Satire of the Trades” by Khety, who tries to convince his son Pepy to “love books more than your mother” as there is nothing “on earth” like being a scribe; the masterpiece “The Dispute Between a Man and His Ba” of the 19^th century BCE – in which a man laments “the misery of life,” while his ba (personality/soul) replies that life is good, that he should rather “ponder life” as it is a burial that is miserable – recently discussed by Peter Adamson and Chike Jeffers in their “Africana Philosophy” podcast series.

Or we can read Amennakht (active in 1170–1140 BCE), the leading intellectual of the scribal town Deir El-Medina, whose teaching states that “it is good to finish school, better than the smell of lotus blossoms in summer.”

This is the context in which we can understand Irsesh’s “The Immortality of Writers,” found in the scribal village of Amennakht and written in the post-Akhenaten era. We can recognize the praise of writing from Khety, or from Ani’s argument that a scribe’s “companions are his concerns.” The text of Irsesh is distinct but so are many other of the miscellaneous Egyptian texts that are now gradually becoming translated and rediscovered.

Irsesh begins his argument by stating one should be skilled in writing. He then goes on to refer to the “wise writers from the time after the gods,” indicating that the gods are not among us after the creation of the Earth. Irsesh states that the names of these writers “have become everlasting, even though they have departed this life and all their relatives are forgotten.” Hence:

They did not make for themselves pyramid-shaped mausolea of copper with tombstones of iron; they did not think to leave heirs, children to proclaim their names: rather they made heirs of writings, of the teachings they had composed.

By chance, these lines are echoed by the Roman poet Horace some twelve hundred years later, when he begins his last ode (30) in book three as follows:

I built a monument more durable than bronze and higher than the royal Pyramids… I shall not wholly die (Exegi monumentum aere perennius regalique situ pyramidum Altius…)

But Irsesh takes the argument a couple of steps further than Horace. Not only will the texts and books give the author eternal life – they are so important that great writers do not think of begetting sons and daughters:

They gave themselves a book as their lector-priest, a writing-board as their dutiful son. Teachings are their mausolea, the reed-pen their child, the burnishing-stone their wife. Both great and small are given them as their children, for the writer is chief.

The best heirs of the writer are the ones who read and remember him after the writer’s death. The pen is their child; the papermaking stone their partner. Writing is everything. Nothing else matters.

Irsesh raises an eternal philosophical dilemma: What is more important, doing good for the humans to come or doing good in life right now?

He continues as follows regarding the great writers of the past:

Their gates and mansions have been destroyed, their mortuary priests are gone, their tombstones are covered with dirt, their tombs are forgotten. But their names are proclaimed on account of their books which they composed while they were alive. The memory of their authors is good: it is for eternity and for ever.

Note how the mortuary priests are mocked. Because neither priests nor tombs live on, only the memory caused by great writing. Accordingly, Irsesh’s advice is clear:

Be a writer, take it to heart, so that your name will fare likewise. A book is more effective than a carved tombstone or a permanent sepulchre. They serve as chapels and mausolea in the mind of him who proclaims their names.

Even though Irsesh rejects materialism, family, and religion – and is skeptical and open-minded regarding what happens after death – one sentence indicates that he is not an atheist as such. Because after this last extract, he adds: “A name in the mouth of the people will surely be effective in the afterlife!”

Irsesh seems to respect the uncertainty of what happens after death. It is following the last statement that he writes the paragraph on how the human and his relatives pass away, which was quoted initially.

Next follows another extraordinary paragraph, in which he names some of the famous, classic Egyptian authors. This is the Canon of the first millennium of Egyptian literature, as treasured by an intellectual in the 12^th century BCE:

Is there one here like Hordedef? Is there another like Imhotep? None of our kin is like Neferti or Khety, their leader. May I remind you about Ptahemdjehuty and Khakheperraseneb! Is there another like Ptahhotep, or the equal of Kairsu?

Hordedef was a legendary writer from the 5^th dynasty, approximately 2500 BCE. Imhotep was revered as the architect of the first pyramid. The texts of Khety and Ptahhotep are mentioned above. The four others are famed writers.

As a true lover of wisdom, a mer-rekh, a philosopher, Irsesh concludes his immortal text, thus:

Those wise writers who foretold what was to come: what they said came into being; it is found as a maxim, written in their books. Others’ offspring will be their heirs, as if they were their own children. They hid their powers from the world, but it is read in their teachings. They are gone, their names forgotten; but writings cause them to be remembered.

We can notice Irsesh’s claim that if we read and remember an earlier writer’s text, we will be his or her heirs, as if we were their own children. In that respect, we have become – at this very moment, just by reading these words – the children of Irsesh.

All of Irsesh’s original children and grandchildren are dead, and no physical descendant in the world knows who he is. But because of his text, we know parts of his mind and ba now. We read his words; we can discuss the philosophical conundrums of “The Immortality of Writers” 3,200 years later.

Hence, at this very moment, when you read and remember these words, Irsesh has become one of your ancestors. By reading this, you have finally proven his point about the writer: “writings make him remembered.”

We are the ones Irsesh was waiting for. You have become the child Irsesh always wanted. And the philosophy of Egypt can, possibly, envision a new dawn in the 21^st century.

Note: The translation of “The Immortality of Writers,” as the text is best known, mostly follows Toby Wilkinson’s version “Be a Writer” in Writings from Ancient Egypt (Penguin Classics, 2016, pp 284–287). Some adjustments are made for clarity or by using the more literal translation (given in the notes).

I thank Egyptologist Joachim Quack at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, for the help regarding this text.

¹The name of the author of “The Immortality of Writers” is not known. In cooperation with Egyptologist Andrea G. McDowell, now at Yale Law School, it is here proposed to name the author Iretsesh, a rendering of the Egyptian words irt sS, which means “Be a Writer.”

Dag Herbjørnsrud

dag@sgoki.org | Website

Dag Herbjørnsrud (@DagHerbjornsrud) is a global historian of ideas, former editor-in-chief, and author. His latest journal article is “Beyond decolonizing: global intellectual history and reconstruction of a comparative method” (Global Intellectual History, 2019). Herbjørnsrud is the founder of Center for Global and Comparative History of Ideas (SGOKI).