African Languages: An Introduction Book

I found this in a charity shop recently for £1 - and I'm glad I picked it up. The introduction gives the reader plenty of context about the village at Deir El-Medina where this material was found, the era these letters and texts are from and what was going on in Egypt around that time. The people in this village were building and decorating the tombs of the Pharaohs themselves, which makes it particularly interesting to learn about how they worked - after all, you imagine they would have been under a lot of pressure to get things right and make sure the various Pharaohs had their final resting place prepared not only in good time, but also to the very highest standards of craftsmanship and with all of the necessary grave goods in place ready for the afterlife.

So the people living and working in this village had a certain amount of status as tomb builders for the royal family. Equally, they were also regular people - and there is something reassuring about reading their concerns and seeing that some things truly never change - in one letter, a father writes to his son, despairing of the son's wayward behaviour.

Other texts cover topics as varied as legal disputes, medical recipes for cures, religious texts asking questions of the local oracle and personal letters between neighbours reminding each other of errands. There are also some longer texts with copies of stories they considered classics. It's an interesting collection and each individual entry is introduced with a brief summary of its context and any additional information known about the author or activities or people referenced in it.

I found the collection interesting, with the inevitable frustration that some of them had words and sections missing through damage, which sometimes prevented us from knowing key words or details. But that's understandable from 3,500-odd year old fragments. It's a fascinating insight into what life was like for those tomb builders - and presented in a way that is accessible to a non-specialist reader as well as the Egyptology student.