Sources. From the Middle Kingdom through the New Kingdom the Egyptians wrote prose stories and tales. There are approximately eleven stories and tales in prose preserved from ancient Egyptian literature. Nearly all of these works survived in only one manuscript copy. These copies seem to have been privately owned rather than part of an institutional library. Thus, it is difficult to determine how widely these texts were read. However, some manuscripts dating to the New Kingdom clearly represent stories composed in the Middle Kingdom. This fact suggests a history of transmission over a long time period.

Anonymous Authors. The authors of these texts are never named. Though often stories are told in the first person, in some cases the "I" of the story is never given a name. For example, the first-person narrator of the story known as The Shipwrecked Sailor (Papyrus Hermitage...