[The following piece includes the translation of a papyrus that is clearly of great antiquity. The writer seems to have been a highly-placed official at the Court of Pharaoh and witness to great and fearsome events in Egypt. It is not known with any certainty under what circumstances the papyrus was found. According to its first possessor, it was found in “Memphis” by which is probably meant the neighbourhood of the pyramids of Saqqara. In 1828, the papyrus was acquired by the Museum of Leiden in the Netherlands and it is today listed in the catalogue as Leiden 344. The papyrus is written on both sides with the face (recto) and the back (verso) differentiated by the direction of the fibre tissues. The Story of Ipuwer is written on the face; on the back is a hymn to a deity. The text is now folded into a book of seventeen pages, most of them containing fourteen lines of hieratic signs (a flowing writing used by the scribes quite different from pictorial hieroglyphics). Of the first page only a third — the left or last part of eleven lines — is preserved; pages 9 to 16 are in very bad condition — there are but a few lines at the top and bottom of the pages — and of the seventeenth page only the beginning of the first two lines remains. In 1909, the text, translated anew, was published by Alan H. Gardiner who argued that all the internal evidence of the text points to the historical character of the material. Egypt was in distress; the social system had become disorganized; violence filled the land. The rich were stripped of everything and slept in the open and the poor took their possessions. “It is no merely local disturbance that is here described, but a great and overwhelming national disaster.” The papyrus is quite clearly a script of lamentations, a description of ruin and horror, and Gardiner, following Lange, interprets the text as though the words were concerning some king, blaming him for bringing confusion, insecurity and suffering to the people. But the introductory passages of the papyrus, where the author and his listeners would be likely to be mentioned, are missing. Unfortunately many words in the papyrus are still not understood fully by scholars and despite much effort some expressions and phrases can be understood only from their context. The account was apparently written after the events of which it is a record, yet some parts are written as if the happenings were being observed at the time. Thus, translation is made more difficult by the quite understandable confusion and agitation in the mind of the writer, who interjects his account with short exclamations quite out of any proper context or, it seems, even proper chronological order of events. For the benefit of today’s reader, the freely adapted version given here is presented mostly in the modern style, avoiding many of the archaic forms that are in the original manuscript but the original style has been preserved where this helps to understand the document.]
[ ... missing ... ] dare to write these things [ ... missing ... ] But men must know what has happened in this great country. How mighty we were! And how low
