The Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor

The Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor is a tale of adventure which may be an ancestor of the story of Sinbad. Only one copy of this story was ever found, written in Hieratic script (a sort of shorthand version of hieroglyphic writing) on a papyrus that is now in the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. It was written during the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, probably during the early 12th Dynasty (1990-1750 B.C.E.). The story is in the Middle Egyptian language, and has rather simple grammar as such things go.

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The tale is presented here in a hieroglyph transcription from Hieratic. Translation and commentary is from a series of notes by James P. Allen, Curator, Department of Egyptian Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hieroglyphic typesetting was done by Paul Dickson using the JSesh program and then merged with the text in OpenOffice.