People in ancient Egypt wrote letters for much the same reasons we send messages today. They gave orders, complained about late pay, argued about money, worried about relatives and asked for help. Some of their letters went to foreign kings. Some went to a son left in charge of the family farm. Some went to people who had already died.
Thousands of years later, a surprising number of these messages still exist. They survive on papyrus, on chips of limestone and pottery, on clay tablets, and even on bowls left in tombs. Read together, they give a picture of Egyptian life that monuments cannot. Temple walls show what kings wanted gods and people to see. Letters show what people were actually worried about.
This article covers the main groups of surviving Egyptian letters and related documents: the Old Kingdom logbooks of an official named Merer, the Middle Kingdom family letters of Heqanakht, the ostraca from the tomb-builders' village at Deir el-Medina, the diplomatic Amarna letters, the Late Ramesside Letters from the end of the New Kingdom, the Elephantine papyri of the Persian period, and the unusual "letters to the dead." It also explains the scripts and materials Egyptians used, and why so much of this writing survived.
The scripts behind the letters: hieratic and demotic
Most people picture hieroglyphs when they think of Egyptian writing. Hieroglyphs were real and important, but they were slow to produce and were used mostly for monuments and formal inscriptions. For daily writing, including nearly all letters, Egyptians used cursive scripts written in ink.
The first of these was hieratic. It developed as a cursive form of hieroglyphic writing in the Naqada III period, roughly 3200 to 3000 BCE, very early in Egyptian history. Hieratic was the everyday script. It was used for administrative documents, accounts, legal texts and letters, and also for mathematical, medical, literary and religious works. It was also the script students learned first, which shows how central it was to a scribe's working life.
Hieratic was mainly written with a reed brush and ink on papyrus, but scribes also wrote it on wood, stone, pottery fragments, leather and linen. In the late Sixth Dynasty, some hieratic was even incised with a stylus into mud tablets.
Over time, hieratic produced local variants. One of them, called abnormal hieratic, was a very cursive southern form used in the Theban area from the second half of the Twentieth Dynasty to the start of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty. It was used mainly for legal texts, land leases and letters.
Around 650 BCE an even more cursive script, demotic, developed from hieratic. Demotic gradually replaced hieratic, including abnormal hieratic, for most everyday writing. Hieratic did not disappear. It became the priestly script for religious texts and literature, and it stayed in religious use into the third century CE, long after demotic, and later Greek, had become the main administrative scripts.
So a letter from Egypt's early or middle history is usually in hieratic. A letter from the last centuries before Roman rule is more likely to be in demotic, or by then in Greek or Aramaic. The Egyptian language itself also changed over these thousands of years, so a scholar reading a letter has to know both which script it uses and which stage of the language it records.
Materials: papyrus, ostraca and clay
Papyrus
The prestige writing material in Egypt was papyrus, made from the papyrus plant, and its manufacture is fairly well understood. The outer rind of the stem was removed, and the fibrous inner pith was cut into thin strips about 40 cm long. These strips were laid side by side with their edges overlapping slightly, and a second layer was placed on top at right angles. The two layers were hammered together while still moist, pressed dry, and then polished with a rounded object such as a stone or a shell. Whether soaking or glue was also used is still uncertain.
Sheets could be cut to size or glued end to end into long rolls. The glued joint is known by the Greek term kollesis. A wooden stick was often attached to the last sheet to make the roll easier to handle. Because of the way a sheet was built, the fibres ran horizontally on one side and vertically on the other. Text was normally written first on the side called the recto, with lines running along the length of the roll. The other side, the verso, was often reused later, with writing running across the fibres.
That reuse matters to historians. Many documents survive only because someone turned an old roll over and wrote something new on the back. Papyrus was not free, so how much of it a writer used also says something about the importance of the message and the resources of the sender.
Ostraca
For short or informal messages, Egyptians often did not bother with papyrus at all. They wrote on ostraca, which are pieces of broken pottery or thin flakes of stone, mostly limestone. Limestone was especially popular because its light colour and flaky surface made it easy to write on.
Ostraca were waste material, so they were cheap and easy to find. People used them for messages, receipts, prescriptions and school exercises: the short-lived notes of daily life. Egypt's dry climate preserves ink on stone and pottery well, so ostraca now offer one of the best views we have of ordinary people's concerns.
Clay tablets
One famous group of letters found in Egypt was not written in an Egyptian script at all. The Amarna letters, described below, are written in cuneiform on clay tablets, which was the standard medium for international diplomacy in the Near East at the time.
The oldest papyri: the Diary of Merer
The oldest known inscribed papyri are not personal letters, but they show how early written reporting became part of Egyptian administration. Excavations in 2012 and 2013 at Wadi al-Jarf, an ancient Egyptian harbour on the Red Sea coast, uncovered the oldest papyri yet found. In 2013 a French mission led by Pierre Tallet of Paris-Sorbonne University and Gregory Marouard found a group of papyri buried in front of man-made caves that had been used to store boats.
The best known of them is the Diary of Merer. Merer was a middle-ranking official with the title of inspector, and he kept logbooks recording the daily activities of his crew. The best-preserved sections, known as Papyrus Jarf A and B, record the transport of white limestone by boat from the Tura quarries to Giza. The documents date to the 26th year of King Khufu's reign in the Fourth Dynasty, around 2560 to 2550 BCE, near the end of his reign. They describe the final years of building the Great Pyramid.
The diary names the Great Pyramid by its original name, Akhet-Khufu, and mentions Ankhhaf, a half-brother of Khufu. Parts of the papyri are displayed at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The Egyptologist Zahi Hawass has called the find "the greatest discovery in Egypt in the 21st century."
The Diary of Merer shows that by the Fourth Dynasty the Egyptian state already ran on regular written records kept by mid-level officials in the field. Letters belonged to the same culture of writing things down and reporting up the chain.
Heqanakht: a Middle Kingdom family man writes home
The Heqanakht papyri are among the most vivid private documents from ancient Egypt. They were written around 1950 BCE, in the early Middle Kingdom, and consist of letters and accounts written by or for a man named Heqanakht.
Heqanakht was a ka-priest: a funerary priest whose job was to maintain the offering cult of a dead person. In his case that person was the vizier Ipi. Heqanakht was posted in the Theban area, probably for duties in the necropolis, and wrote to his household, who lived elsewhere. His estate gave him enough to support a large family and to keep a comfortable position near the lower edge of the upper class.
The letters are addressed mainly to his eldest son, who was running the household while his father was away. That household was crowded: five sons, Heqanakht's mother, a daughter, and a new wife whom the rest of the family did not accept. So alongside instructions about running the estate, the letters reveal the family tensions of a real household four thousand years ago.
The papyri are also an important source for the Egyptian economy. Grain, especially barley, was the basic measure of value. Rent and taxes were usually paid in grain, and Heqanakht converted grain values into other goods such as oil, textiles and copper. One record of household income totals 79½ heqat (the heqat was an Egyptian measure of grain). Because of these accounts, the papyri interest historians of accounting and economic thought, as well as scholars of Egyptian fractions and multiplication.
How they survived is a small story in itself. They were found in the tomb complex of the vizier Ipi, in the burial chamber of a servant named Meseh. They seem to have been mixed by accident into the debris used to build a ramp for Meseh's coffin. Today they are held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The Heqanakht letters also had a life in fiction. They inspired Agatha Christie's 1944 novel Death Comes as the End, a murder mystery set in ancient Egypt.
Deir el-Medina: letters from the tomb-builders' village
No single site has produced more everyday Egyptian writing than Deir el-Medina, the village of the workmen who cut and decorated the royal tombs of the New Kingdom in western Thebes.
Who lived there
The earliest datable remains at the village belong to the reign of Thutmose I (about 1506 to 1493 BCE). The village was occupied roughly from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Dynasty, about 1550 to 1080 BCE, and was abandoned around 1110 to 1080 BCE under Ramesses XI, in a period of tomb robbery, Libyan raids and civil war.
The residents included Egyptians, Nubians and people from western Asia, employed as labourers and craftsmen on the royal tombs. They were called "Servants in the Place of Truth." The workforce was split into a left gang and a right gang, each with its own foreman. They were salaried state employees and received rations at up to three times the rate of a field hand, which is why modern scholars often describe them as middle class. Their working week lasted eight days, followed by two days off.
A literate community
Deir el-Medina is especially valuable because so many of its residents seem to have been able to read. A large share of the community, women included, could at least read and possibly write. That was unusual in the ancient world, and it helps explain the volume of writing found there.
The finds
Ernesto Schiaparelli excavated large numbers of ostraca at the site between 1905 and 1909. A French team led by Bruyère then excavated the whole site from 1922 to 1951. About 5,000 ostraca recording commerce and literature were found in a single well near the village. Roughly half of the recovered papyri were reportedly removed without the excavation director's knowledge or permission, and thousands of papyri and ostraca from the site remain unpublished.
The personal letters in this material shed light on family life and social relations, while sales records document prices. Other ostraca from the village record medical, economic and administrative details. They mention a "physician" for treatments and a "scorpion charmer" for scorpion stings, and they show magic spells being passed from one worker to another. Six water carriers supplied the households, and one ostracon records about 375 litres of water rations that had not been delivered to five people. Trade looked more like barter than money: one ostracon records an ox valued at 120 deben exchanged for goods valued at 130 deben. (The deben was a unit of weight used to express value.)
The first recorded strike
Deir el-Medina is also the source of one of history's most famous labour disputes. Around year 25 of Ramesses III (about 1170 BCE), the tomb workers stopped work because their wheat rations were late. Eighteen days of the month had passed without rations, and their complaint was simply "We are hungry." The walkout is often described as the first recorded sit-down strike. Several more strikes followed before regular supplies were restored, and then the strikes stopped for the rest of that reign. The workers came to distrust the village chiefs, who had sided with the authorities, and they chose their own representatives instead. More complaints followed about 40 to 50 years later, under Ramesses IX and X.
The strike is known from administrative records rather than from a single letter, but it shows the same thing the village's letters show: these were people used to putting their problems in writing and expecting someone to act.
The Amarna letters: diplomacy on clay
The most famous letters found in Egypt are probably the Amarna letters, even though they were written in Akkadian cuneiform on clay rather than in an Egyptian script.
Discovery
Around 1887, local Egyptians secretly dug up most of the tablets at el-Amarna, the site of Akhetaten, the capital founded by the pharaoh Akhenaten. The tablets were sold on the antiquities market and scattered. Flinders Petrie later recovered 21 more fragments in 1891 and 1892, and Émile Chassinat acquired two more in 1903. Only 26 tablets were found in their archaeological context, in a building that archaeologists called the "Bureau of Correspondence of Pharaoh."
In total, 382 tablets and fragments are known. About 350 of them are letters; the rest are literary and school texts.
Dates and correspondents
The letters cover at most about 30 years in the mid-14th century BCE, and possibly only about 15. They begin in the last decade of the reign of Amenhotep III and end around the time Amarna was abandoned, about 1332 BCE, in the second year of Tutankhamun. Akhenaten reigned from about 1351 to 1334 BCE.
On the Egyptian side, the correspondents are the pharaohs Amenhotep III and Akhenaten. On the other side are the great powers and smaller states of the Near East:
- Babylonia: the kings Kadashman-Enlil I and Burna-Buriash II
- Assyria: Ashur-uballit I
- Mitanni: Tushratta
- Hatti (the Hittites) and Arzawa in Anatolia
- Alashiya, generally identified with Cyprus
- Rulers of cities in Syria and Canaan, including Rib-Hadda of Byblos, Abdi-Heba of Jerusalem, Labaya of Shechem, Abimilku of Tyre and Aziru of Amurru
Rib-Hadda of Byblos wrote so often that his letters form the largest single group in the archive.
Language
Most of the letters are written in a mixed form of Akkadian, sometimes called Canaanite-Akkadian, which reflects the local speech of scribes in the Levant. One letter, EA 24, is written in a late dialect of Hurrian and is the longest surviving text in that language.
Notable letters
Scholars refer to the tablets by "EA" numbers, taken from the standard edition by Jørgen Knudtzon, Die El-Amarna-Tafeln (1907 and 1915). Knudtzon published 358 texts; later finds raised the total to 382. The numbering is grouped by region: EA 1–14 come from Babylonia, EA 15–16 from Assyria, EA 17–30 from Mitanni, EA 31–32 from Arzawa, EA 33–40 from Alashiya, EA 41–44 from Hatti, and EA 45 onward from Syria, Lebanon and Canaan.
A few letters stand out:
- EA 15 is a letter from Ashur-uballit I of Assyria to Egypt.
- EA 24 is the long Hurrian letter from Mitanni.
- EA 153 is a letter from Abimilku of Tyre about ships being held back.
- EA 252 is a letter from Labaya of Shechem that includes a parable about an ant.
- EA 285–290 are the letters of Abdi-Heba of Jerusalem, which include the first mention of a group called the Habiru.
A widely used English translation is William L. Moran's, published in 1992. A newer edition by Anson Rainey and William Schniedewind appeared in 2014.
Where they are now
Because the tablets were sold piecemeal, they are divided among many museums. The largest group, 202 or 203 tablets, is in the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin. The British Museum holds 99, the Egyptian Museum in Cairo 49 or 50, the Louvre 7, the Pushkin Museum in Moscow 3, and the Oriental Institute in Chicago 1, with a few more in Oxford and Brussels.
The Amarna letters let us hear kings and vassals negotiating with Egypt at the height of its power. They also show that the Egyptian court kept scribes who could read and write a foreign script and language, a real investment in international communication.
The Late Ramesside Letters: a scribe, his son and a general
At the very end of the New Kingdom, a group of hieratic letters known as the Late Ramesside Letters (often abbreviated LRL) gives an unusually personal view of a troubled time. They come from Thebes near the end of the Twentieth Dynasty, during the reign of Ramesses XI, which is usually dated to about 1106 to 1077 or 1073 BCE.
The writers
Many of the letters were written by or to two scribes of the Necropolis, Dhutmose and his son Butehamun. Dhutmose, who also appears under the name Tjaroy, held the title "Scribe of the Necropolis." Other letters involve Piankh, a general and High Priest of Amun and one of the most powerful men in southern Egypt at the time. Some letters passed between Piankh and the scribes. In one, Butehamun explains to the general why his orders have not been carried out. In another, Piankh sends instructions to Butehamun and others.
The political background
Ramesses XI's reign was a time of crisis. Pinehesy, the Viceroy of Kush (Nubia), had pushed out the High Priest Amenhotep and taken control of the Theban region. He then apparently withdrew to Nubia, where he kept a power base for more than a decade. In regnal year 19 a new era was proclaimed, called wḥm-mswt, often translated as the "Renaissance" or "Repeating of Births." It was probably meant to mark a return to normal conditions after Pinehesy's coup. One of the letters, LRL no. 9, shows that this era lasted into at least its 10th year, which more or less equals year 28 of the king's reign.
What the letters reveal
In year 10 of the Renaissance era, Piankh led an expedition into Nubia to "meet Pinehesy." Its purpose is unclear. He may have been negotiating with Pinehesy, or even plotting against the king. In LRL no. 21, Piankh speaks dismissively of the pharaoh. In LRL nos. 34 and 35, he orders two Medjay policemen to be secretly arrested and questioned. It has been argued that, given Piankh's supreme position, such secrecy could only have been meant to keep something from the king.
These are working documents, not polished royal statements. They let us see power struggles at the top of Egyptian society through the eyes of the men handling the paperwork. The hieratic texts were first published by J. Černý in 1939, and Edward Wente's 1967 English edition became the standard translation.
Scholars still disagree about some details, including the order of the High Priests Herihor and Piankh, the exact dating of the letters, and the relationships between Piankh, Pinehesy and Ramesses XI. The letters are key evidence in those debates.
Letters to the dead
One of the most striking kinds of Egyptian letter was addressed to someone who had already died. The letters to the dead are a small corpus of texts dating from the Old Kingdom to the Late Period. In each, a living person writes to a dead relative and asks for help.
What they look like
These letters were written on many different objects: bowls, figurines, linen, papyrus, a jar stand, ostraca and stone stelae. Most follow a similar structure:
- The name of the dead person, often with a title and their relationship to the writer.
- A greeting, such as an offering formula, a wish for the person's well-being, or another invocation.
- The problem, which is usually a dispute over inheritance, an illness, or a problem with fertility.
- A request for a specific outcome.
Scholars disagree about exactly how many such letters survive; estimates range from nineteen to twenty-four. Most have no recorded findspot, but those that do come from cemeteries and tombs.
Two examples
The Qau Bowl, now in the Petrie Museum in London (UCL 16163), was found in tomb 7695 at Qau and dates to the First Intermediate Period. It carries two letters written by a man named Shepsi, one inside the bowl and one outside. One asks his dead father for help with an inheritance matter. The other asks his dead mother for protection from illness.
Papyrus Brooklyn (Brooklyn Museum, 37.1799 E) is a much later example from the Late Period. It is a petition from a temple worker of Amun about an inheritance problem, written in abnormal hieratic.
Why they matter
Letters to the dead show that Egyptians did not believe death ended family ties. The dead were thought to remain part of the family and to be able to act in the world. Writing to them followed a pattern similar to any other appeal: identify the recipient, greet them properly, state the problem and ask for action. Letter-writing was so basic to Egyptian society that it was extended even to the afterlife.
The Elephantine papyri: letters at the southern frontier
Egypt's letter-writing culture continued long after the New Kingdom. On the island of Elephantine, at Egypt's southern border near Aswan, excavators found a large body of papyri and ostraca. The material includes texts in hieratic and demotic Egyptian, Aramaic, Greek, Latin and Coptic, a sign of how many communities passed through the site over the centuries.
The best-known part of the collection comes from a Jewish military community of the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, when Egypt was under Persian rule. Two letters are especially famous:
- The "Passover Letter" of 419 BCE, found in 1907 and now in the Egyptian Museum of Berlin, appears to give instructions for observing the Festival of Unleavened Bread, although Passover itself is not named in the surviving text.
- A petition of 407 BCE to Bagoas, the Persian governor, asks for help in rebuilding the community's temple. The community also appealed to Sanballat and his sons and to Johanan ben Eliashib.
The Brooklyn Museum holds eight papyri from the site documenting the family of Ananiah and Tamut over 47 years. These are family and legal documents rather than letters, but they come from the same world.
Elephantine is a reminder that by the Late Period, letters in Egypt were not written only by Egyptians or only in Egyptian. The country was a crossroads, and its archives reflect that.
How Egyptian letters worked
Across these very different collections, a few common features stand out.
Letters had a recognisable structure. Whether a message went to a son, a general or a dead mother, it named the people involved, offered greetings or good wishes, and then moved to the business at hand. The letters to the dead show this most clearly because they are short and formulaic, but the same habit of greeting first and asking second runs through Egyptian correspondence.
Most letters were practical. The surviving letters deal with grain, rations, land, inheritance, orders not yet carried out, and people who were ill or in trouble. That is partly because practical documents were produced in large numbers, and partly because they were often kept as records.
Writing reached beyond a tiny elite, at least in some places. In most of Egypt, writing was the work of trained scribes and officials. But at Deir el-Medina, a large share of the community, including women, could at least read. That allowed craftsmen and their families to send one another notes on flakes of limestone.
Scribes were the backbone of the system. Officials such as Merer, landholders such as Heqanakht, and professional scribes such as Dhutmose and Butehamun produced or managed the paperwork that kept estates, building projects and the state running.
Survival depended on climate and luck. Egypt's dry climate is the main reason so much survived: papyrus and ink last a long time in dry sand and sealed tombs, and ostraca are nearly indestructible. But survival was still haphazard. The Heqanakht papyri survived only because they were swept into tomb debris. Most of the Amarna tablets were dug up by unofficial excavators and scattered across the world's museums. Half the papyri from Deir el-Medina reportedly left the excavation without permission, and thousands of texts from the site still await publication.
Why these letters matter
Monuments tell us how Egypt's rulers wanted to be remembered. Letters tell us how Egypt worked from day to day. From them we learn that a Fourth Dynasty inspector logged limestone shipments for the Great Pyramid; that a Middle Kingdom priest worried about his farm, his family and the value of barley; that tomb workers walked off the job when their rations were late; that foreign kings bargained with the pharaoh in Akkadian; that a general at the end of the New Kingdom ordered secret interrogations; and that people turned to their dead parents when the living could not help.
The letters also show how much weight written messages carried in Egyptian society. A culture that writes to the dead takes writing seriously. The same steps of naming the recipient, greeting them, explaining the problem and asking for action appear in messages about pyramids, grain, diplomacy and family quarrels. Reading these letters is one of the most direct ways to meet ancient Egyptians as individuals rather than as names on a monument.
Frequently asked questions
What language were ancient Egyptian letters written in? Most were written in the Egyptian language, using the hieratic script and, from about 650 BCE onward, increasingly the demotic script. Some letters found in Egypt use other languages: the Amarna letters are mostly in Akkadian cuneiform, and many Elephantine papyri are in Aramaic.
Were letters written in hieroglyphs? Generally not. Hieroglyphs were mainly for monuments and formal inscriptions. Hieratic was the everyday script for letters, accounts and administrative documents.
What did Egyptians write letters on? Papyrus was the main material for important documents. For short or informal messages, people often used ostraca: flakes of limestone or pieces of broken pottery. Letters to the dead appear on bowls, linen, figurines, stelae and other objects.
What are the oldest surviving Egyptian papyri? The oldest known papyri come from Wadi al-Jarf on the Red Sea coast. They include the Diary of Merer, which dates to about 2560 to 2550 BCE, in the reign of Khufu.
How many Amarna letters are there? There are 382 known tablets and fragments, of which about 350 are letters. They date to the mid-14th century BCE.
What were letters to the dead? They were messages from living people to dead relatives, usually asking for help with inheritance disputes, illness or fertility. Estimates of how many survive range from nineteen to twenty-four.
Who wrote the Late Ramesside Letters? Many were written by or to the Necropolis scribes Dhutmose and his son Butehamun, and some involve Piankh, a general and High Priest of Amun. They date to the end of the Twentieth Dynasty, in the reign of Ramesses XI.
Where can I see Egyptian letters today? The Heqanakht papyri are at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The Amarna tablets are divided among museums in Berlin, London, Cairo, Paris, Moscow, Chicago and elsewhere. The Qau Bowl is in the Petrie Museum in London, and parts of the Diary of Merer are on display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
Sources and further reading
- Wikipedia, "Amarna letters": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amarna_letters
- Wikipedia, "Heqanakht papyri": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heqanakht_papyri
- Wikipedia, "Letters to the dead": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_to_the_dead
- Wikipedia, "Hieratic": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieratic
- Wikipedia, "Deir el-Medina": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_el-Medina
- Wikipedia, "Ostracon": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracon
- Wikipedia, "Papyrus": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus
- Wikipedia, "Diary of Merer": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diary_of_Merer
- Wikipedia, "Ramesses XI": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramesses_XI
- Wikipedia, "Elephantine papyri and ostraca": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephantine_papyri_and_ostraca