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Anonymous - The Maxims of Ptahhotep (Small Works List)

 I felt the snake bite here of wandering to far afield from the original intention of this project. I had a very underdeveloped list of ancient writings in one of the segments of the Small Works List. Because of this, I thought that I should find some way of coming to terms with this lacking in the list and find a way to fold in a more robust catalog of the literature of the ancient world. I have studied Christian theology and Church history at the graduate level and so I thought I might have some sense of what might be hiding behind this veil but I was woefully mistaken at my purchase into this arena. I was confronted by this with the issue of simply getting my hands on a readable copy of this text. 

I am not sure where I went to flesh out these category, but I had a smattering of readings especially from Ancient Egypt on the same list as the Greeks. The time frame that these things exist in are as far away as modern American writings are from early Christian writings and so I don't think it is fair to lump these categories together. Okay, so what is the cut off then? So I determined to round out what might be included in a list of really ancient things and Sumerian and Egyptian texts are of the oldest and so they all go in together. Taken that then, I'll need more than 20 or 30 here to justify its own list, and so I decided to fill it on up. That list contains writing from 2000-ish B.C. to 600 B.C. which felt like an appropriate cut off and there is everything in that list from ancient Egypt to ANE to India to China. Many of these texts will be religious in nature and I will have to adjudicate that as I encounter it at the time. 

So, just after I pull Ur and then overhaul the list in a way that gets more towards a feeling of a fulsome approach, I pulled Ptahhotep and I feel the bottom really fall out from under me. This small text is not often published as a stand alone text, not like Ur, for some reason so I consulted again my brother, the PhD in Ancient Languages, he told me that he did not spend a lot of time in Egypt stuff because that is its own entire discipline, but that if I were to get the Miriam Lichtheim translation I would be in good company to fill in some of the gaps I might need to get close to context for this particular text. Lichtheim has a 3 volume set of translations of ancient Egyptian 

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