Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor

E. A. Wallis Budge's "The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians", published in 1914, states that the papyrus that contained the story was located within the Imperial Library at St.

[1] Miriam Lichtheim's "Ancient Egyptian Literature Vol I", published in 1973, reiterates this, further stating that the papyrus, called P. Leningrad 1115, was now in Moscow.

[2] In 1911 a French Egyptologist Gaston Maspero states that Golenishchev discovered the papyrus in 1880, and brought to the attention of scholars at the 5th International Congress of Orientalists in Berlin, in 1881.

His ship arrives to rescue him, and the serpent asks him to "make me a good name in your town" and gives him many precious gifts, including spices, incense, elephants' tusks, greyhounds and baboons.

The tale ends with the master telling the narrator, "Do not make the excellent (that is, do not act arrogantly) my friend; why give water to a goose (literally, bird) at dawn before its slaughtering in the morning?

[18] Nevertheless, interpretation of the story has changed from the naive initial understanding of the story as a simplistic tale of the folk tradition into a sophisticated analysis, in which the narrative is shown to have complexity and depth: a shipwrecked traveller engages upon a spiritual endeavour (or quest), journeying through the cosmos, to meet a primordial god, providing to the traveller a gift of moral vision with which to return to Egypt.

"[20] The tale itself begins with a framing device in which an attendant or "follower" (conventionally—although not in the papyrus—referred to as "the sailor") tries to comfort his master ("Mayor", although it has been suggested that they might be of equal status[21]), who is returning from an apparently failed expedition and is anxious about how the king will receive him.