The Westcar Papyrus (inventory-designation: P. Berlin 3033) is an ancient Egyptian text containing five stories about miracles performed by priests and magicians.

In the papyrus text, each of these tales are told at the royal court of king Khufu (Cheops) (Fourth Dynasty, 26th century BCE) by his sons.

Miriam Lichtheim dates the document to the Hyksos period (eighteenth to sixteenth century BC) and states that it is written in classical Middle Egyptian.

[citation needed] In 1838 or 1839, German Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius claimed to have received the papyrus from Westcar's niece.

As Lepsius was able to read some signs of Hieratic, he recognized some of the royal cartouche names of the kings and dated the text to the Old Kingdom.

Because of the paper lamination during the eighteenth century, all the papyrus fragments are partially damaged; at several spots the material is torn, distorted, and squashed.

It looks as if Papyrus Westcar is a palimpsest; the unknown ancient Egyptian author obviously tried but partially failed to wipe the older text off.

It seems to have been a text detailing a miracle performed by a lector priest in the reign of king Djoser, possibly the famous Imhotep.

King Nebka's chief lector Ubaoner finds that his wife is having a love affair with a townsman of Memphis, and he fashions a crocodile in wax.

Upon learning that his unfaithful wife is meeting her lover, he casts a spell for the figurine to come to life upon contact with water, and sets his caretaker to throw it in the stream by which the townsman enters and leaves the lector's estate undiscovered.

Upon catching the townsman, the crocodile takes him to the bottom of the lake, where they remain for seven days as the lector entertains the visiting pharaoh.

The king is bored and his chief lector Djadjaemankh advises him to gather twenty young women and use them to sail him around the palace lake.

However, one of the girls loses an amulet - a fish pendant made of turquoise so dear to her that she will not even accept a substitute from the royal treasury, and until it is returned to her neither she nor any of the other women will row.

A townsman named Dedi apparently has the power to reattach a severed head onto an animal, to tame wild lions, and knows the number of secret rooms in the shrine of Thoth.

Khufu, intrigued, sends his son to invite this wise man to the court, and upon Dedi's arrival he orders a goose, an undefined waterbird, and a bull beheaded.

The most recent translations and linguistic investigations by Miriam Lichtheim and Verena Lepper reveal interesting writing and spelling elements hidden in the text of the papyrus, which has led them to a new evaluation of the individual stories.

The name of the hero, who is said to have performed the miracle, is completely lost, but Liechtheim and Lepper think it's possible that the Papyrus was talking about the famous architect and high lector priest, Imhotep.

The author depicts Sneferu as a fatuous fool, who is easily pleased with superficial entertainment and who is unable to resolve a dispute with a little rowing maid.

On one hand he is depicted as ruthless: deciding to have a condemned prisoner decapitated to test the alleged magical powers of the magician Dedi.

Earlier Egyptologists and historians in particular, such as Adolf Erman, Kurt Heinrich Sethe, and Wolfgang Helck evaluated Khufu's character as heartless and sacrilegious.

But other Egyptologists such as Dietrich Wildung see Khufu's order as an act of mercy: the prisoner would have received his life back if Dedi had performed his magical trick.

The sun god Ra orders his companions Isis, Meskhenet, Hekhet, Nephthys, and Khnum to help Rededjet, to ensure the birth of the triplets and the beginning of a new dynasty.

Lepper and Liechtheim both evaluate the story as some kind of narrated moral that deals with the theme of justice and what happens to traitors.

Lepper points out, that the story of Rededjet might have been inspired by the historical figure of Khentkaus I, who lived and may have ruled at the end of the Fourth Dynasty.

[14] Since, in the Westcar Papyrus, Rededjet is connected with the role of a future king's mother, the parallels between the biographies of the two ladies has garnered special attention.

Lepper points out that the crocodile sequence is repeated several times, like a kind of refrain, which is a typical element in similar stories and documents.

They refer to multiple, and somewhat later, ancient Egyptian writings in which magicians perform very similar magic tricks and make prophecies to a king.

The Papyrus pAthen contains the phrase: "...for these are the wise who can move waters and make a river flow at their mere will and want...", which clearly refers to the wonder that the magicians Djadjaemankh and Dedi had performed in the Westcar story.

Since pAthen, pBerlin 3023 and The prophecy of Neferti use the same manner of speaking and quaint phrases, complete with numerous allusions to the wonders of Papyrus Westcar, Lepper and Lichtheim hold that Dedi, Ubaoner and Djadjaemankh must have been known to Egyptian authors for a long time.