Before the Church · copied c. 1250 BC; composed c. 1850–1600 BC
The Admonitions of Ipuwer
Anonymous
What it is
A sage describes Egypt turned upside down: the river is blood and men drink of it, plague is throughout the land, the poor now own what the rich had, gold hangs on the necks of slave girls, and there is groaning throughout the land mingled with lamentations.
Why it lasted
Popularly cited as an Egyptian record of the plagues of Exodus, which the dating does not support and no Egyptologist accepts. It is catalogued here as the most persistent of the claimed parallels, and as a genuine window on Egyptian ideas of social collapse.
Scripture it works from
Where to read it
Public domain and free to read in full, though not held here. The archives below have it.
These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.
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