Ancient History Magazine

INTRODUCTION TO PAPYRI: A STUDY IN SIX EXAMPLES

1 Egyptian mythology

Our first example comes from the Egyptian town of Hermopolis and contains the myth of the battle between the gods Horus and Seth, a story we know primarily thanks to papyri.

This fragment is not written in hieroglyphs. That script was designed for inscriptions carved in stone, but the Egyptians also wrote with ink on papyrus and simplified their picture script. Egyptologists call the simplified types

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