Parkinson describes how the four papyri containing “The Tale of Sinuhe,” “The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant,” and “Dialogue of a Man and His Soul” were preserved for millennia in the tomb of a high-ranking official buried sometime around 1800 BCE. Egyptian hieroglyphics were not translated by Western scholars until the 1820s CE. The literary tradition of fiction writing, which seems to develop in the early Middle Kingdom period, exists alongside a larger tradition of mainly religious literature. Parkinson speculates that the tone of lament that pervades the fiction marks its roots in the genre of funeral elegies.

The textual tradition represented in this volume is situated within the historical context of their time. In particular, audiences of the Middle Kingdom, whose kings ruled the once-separate kingdoms of Lower and Upper Egypt, were wary of previous civil unrest, the developing bureaucracy of the government, and the continual threat of invasion from without. The surviving written literature existed in relationship with a thriving tradition of oral literature, and Parkinson suggests that, given their monologue structure and tone of instruction, the included works were designed to be read to an

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