Ancient Egyptian Stories of Book Transmission and Discovery and the Origins of Pseudo-Documentarism in Antiquity

This presentation explores how and to what end stories about the transmission and discoveries of books were employed in narrative and non-narrative literature from Ancient Egypt. Such “pseudo-documentary” tropes were a prevalent narrative strategy in the later literature of the Early Imperial Period and Late Antiquity, used in Greco-Roman novels, Christian apocrypha and hagiography, and Hermetic texts alike. It has often been claimed that antique pseudo-documentarism has its origins in Ancient Egypt – the country to which both classical and modern authors like to attribute all things magical, fantastical, and (above all) dubious. The presentation reassesses this long-held claim, asking whether it reflects historical reality or merely perpetuates an old Orientalist stereotype.