The earliest historic period--from the Ist Dynasty to the IIId, about
B.C. 4500--has left no inscriptions of any extent. Some portions of the
'Book of the Dead' profess to date from these or earlier times, and
probably much of the religious literature is of extremely ancient
origin. The first book of *'Proverbs' in the Prisse Papyrus is
attributed by its writer to the end of the IIId Dynasty (about 4000
B.C.). From the IVth Dynasty to the end of the VIth, the number of the
inscriptions increases; tablets set up to the kings of the IVth Dynasty
in memory of warlike raids are found in the peninsula of Sinai, and
funerary inscriptions abound. The pyramids raised at the end of the Vth
and during the VIth Dynasty are found to contain interminable religious
inscriptions, forming almost complete rituals for the deceased kings.
Professor Maspero, who has published these texts, states that they
"contain much verbiage, many pious platitudes, many obscure allusions to
the affairs of the other world, and amongst all this rubbish some
passages full of movement and wild energy, in which poetical inspiration
and religious emotion are still discernible through the veil of
mythological expressions." Of the funerary and biographical inscriptions
the most remarkable is that of *Una. Another, slightly later but hardly
less important, is on the facade of the tomb of Herkhuf, at Aswan, and
recounts the expeditions into Ethiopia and the southern oases which this
resourceful man carried through successfully. In Herkhuf's later life he
delighted a boy King of Egypt by bringing back for him from one of his
raids a grotesque dwarf dancer of exceptional skill: the young Pharaoh
sent him a long letter on the subject, which was copied in full on the
tomb as an addition to the other records there. It is to the Vth Dynasty
also that the second collection of *'Proverbs' in the Prisse Papyrus is
dated. The VIIth and VIIIth Dynasties have left us practically no
records of any kind.