Before the Church · c. 1200 BC
The Instruction of Amenemope
Amenemope son of Kanakht
What it is
Thirty chapters of counsel for an official: do not move the boundary stone, do not lean on the scales or falsify the weights, do not befriend the hot-tempered man, and do not strain to seek excess — for wealth makes itself wings like geese and flies away.
Why it lasted
Proverbs 22:17 to 24:22 follows it closely, in places phrase for phrase, and Proverbs 22:20 refers to thirty sayings. The 1923 publication of this text explained a verse nobody had been able to translate for two thousand years.
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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