Before the Church · c. 2400 BC
The Instruction of Ptahhotep
Attributed to Ptahhotep
What it is
An ageing vizier asks permission to train a successor and sets down thirty-seven maxims: do not be proud of your knowledge, take counsel with the ignorant as with the wise, good speech is more hidden than malachite yet found among servant girls at the grindstones.
Why it lasted
The oldest book of instruction in the world, and the head of the genre Proverbs belongs to. Its form — a father addressing my son, maxim by maxim — is the form Hebrew wisdom would still be using seventeen hundred years later.
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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