Book excerpt: Voices from Ancient Egypt is an anthology presenting translations of sixty documents from a golden age of ancient Egyptian culture (c. 2081 - 1600 BC). The documents illustrate all aspects of life and the place of literacy in an early civilisation. The 'voices' range from the high formal literature of religious rituals and royal monuments to the hurried requests of the bureaucrats and the jokes of harrassed workmen. They tell a tale not only of the intellectual beliefs of the elite, but of family feuds, love and murder, as well as the pastoral dreams of a society trying to attain its vision of absolute order in a chaotic universe. This volume is a reissue of the valuable introduction to ancient Egyptian literature, first published in 1991.