Anyone looking for a fairly complete collection of Ancient Egyptian writing in translation—not every single thing, mind you, but practically everything someone

Anyone looking for a fairly complete collection of Ancient Egyptian writing in translation—not every single thing, mind you, but practically everything someone who's not doing a deep-dive on some specific aspect and time of and in Ancient Egyptian history could want, and then some—might be interested in Miriam Lichtheim's work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miriam_Lichtheim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miriam_Lichtheim I've got, and have read, the three-volume edition of Ancient Egyptian Literature. Almost everything before the Greeks, as far as Western and near-East literature, reads alien as hell and is pretty hard to get a grasp on, largely (I think) because so much of it exists absent context, with the remarkable and towering exception of Gilgamesh, which is truly amazing. I've tried Sumerian and Akkadian collections in translation, and bounced the fuck off after putting in substantial effort. Got zero out of it. It's all fragments of poems to gods that you have to go read a bunch of modern writing to figure out (where'd they get their info? It's not in the surviving literature, I have no idea). You need several times as much commentary as original text, to make sense of it. Ancient Egyptian literature is the only of that set (Gilgamesh aside—everyone should read Gilgamesh) that I'd tentatively recommend to a general reader as the easiest to get into, though the entirety of Lichtheim's collection might be a bit much. Of interest are examples of the various genres of Ancient Egyptian literature—"mirrors for princes" instructional texts; scribal copy-practice instructional texts (why not impart some wisdom and/or entertainment with copy practice?); formulaic but evolving funerary inscriptions (they routinely threaten their gods, it's wild); monumental "historical" inscriptions (propaganda, LOL); and the handful of fictional tales, which tend to be entertaining enough but are in multiple cases frustratingly incomplete (talk about cliffhangers! You'll never get the ending, probably). It's a rough read, not exactly relaxing cotton-candy airport-novel reading, but far more tractable than the surviving fragments of the Fertile Crescent ancients (except Gilgamesh! Read that!) Actually, there's another category of literature from that region, the written form of which isn't so old as those, but that has oral lineage with roots back into that era: the biblical "Old Testament", or Jewish scripture. It comes off rather well by comparison to the rest, though benefits from very-late composition and editing (contemporary with the Greeks, who read just fine to moderns) compared to the others. That's a fun one, too.