Lichtheim, Miriam (2006), Ancient Egyptian Literature: Volume II: The New Kingdom, with a new foreword by Hans-W. A stone slab with 3,000-year-old writing, the Cascajal Block, was discovered in the Mexican state of Veracruz, and is an example of the oldest script in the Western Hemisphere, preceding the oldest Zapotec writing dated to about 500 BCE.

At the top tier, set furthest back into the rock formation, there are statues placed in front of columns. Old Kingdom texts served mainly to maintain the divine cults, preserve souls in the afterlife, and document accounts for practical uses in daily life.The adoption of Greco-Roman writing tools influenced Egyptian handwriting, as hieratic signs became more spaced, had rounder flourishes, and greater angular precision. Nevertheless, scholars speculate that ancient Egyptian literature, perhaps in oral form, influenced Greek and Arabic literature. The Geʽez script of Ethiopia and Eritrea is an evolution of the Ancient South Arabian script, in which early Geʽez texts were originally written. In the 1st millennium BC Demotic short story cycle centered on the deeds of Petiese, the stories begin with the phrase "The voice which is before Pharaoh", which indicates that an oral speaker and audience was involved in the reading of the text.

Most ancient Egyptian verses were written in couplet form, but sometimes triplets and quatrains were used. In funerary texts beginning in and following the Twelfth Dynasty, the Egyptians believed that disfiguring, and even omitting certain hieroglyphs, brought consequences, either good or bad, for a deceased tomb occupant whose spirit relied on the texts as a source of nourishment in the afterlife. For example, in the mythology that developed around unification, Narmer was portrayed as Horus, a god of Lower Egypt, where Narmer originally ruled. Each hieroglyphic word represented both a specific object and embodied the essence of that object, recognizing it as divinely made and belonging within the greater cosmos.proper greetings with wishes for this life and the next, the rhetoric composition, interpretation of aphorisms in wisdom literature, application of mathematics to engineering problems and the calculation of supplies for an army, and the geography of western Asia". Because the messenger's mouth was heavy and he couldn't repeat (the message), the Lord of Kulaba patted some clay and put words on it, like a tablet. Anatolian hieroglyphs are an indigenous hieroglyphic script native to western Anatolia, used to record the Hieroglyphic Luwian language. Letters of royal or official correspondence, originally written in hieratic, were sometimes given the exalted status of being inscribed on stone in hieroglyphs. Ancient Egyptian literature was written in the Egyptian language from ancient Egypt's pharaonic period until the end of Roman domination.