The papyrus reproduced below in plates i-vi, for which the abbreviation On. Ram. will henceforth be used, emanates from a great find made by Quibell some fifty years ago in a tomb of the late Middle Kingdom discovered by him under one of the storerooms at the back of the Ramesseum of Thebes. The only manuscripts thus far published out of this extensive, but extremely fragile and illpreserved, collection are that containing the early portions of the story of Sinuhe and the Eloquent Peasant and that to which Prof. Kurt Sethe, who edited it, gave the name of the Dramatic Papyrus; also an edition by the late P. C. Smither of some interesting copies of dispatches from officials stationed at Semnah and elsewhere will have appeared by the time this book goes to press. The exact date to which the tomb should be assigned—it may have been that of a doctor or magician—is not quite certain, but may be roughly described as Dyns. XIII-XIV.

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The title, if ever there was one, is lost. We may conjecture it would have conveyed much the same sense as the Introduction to the Onomasticon of Amenope (see below, Chapter II), though possibly in more concise and less bombastic language. After the title the word-lists will have begun. A separate line was devoted to every word, and the determinatives are divided by an interval from the preceding phonetic spelling, so that the species of things referred to can be rapidly and easily recognized by the reader, or rather would have been so recognized had the determinatives been less ambiguous than they usually are. In two sections (before 11 . 171-82 and before 11 . 217 ff.) short vertical lines give the classificatory headings.

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The lists are followed by an enumeration of twenty different types of cattle, the lines unnumbered, but a total being added at the end, and on the verso, as already stated, there are some very obscure accounts in a different and more cursive handwriting.