The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor is the earliest known surviving story of a shipwrecked sailor, and as such is the forerunner of many stories of nautical adventure encountering strange magical creatures, from Homer’s Odyssey to Sinbad the Sailor. In a broader sense, it is generally considered the oldest piece of Egyptian fiction to survive to the present. Only one copy has been found to date, a single papyrus manuscript which resides as the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, and is designated p Hermitage 1115. The exact origin of the papyrus was not properly documented at the time, which was common of early Egyptologists, however, it was most likely recovered in Vladimir Golenishchev’s 1884-85 expedition to the Wadi Hammamat, which was the major trade route between the Nile in southern Egypt and the port of El Qoseir on the Red Sea.
The papyrus does appear to be complete, however, the story is not. It begins abruptly, and ends abruptly, and suggests that it was excised from an older text. The story begins as a ship’s captain is returning home from Nubia, on a failed mission of some kind, and then segues to the narrator telling the disinterested captain of a time when was shipwrecked on an island near Punt. It ends as abruptly as it begins, but the scribe confirms that this is the end of the story. Based on the content, it appears that the point of the papyrus was to copy the section of text dealing with the island and the ‘Lord of Punt, ‘ which was copied from a longer text in which the captain returned from his failed mission in Nubia, and told the king a story his crewman had told him to make up for the fact that he had nothing to report, but also downplayed the fantastic story by making it clear that it was his boring crewman’s story, and not his.
The reason for the extraction of the story, was probably because at the time, in the early Middle Kingdom era, the Egyptians were re-exploring their world, and trying to find the lands their ancestors had been trading with. This short work of probable fiction was, nevertheless, about the fabled land of Punt, which the Middle Kingdom reopened trade with in the 11th dynasty. Under the 11th dynasty’s Mentuhotep III, an officer named Hannu reopened trade with Punt, however, it is unknown if he personally sailed there or simply organized the expedition. The most probable time for Imenyas pen-Imeny to have excised the story was before that first mission of Hannu, when the Egyptians were scouring their records for information on Punt. The fact that it was abandoned in the Wadi Hammamat, the route taken from the capital at Thebes to the Red Sea port of El Qoseir, seems to be a pretty strong indicator that the navigator did not see any value in the text, and did not even bother carrying it all the way to the harbor.