Welcome to the fourteenth episode of A History of Literary Criticism. Today’s episode discusses The Maxims of Ptahhotep. The structure of today’s episode is a little different, because the text is quite short and this is the only text to be included, so far, from Ancient Egypt. So first I’ll discuss the social context and then the wisdom literature genre of which The Maxims of Ptahhotep is an example; then I’ll summarize the text and its relationship with Abrams’ triangle.
