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The Teaching for Merikare: a king's advice to his son

3 November 2026

The Teaching for Merikare is an Egyptian text in which an old king tells his son, the future king Merikare, how to rule. He tells him to speak well, to do Maat (what is right), to keep the frontiers safe and to honour the gods. He also confesses a crime of his own reign.

Merikare ruled the north of Egypt from Herakleopolis in the 10th Dynasty, around 2075 to 2040 BC, during the First Intermediate Period, when rival kings in Thebes held the south. The teaching is the oldest surviving example of a royal testament, a king's last advice on kingship.

A father hands his son the rules of kingship

Egyptians called a text of this kind a sebayt, a teaching or instruction. Most teachings put wise words in the mouth of an official or a father speaking to his son. The Teaching for Merikare is unusual because the father is a king. The opening line, damaged in the papyrus, calls him the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Khety.

Several kings of Herakleopolis took the name Khety, and which one is meant is still debated. Some Egyptologists name Wahkare Khety, the king listed before Merikare on the site's 10th Dynasty page. Scholars also disagree about when the teaching was written. It may come from Merikare's own time, or from a writer of the Middle Kingdom who set it in an older age.

See the kings of the 10th Dynasty

Speech was the king's strongest weapon

The best-known lines are about speaking. In the transliteration of the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae the advice begins ḥmww m mdw.t nḫt.k, “be skilled in speech, so that you may be strong”. Miriam Lichtheim translated the start as “Be a craftsman in speech”.

Two more lines follow. Lichtheim gave the first as “The tongue is [a king’s] sword”. The Egyptian word there is ḫpš (khepesh), the strong arm, which also names the curved sword, so the line can be read as “the strong arm of a king is his tongue”. Then comes qn mdw.t r ꜥḥꜣ nb, “speech is stronger than any fighting”. For a king at war with Thebes, the father counts a good speaker as the better ruler.

Six words tell the king to do Maat

One short command sums up the advice to rule justly: jrj mꜣꜥ.t wꜣḥ.k tp tꜣ, said roughly “iri maat wahek tep ta”, “do Maat, so that you endure on earth”. The papyri are written in hieratic, a quick hand of the scribes, but each hieratic sign has a hieroglyph behind it.

In a usual hieroglyphic spelling the eye D4 writes jr, “do”. Maat is written with the platform Aa11 for mꜣꜥ, the bread loaf X1 for its ending t, and the feather H6, the sign of the goddess Maat herself. The fibre swab V29 writes wꜣḥ, “endure”, and the basket V31 is k, “you”. The head D1 writes tp, “upon”, and the strip of land with grains N16 writes tꜣ, “earth”.

Around that line the father spells out what justice means in practice: comfort the one who weeps, do not oppress the widow, do not drive a man from his father’s land. He adds a rule for builders. Never build your tomb by pulling down what others built. In the TLA translation he also says to equip your place in the necropolis “by uprightness and by doing Maat”.

Eye Platform Bread loaf Feather Fibre swab Basket with handle Head Land with grains

Draw the feather of Maat

The old king confesses a crime at Thinis

The teaching remembers the civil war with Thebes. The father says he took This (Thinis), near Abydos, and then admits that something terrible happened there. In the TLA wording the line m.k sp ẖsj ḫpr m-hꜣw.j says “see, a shameful deed happened in my time”: the districts of This were laid waste.

He takes the blame. It happened as a result of what he did, he says, though he learned of it only afterwards, and his distress is the price of his own deeds. Earlier he admits that tombs were hacked up and that the same was done to him. The Thinis region held Abydos, the holy burial ground of Osiris, so the damage struck sacred ground.

The lesson is about the judges of the dead. They are never mild on the day of judgment, the father warns, and they see a whole lifetime as one hour.

The Asiatic is a crocodile on his bank

The father also guards the north-east, where the Delta meets the Sinai. The Egyptians called the people of Sinai and the Levant ꜥꜣmw, usually translated as Asiatics. The teaching calls the Asiatic wretched because of the land he lives in, short of water and poor in wood.

The father says he had Lower Egypt strike them until the Asiatics came to loathe Egypt. Then comes a picture every Egyptian knew from the Nile: ꜥꜣm pw msḥ ḥr mryt.f, “the Asiatic is a crocodile on his bank”. A crocodile is dangerous at its own bank, so the son is told to build strongholds in the Delta to hold the border.

People are the cattle of the god

Near its end the teaching turns into a hymn to the creator, who is never named. It opens ḥn rmṯ ꜥw.t nt nṯr, in Lichtheim’s words “Well tended is mankind, god’s cattle”. For their sake the god made sky and earth and drove back the greed of the waters. He made the breath of life for their noses.

The picture is of a herdsman who looks after his herd. The god made plants, cattle, birds and fish to feed people. He made rulers for them too, to be a support at the back of the weak. The king is one more servant of that order and answers to the god for how he treats people.

Three papyri copied centuries later survive

No copy from Merikare’s own time survives. The teaching is known from three papyri copied in the late 18th Dynasty, centuries after he died: Papyrus Hermitage 1116A in St Petersburg, Papyrus Moscow 4658 in the Pushkin Museum, and Papyrus Carlsberg 6 in Copenhagen. The St Petersburg papyrus is the most complete and also has the most copying mistakes. The three only partly fill each other’s gaps.

Merikare himself left little else. His throne name, mry-kꜣ-rꜥ, “Beloved of the ka of Ra”, is written with the sun N5, the hoe U7 and the raised arms D28. It is on a wooden scribe’s palette now in the Louvre and in the tomb of Khety II, a governor at Asyut. His pyramid at Saqqara is named on stelae of its priests but has not been found.

Sun Hoe Raised arms

See Merikare's cartouche

Questions

Who wrote the Teaching for Merikare?

The text presents itself as the words of a king called Khety to his son Merikare. Which Khety is meant is debated, and some scholars think a writer of the Middle Kingdom composed it later in the voice of the old king.

What is the main message of the Teaching for Merikare?

A king should rule by justice and good speech, keep the borders safe and honour the gods, because the gods judge every ruler after death.

Where can I read the Teaching for Merikare in English?

Miriam Lichtheim’s Ancient Egyptian Literature, volume 1, and R. B. Parkinson’s The Tale of Sinuhe and Other Ancient Egyptian Poems both translate it. The Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae gives its transliteration line by line with a German translation.

Is the Teaching for Merikare written in hieroglyphs?

The surviving papyri are written in hieratic, the joined-up hand scribes used on papyrus. Egyptologists transcribe each hieratic sign into its hieroglyph to study the text.

Glossary

dynasty: A line of kings counted together, usually one family. Egyptologists number Egypt's kings in about 30 dynasties, following the priest Manetho.
First Intermediate Period: The years after the Old Kingdom, about 2160 to 2055 BC, when Egypt split between rival kings in Herakleopolis in the north and Thebes in the south.
hieratic: A quick, rounded script made from hieroglyphs and written with a reed brush on papyrus. Scribes used it for letters, accounts and stories.
hieroglyphs: The picture signs of ancient Egyptian writing, used from about 3200 BC to AD 394. A sign can stand for sounds, for a whole word, or for the kind of thing a word means.
Lower Egypt: The north of Egypt, the flat Nile Delta from around Memphis to the sea. It is called lower because it is downstream.
Maat: Truth, justice and the right order of the world, shown as a goddess with an ostrich feather on her head. Kings claimed to uphold it.
Middle Kingdom: The age when Egypt was united again, about 2055 to 1650 BC. Its texts became the classic form of the language that later scribes copied.
papyrus: A writing sheet made from strips of the papyrus reed laid in two crossing layers and pressed. Sheets were glued into long rolls.
scribe: A person trained to read and write, who kept accounts, wrote letters and copied texts. Few Egyptians could write, and scribes were well respected.
throne name: The name a king took when he came to the throne, written in the first cartouche after the title "King of Upper and Lower Egypt". Egyptologists also call it the prenomen.
tomb: A burial place: a pit, a mastaba, a pyramid or rooms cut into rock. Its chapel was where the family brought offerings.
transliteration: Writing Egyptian in Latin letters, one letter for each sound sign, such as ꜥnḫ for ankh. Egyptologists say the words with an e between consonants.