important for a study of Proverbs is the extensive number of Egyptian instructions that we have. Indeed, we have about forty of these texts stretching over an extremely long time period of Egyptian history beginning with the old kingdom, a little bit later than those Sumerian proverbs beginning around the twenty-eighth century BC. But this is the time period of the building of the pyramids all the way down to the so-called Ptolemaic period, which is getting down toward the time of Christ. We have