“There’s blood everywhere Lo, the River is blood.” These more ancient words are not as direct. To be read out of the Ipuwer Papyrus, this haunting line has engendered scholarly dispute and religious interest for centuries, for it appears to mirror the biblical account of the Nile turning to blood at the first of the ten plagues of Egypt.
Housed in the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, the Ipuwer Papyrus officially Papyrus Leiden I 344 recto is a poetical complaint by scribe Ipuwer. It is a complaint about a world out of joint: famine sweeping through the fields, death on a grand scale constricting the rivers, trees stripped bare, and the social order turned upside down. Readers of Exodus will find it difficult to avoid noticing the parallels. Along with the river altered, the text reads “Lo, trees are felled, branches stripped” and “Lo, grain is lacking on all sides,” reminding one of the biblical locust plague and hail storm. Another, “Birds find neither fruits nor herbs,” touches upon the destruction of vegetation mentioned in Exodus 10:15.
The most terrifying sections of the manuscript envision a nation in sorrow: “Groaning is throughout the land, mingled with laments,” echoing Exodus 12:30, where “there was not a house where there was not one dead.” One especially vivid image “Lo, many dead are buried in the river, the stream is the grave, the tomb became a stream” replicates biblical descriptions of widespread death and burial among the plagues.
It has been the opinion of some historians, including Michael Lane, that the style of the book is similar to an eyewitness account, and most place its composition near the traditional biblical date of 1440 BCE. Official dating places the existing manuscript during Egypt’s Nineteenth Dynasty (c. 1295–1186 BCE), and most historians believe it to be a copy of an original composition written prior to that. The date of the original can be anywhere between 1550 and 1290 BCE, and this leaves lots to interpret but also lots to suspect.
That skepticism is where the controversy heats up. Critics, including Egyptologists operating in the scholarly sphere, caution that the Ipuwer Papyrus is poetic, fragmented, and never mentions Moses or the Israelites once. They note that Egyptian literature used laments routinely to describe the collapse of society, and that descriptions like “river is blood” are metaphorical accounts of the Nile’s reddish sediment from Upper Egypt during seasonal flooding, which could suffocate fish and contaminate the water. This was an acknowledged phenomenon, one not necessarily based on supernatural forces.
However, the theological undertones are exceptional. Let us quote the papyrus referring to the humiliation of Egypt’s gods Hapi (Nile), Heqet (frogs), and Ra (sun) in language that matches the biblical account of the plagues as judgments of God. It also refers to servants now being masters and the wealthy brought low, like Exodus 12:35–36, where the Israelites depart with Egyptian wealth.
The ancient Egyptian literary tradition embraced such laments as a way of finding meaning in mass trauma, uniting historical memory and theological explanation. Like other Egyptian and Mesopotamian literature, these texts have a habit of enumerating disasters in rolling columns, attributing calamity to the wrath of gods. This context renders any direct association with Exodus tenuous but clarifies how ancient civilizations recorded catastrophe.
Apart from the papyrus itself, other Egyptian sources like the Great Harris Papyrus and the Elephantine monument report foreign elements surging in Egypt, accompanied by extraneous elements from Syria or Canaan, who attacked Egyptian authority and religion before they were driven out. These reports, preserved on later dynastic monuments, are narrative equivalents of the Exodus narrative and to historian Manetho’s report of lepers under a priest named Osarseph, who later took on the name Moses. They represent either historical coincidences or literary borrowings, issues of debate among scholars.
To those with an interest in the connection between religion and archaeology, the Ipuwer Papyrus is a tantalizing mystery. It may be a poetic record of real events, a cultural memory reinterpreted in Egyptian terms, or simply an art-work of lament. One thing is definite, though: its words full of imagery of environmental disaster, social disintegration, and divine wrath remain at the intersection of scripture, history, and ancient literature in a manner that few other artifacts can.
