Look, I need to have a word with whoever categorized this as "Kids & Family." Because I downloaded this thinking it would be a fun bedtime story situation for Emma and Lucas - ancient Egyptian tales! Magic! Adventure! - and instead I got a story where a guy's wife cheats on him so he makes a magic crocodile that drags her lover to the bottom of a lake for seven days. Emma looked at me like, "Mom, what?" And I looked at her like, "Honestly, sweetie, I don't know either."
So that bedtime experiment lasted exactly one story before I reclaimed this for solo listening.
Ancient Gossip Column Written on Reed Paper
Here's the thing about these tales - they're genuinely fascinating as a peek into what entertained people four thousand years ago. And the answer is: basically the same stuff that entertains us now. Cheating spouses, power-hungry magicians, kings who are bored and demand their courtiers amuse them. There's a pharaoh (Khufu, the pyramid guy) who literally sits around asking people to tell him cool stories about magic. That's it. That's the framing device. A king demanding content. He's basically scrolling ancient TikTok. The storytelling-within-a-story structure reminded me of Echo in the Bone, where characters are also constantly pulling each other aside to recount things that happened — though Diana Gabaldon's papyrus is decidedly less crumbled.
The stories themselves are short and strange and sometimes just... stop. Like, mid-narrative. Because these are translated from papyri that are thousands of years old and sometimes the papyrus is just gone. Torn. Missing. So you'll be following along and then Timothy Ferguson will calmly note that the text breaks off here. Which honestly mirrors my listening experience perfectly since Sophie woke up from her nap screaming about her sock and I lost track of which magician was parting which body of water.
At under two hours total, this is barely longer than a podcast episode. I knocked it out across two school drop-offs and still had time to sit in the Starbucks drive-through.
Timothy Ferguson Does His Best With Some Truly Wild Material
Ferguson has a calm, clear reading voice - the kind of narrator who sounds like a BBC documentary about pottery. Which actually works for this material? These aren't dramatic retellings, they're academic translations. Petrie was an archaeologist, not a novelist, and the prose reads like what it is: careful, literal translation from hieratic script. Ferguson doesn't try to make it something it's not. No dramatic voices, no Egyptian accents (thank goodness), just steady, measured narration that lets the weirdness of the stories speak for itself.
And the stories ARE weird. There's a wax crocodile that becomes real. A magician who folds a lake in half to retrieve a turquoise pendant. A sailor shipwrecked on an island with a giant talking serpent covered in gold who gives him gifts and then the island sinks into the sea. These are fairy tales from a civilization that thought cats were gods, and honestly that energy comes through.
The downside is that Ferguson's evenness means everything kind of blurs together at the same emotional register. The crocodile eating a guy and the king nodding politely get the same delivery. At 1.25x speed this was fine - actually pretty perfect for keeping my attention without demanding too much from me.
Who This Is Actually For (Hint: Not Bedtime)
If you're a mythology nerd, a history buff, or someone who just wants something genuinely different from your usual audiobook rotation, this is a fun little palate cleanser. It's free (LibriVox recording), it's short, and it's legitimately interesting as a window into ancient storytelling.
But if you're looking for polished, complete narratives with character arcs and satisfying endings - no. Some of these stories literally have no ending because the papyrus crumbled to dust in a museum somewhere. Which is kind of poetic but also kind of annoying when you were actually invested in what happened to the shipwrecked sailor.
Not for little kids despite the category tag. Unless you want to explain adultery and magical vengeance to a five-year-old, in which case, go for it, I'm not your mom. (Actually, if Lucas asks me one more question about why the crocodile ate that man, I might lose it.)
Filed Under: Interesting Snack, Not a Meal
I don't regret the two hours. It's the kind of thing I'd mention at a dinner party if I ever went to dinner parties anymore. "Did you know ancient Egyptians told stories about magicians folding lakes?" Very fun cocktail party energy. The translation is stiff and academic, the stories are incomplete, and the narration is competent but not electric. But for a free, under-two-hour listen that made me feel like I learned something while waiting in the pickup line? I've spent my time worse. Like that time I spent three hours cleaning dried Play-Doh out of the heating vent.
Each tale is short enough that an interrupted listen never costs you the thread - you just resume at the start of the next story. Four thousand years of keeping listeners entertained is a decent track record, even if none of it will change your life. Sometimes you need a magic crocodile.
