As someone who has a decent grasp of Middle Egyptian hieroglyphs, I think your enthusiasm for these texts would be destroyed by reading them. I know from experience that the quickest way to bore someone I'm guiding through an Egyptian exhibit is to start reading and translating inscriptions. The context for much of what is written is more impenetrable than the language itself. You pick up a lot of that context by necessity in learning the language but it doesn't come through in translation.

So all those headless guys with their arms tied to the back all around the caskets are some kind of boring groceries list?

Powerful rulers subdue their enemies. It's a common formula seen over and over in various royal tombs and elsewhere. Sometimes, like in the case of the Libyans in some periods, the enemies the king claims domination over haven't been seen or heard from in generations. These kinds of inscriptions can tell us interesting things about foreign relations sometimes, but it's not the type of thing that's easy to extract.

As karatestomp states, there are far more interesting texts out there. The Story of Sinuhe says more about the milieu it was written in than most monumental or funerary inscriptions. It also happens to be one of the world's earliest surviving literary masterpieces. The Story of Wenamun argues against the common notion that the ancient Egyptians didn't have a sense of humor.

If you're still reading, thank you for the detailed explanation and references. I hadn't heard of Wenamun. Sinuhe rings a bell, maybe a novel? I have some digging to do :)

> I really wish I could read what these means in English.

You can buy them on Amazon. Search for "pyramid texts", "book of the dead", etc.

Lichtheim edited a 3-volume "Ancient Egyptian Literature" which contains a lot of funerary inscriptions. I'd second wl's post above: if you don't have tolerance for really dull writing, avoid.

Almost all of that "genre" is of the "seen one, seem them all" variety. Most of it's very formulaic—think nicene creed or traditional church hymns, but less interesting. There were a bunch of standard texts that were reproduced on many tombs, and as time went on this body of necessary texts grew, so that's very likely what a lot of this is. Sometimes you'd get some passages of history but those are usually about as dry as the tombs themselves. More often those are on monuments, not buried in tombs, anyway.

"Mirrors for princes" (instruction texts for rulers, often both moral and practical in nature), scribal training texts (yes, really), and their few actual stories that survive, are all way more interesting than the stuff inscribed in tombs, in general. A lot of those don't survive in hieroglyphs, though, but in hieratic or demotic script.

The Greek graffiti are legitimately more interesting then the hieroglyphs.