There were times when a person was so outraged at the stupidity of another that he could not prevent himself from writing a hostile, abusive, or sarcastic letter At least two such letters exist One of them appears to have been a real letter written by a senior bureaucrat to an inept subordinate, a man who had bningled his duties in organizing shipping for an Egyptian temple The other is a purely literary composition, written in the form of a letter Here one scribe lambastes a colleague for his pretensions to the special knowledge required of an Egyptian envoy and attempts to show that his colleague could never survive one day outside of Egypt on a real diplomatic mission The letter is extremely sarcastic and employs all sorts of rare words and expressions, many based on Semitic languages that an Egyptian...