Could Translation of Ancient Egyptian Texts Change Everything We’ve Known about Africa?

It's not the bulk of Egyptian texts. It's an anthology, and far from the first of its kind - the Guardian are simply wrong about this. There have been at least 6 anthologies of Egyptian texts published in English in the last 50 years, aside from Wilkinson's book. They are:

- Ancient Egyptian Literature, by Miriam Lichtheim (3 volumes, published 1974, 1976, and 1980);
- Voices from Ancient Egypt: An Anthology of Middle Kingdom Writings, by Richard Parkinson (published 1990)
- Echoes of Egyptian Voices: Anthology of Ancient Egyptian Poetry by John L. Foster (published 1992);
- The Tale of Sinuhe and Other Ancient Egyptian Poems, 1940-1640 BC, by Richard Parkinson (published 1997);

- Ancient Egyptian Literature: An Anthology, by John L. Foster (published 2001);

- The Literature of Ancient Egypt, edited by W.K. Simpson (first published 1973; revised 2003).

So far as I am aware, all of these are still available on Amazon, and still in print. These aren't even the more "scholarly" volumes like Stephen Quirke's "Egyptian Literature 1800 BC: Questions and Readings" (published 2004), or James Allen's translation of the Pyramid Texts (2nd edition published 2015), or his Eight Literary Works of the Middle Kingdom (published 2014). So the idea that Wilkinson has done something revolutionary and new here is utter nonsense. Even these, though, weren't the first. Anthologies were published by James Henry Breasted in several volumes in the 1900s, and E.A. Wallis Budge in 1914.

It is simply untrue to say that "very little effort or interest has been invested into translating the ancient African (Egyptian) texts from the world’s oldest civilization into modern, everyday English."

It is also untrue that "[m]ost of the curiosity about ancient Egyptians seems to conveniently
ignore the intangibles like literature, which Wilkinson describes as “the life of the mind, as expressed in the written word.”"

It was the decipherment of hieroglyphs by Jean-Francois Champollion in 1822 (announced in his Lettre a M. Dacier) that created the modern academic subject of Egyptology, and the volume of lexicographical, grammatical, linguistic and literary produced since then has been truly enormous. A good place to start reading about Egyptian literature can be found in Richard Parkinson's 2002 book, "Poetry and Culture in Middle Kingdom Egypt: A Dark Side to Perfection", or the same author's 2009 volume "Reading Ancient Egyptian Poetry: Among Other Histories".

Volumes by Moers (1996), Loprieno (1996), Enmarch and Lepper (2013), Hagen (2013), to name but a tiny cross-section of recent works, discuss literature in the academic context, and the study of ancient Egyptian grammar and texts likely makes up the bulk of research into ancient Egypt done in Europe. Most of the content of academic journals like the Zeitschrift fur Agyptische Sprache, Lingua Aegyptia, Studien zur Altagyptischen Kulture, or Bulletin de l'Institut Francaise Afrique et Orientale is given over to discussion of Egyptian grammar.

The picture of Egyptology painted in this article simply does not reflect reality.