Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor: What Did the Serpent Lose?

The oldest known fantasy story: a sailor stranded on an island meets a golden serpent whose family was burned up by a falling star.

The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor is a Middle Kingdom Egyptian story on a single papyrus. A sailor stranded on an island meets a giant golden serpent whose family was burned up by a falling star.

The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor survives on a single papyrus from Egypt's Middle Kingdom, known as Papyrus Leningrad (or Hermitage) 1115. The Russian Egyptologist Vladimir Golenishchev found it in the Hermitage collection in St. Petersburg and presented it in 1881. It is a story within a story: an attendant tries to cheer up his nervous master by telling of his own adventure.

On a voyage to the royal mines, a storm sinks his ship and kills all 120 sailors aboard except him. He washes up on an island full of figs, grapes, fish and birds. Then comes a noise like thunder, trees shake, and a giant serpent appears, thirty cubits long, with a beard of more than two cubits, its body overlaid with gold and its brows of real lapis lazuli.

The serpent, lord of the land of Punt, is kind. It tells him its own sorrow: it once lived on the island with its kin, seventy-five serpents in all, until a star fell and they were all burned up in flames. The serpent alone survived. It predicts the sailor's rescue, loads him with gifts, and tells him he will never see the island again, for it will become water.

Scholars see the tale as a carefully crafted literary work about loss, endurance and consolation. Its scribe signed the end of the papyrus, one of the oldest signatures of its kind. For readers of catastrophe and visitor stories, it is a vivid ancient image: the last survivor of a species destroyed by a star, on an island that vanishes into the sea.