Ipuwer

Ipuwer is known only from one text, the Admonitions of Ipuwer, preserved on Papyrus Leiden I 344 in the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden. The surviving copy was made around 1250 BCE, but the text was composed earlier, no earlier than the late Twelfth Dynasty. Alan Gardiner published the standard edition in 1909.

Ipuwer addresses the 'Lord of All' and describes a land in chaos: the poor become rich, servants rise up, royal tombs are robbed, and 'the river is blood'. Because of such lines, some popular writers since the 1950s have read the papyrus as an Egyptian account of the Exodus plagues.

Mainstream Egyptologists reject that reading. They place the text in the genre of Middle Kingdom lamentation literature, which uses the image of an inverted world, and date it well before any likely date for the Exodus. Whether Ipuwer was a real person or a literary character is unknown.