Tonight I saw the following lovely quote pop up in someone's email sig:

Be a scribe! Your body will be sleek, your hand will be soft. You are one who sits grandly in your house; your servants answer speedily; beer is poured copiously; all who see you rejoice in good cheer. Happy is the heart of him who writes; he is young each day.

This was attributed to "Ptahhotep, Vizier to Isesi, Fifth Egyptian Dynasty, 2300 BC". Curious about the source, I dug out my copy of Miriam Lichtheim's excellent [link|http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0520028996/qid=1110001355/sr=8-1/ref=pd_ka_1/104-3938964-7440711?v=glance&s=books&n=507846|compendium of Egyptian literature] and started hunting. I found "The Instruction of Ptahhotep", a set of maxims and moral principles the Vizier wrote out for his son, but nothing resembling the above passage shows up in the text; further, Ptahhotep appears to have been a Sixth, not Fifth Dynasty figure.

The only other bit of Egyptian literature I could think of to check against was the "Satire of the Trades", which is also addressed from a father to a son and is meant to encourage the son to become a scribe, but it doesn't contain anything like the above passage either.

Checking Google turns up an awful lot of people attributing this quote to Ptahhotep, but nearly every one of them gives a different date for him and none of the lists the text from which the quote comes.

Does anybody here know the original source of the quote, or have any ideas on where else to turn to find it?