The research of Egyptologist and specialist in religious studies F. was a revised and developed version of his Ph.D. thesis. Dealing with this topic, F. pursued several goals at once. First, he introduces Ancient Egyptian tales into the studies of folklore and ethnography and, therewith, enriches the method of comparing fairy tale motifs with new material. Secondly, he argues with literary critics of his time, who, considering only the formal side of tales, did not consider at all the connection between tales and political ideology. Thirdly, as an Orientalist, who held the Marxist position, F. tried to make a social analysis of those tales and proposed a stage typology of plots associated with specific eras in the history of Ancient Egypt.

Like most researchers of that time, F. believed that the tales appeared much earlier than the time of their recording, and, therefore, one should begin their analysis not from the era of creation of their texts on papyri, but from the prehistory of the class society. Besides, he thought that the tales reflected the people's critical attitude toward the clergy and through them one can trace the general attitude of Egyptians to the status of the priesthood and its real possibilities. He used to analyze the tales of all eras of Egyptian history. However, their study was preceded by a theoretical part, in which the stage evolution of the Egyptian tales was explained through the works of K. Marx and Marxist ethnographers. The author took the stories about sorcerers the earliest ones and associated them with the clan society and primitive magic. With the beginning of the state, the exploitative elite of society arose, and the tales of sorcerers turned into tales of the high priests. The process of class differentiation goes further, and a division appears between the priesthood, associated with the old clan nobility, and ordinary people – nedges. It is the nedges, according to F., who brought the figure of the common folk sorcerer Dedi the Magician into the tales and lowered the entire genre to the level of entertaining stories. This is how the democratization of the tale takes place. Even later, the tales served as a form for new religious concepts, since the figure of Si-Osiris appears in it – a priest and a demigod, miraculously born, who came to earth after his reincarnation, and then miraculously ascended to heaven. This Si-Osiris tells about the fate of the rich and the poor in the next world, and thus his image opens the gallery of saints and miracle makers, being built in the Christian era of Egyptian history.

This research provides numerous parallels from Babylonian, Hebrew, Greek, and Coptic literature, as well as from records of ethnographers. In a number of cases, these parallels make it possible to determine quite accurately some motives of the Egyptian tales to the corresponding number in the index of ‘fairy tales motifs’ by Aarne. They also make it possible to establish links between the literatures of the ancient world.