The manuscript was written in hieratic, a cursive Egyptian script, on papyrus made from the papyrus plant. It was not a roll of linen-fibre paper. Berlin's catalogue assigns the surviving object to the Seventeenth Dynasty, within the Second Intermediate Period, and records its archaeological provenance as unknown. The name Westcar comes from the English traveller Henry Westcar, with whom its nineteenth-century ownership is associated; it later belonged to Richard Lepsius before entering the Berlin collection. Adolf Erman's publication in 1890 helped establish its place in modern scholarship. The date of the surviving copy is not automatically the date when every tale was composed, and proposed earlier stages of the collection remain matters of literary and linguistic interpretation.

The surviving cycle opens incompletely. Only the end of the first story remains, connecting it with the age of Djoser; the lost material should not be supplied as though its magician and plot were fully preserved. The next tale is told by Prince Khafre and is set under King Nebka. Its magician is the chief lector-priest Webaoner, whose wife has taken a lover. After learning what has happened, Webaoner makes a small crocodile from wax and gives it to a servant. When the model is thrown into the water, it becomes a living crocodile and seizes the man. The priest later demonstrates his control over it before the king, who authorises the punishment. It is a story about magic, authority and retribution, not an episode from Sneferu's reign.

The boating story belongs to Sneferu. A prince recounts how the king is entertained by women rowing on a palace lake until one of them loses an ornament in the water. The interruption matters because the woman wants her own possession back, not merely a replacement. The magician Djadjaemankh supplies the solution: he folds back one part of the lake's water over another, retrieves the ornament and restores the water to its place. The outing can then continue. The scene combines a royal setting with an ordinary attachment to something lost, turning a small mishap into a demonstration of extraordinary knowledge. The recovery of the ornament gives the magician a task that the king's wealth alone has been unable to settle.

Prince Djedefhor changes the direction of the gathering by pointing out that tales of former times cannot be tested before the listeners. He knows a living man called Djedi, an aged sage credited with a remarkable appetite, the power to restore severed heads and the ability to make a lion follow him. The prince brings him to court, where Khufu asks for a demonstration and proposes using a prisoner. Djedi refuses to perform the test on a human being. The king permits animals to be used instead, and the magician restores birds and a bull. The episode contrasts the king's demand for a spectacle with the magician's refusal of one particular command. It is a meaningful moment within the story without needing to be declared the only moral challenge ever made to an Egyptian ruler.

Khufu then asks Djedi about hidden knowledge associated with Thoth. Translations differ over the precise sense of the sanctuary's secrets, so the episode should not be treated as a reliable description of an actual archive or architectural plan. Djedi says that he knows where the required information is kept, but that another person is destined to bring it. That person will be one of three children of Reddjedet, a priest's wife, whose true divine father is Ra. They will become kings. Khufu is troubled, and Djedi reassures him that his own son and grandson will reign before the new line. The prophecy concerns succession across generations, not an immediate replacement of Khufu by newborn rivals.

The narrative leaves the court and follows the birth. Isis, Nephthys, Meskhenet and Heket arrive with Khnum in the guise of travelling performers, and the divine visitors help deliver the three children. Their names and predicted futures connect them with Userkaf, Sahure and Neferirkare, the first rulers of the Fifth Dynasty. The tale makes them brothers born together through divine intervention; that literary relationship should not be imported into a historical royal family tree. The gods also prepare signs of the children's future royalty, concealing crowns in a quantity of barley. When sounds of celebration emerge from it, an ordinary household object becomes a hiding place for kingship. The story has moved from wonders performed for a ruler to a wonder explaining how future rulers came into the world.

The surviving text does not end at the birth. It continues with events in Reddjedet's household, including a quarrel with a servant who threatens to tell Khufu about the children. A crocodile takes the servant, and her brother later reports what has happened. The damaged ending leaves the full conclusion uncertain. Nor does the manuscript establish that the children's birthday became an annual historical festival. The collection can be read as a literary treatment of divine kingship and dynastic legitimacy, but that interpretation does not prove that it was commissioned by the Fifth Dynasty itself. Its humour, dangers and reversals also reward reading as stories. The surviving roll preserves both imagined royal power and the fascination of people who could do what kings themselves could not.