The tomb biography (Lichtheim 1988; Gnirs 1996), recounting the titles, name, ethical qualities and sometimes the main career events of the tomb owner, has its origins in the Old Kingdom, and it has been suggested that Middle Kingdom literature itself developed out of the tradition of writing biographies (Assmann 1983), which would fit with the Tale of Sinuhe masquerading as a biography. The biography tradition saw considerable development in the First Intermediate Period, when local rulers such as Ankhtify of Moalla (Vandier 1950), or Itibi and Khety II of Assiut (Franke 1990: 125-6) created highly wrought descriptions of the unsettled conditions of the time, including descriptions of battle. With the reassertion of royal authority in the Middle Kingdom, non-royal inscriptions tend to focus once again on the individual’s relationship with the king. However, several regional governors had lengthy biographies inscribed in their tombs, and these vary widely in emphasis: for example the nomarch Ameny of Beni Hasan records his military service in Senwosret I’s expeditions to Nubia, as well as his success in feeding the people of his province during a famine caused by a low inundation (Moreno Garcia 1997: 32-4). A later Beni Hasan nomarch, Khnumhotep II, is more concerned with detailing his family’s appointment to various governorates. Another kind of non-royal commemorative text is evidenced by governor Sarenput I of Aswan, who renovated the chapel of the local ‘‘patron saint’’ Heqayib at Elephantine and left a stela commemorating his urban improvements (Franke 1994: 156-7).
The central feature of any non-royal commemorative inscription is the offering formula, which, if read aloud, was believed to conjure up the enumerated offerings (bread, beer, oxen, fowl, alabaster, linen, ‘‘everything good and pure’’) for the benefit of the deceased in the next life. Many non-royal commemorative texts consist of little more than this, plus the deceased’s name and titles, and a conventional series of claims that the deceased was an upright individual deserving of a decent afterlife. Often the texts continue with a set of ‘‘appeals to the living,’’ trying to induce passers by to recite the offering formula: ‘‘O you who love life and hate death, as you wish your local gods to favor you, you should say (the offering formula).’’ Sometimes the text continues with blandishments to encourage the reader to say the offering formula, occasionally counterbalanced by curses against anyone who disrespects the monument.
By the Middle Kingdom Abydos, the city of Osiris, had become a religious center of national importance, and a large number of officials erected memorials in the vicinity of the temple and processional ways of the god, hoping to partake of his festivals (Simpson 1974a). A string of officials throughout the Middle Kingdom and Second Intermediate Period commemorate their being sent by the king to renovate the Osiris chapel, and to conduct the rituals of Osiris. The most explicit of these is the stela of Ikhernofret from the reign of Senwosret III (Sethe 1928: 70-1). The stela begins with the text of an elaborate royal decree commissioning Ikhernofret to renovate the temple equipment and predicting that ‘‘there is none who can do it besides you.’’ Ikhernofret duly refurbishes the temple regalia, and then describes in a somewhat vague and allusive fashion his conduct of the festivals of Osiris, which include a re-enactment of the central events of the Osirian myth cycle.
Another class of inscription, where the boundary between royal and non-royal becomes somewhat blurred, is represented by the inscriptions left in remote places outside the Nile Valley commemorating expeditions undertaken by officials on behalf of the king to procure raw material. As well as factual information, these texts sometimes contain details of difficulties overcome, or prodigious events that occurred during the expedition. One stela, set up in the reign of Amenemhet III at the remote temple of Hathor at Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai, records how the official Harwerre journeyed there to mine turquoise (though see Iversen 1984). His team were discouraged by being made to prospect for the mineral in the heat of summer, but Harwerre persevered, offered to Hathor and eventually brought back more turquoise ‘‘than anyone who had come (before).’’ Harwerre directly addresses future expedition leaders to heed his example, and not give up hope of finding turquoise. The motif of fortitude, and disaster overcome, is strongly reminiscent of the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, and it is a moot point whether the literary text might reflect the expedition inscription tradition, or whether in fact Harwerre’s inscription might have been influenced by the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor.
The last example demonstrates why it is impossible to draw a sharp distinction between the literary and the non-literary texts surviving from the Middle Kingdom. The narrowly ‘‘literary’’ texts make extensive intertextual reference to many of the other written genres of the period, and any interpretation of them requires a knowledge of these other genres. The Tale of Sinuhe, for instance, incorporates its narrative within the overall format of a biography, and within the narrative one can find eulogistic praise poetry, an exchange of letters between king and subject, not to mention ritual songs sung by the royal princesses.
World History
