A significant number of very artfully composed and rhetorically involved royal inscriptions survive from the Middle Kingdom, which saw the genesis of a new genre of royal inscription which is still generally known by its German name of Konigsnovelle (Loprieno 1996: 277-95; B. Hofmann 2004). These texts are usually set up in a temple context, and record the deeds of the king: in war, he suppresses rebels, and in peacetime he undertakes building activities in the temples. These texts quickly develop a standard form, involving scenes where the king speaks before his courtiers, and his ideas are enthusiastically received and carried out. The Konigsnovelle tradition probably has its origin in the Eleventh Dynasty, but the best known Middle Kingdom examples date to the reign of Senwosret I. In the inscription he set up in the temple of Tod, he records rebuilding the temple which was laid waste as a result of a rebellion which he suppressed (Barbotin and Clere 1991). Another building inscription of this king, recording his embellishment of the temple of Atum at Heliopolis, survives only in a New Kingdom manuscript copy (de Buck 1938), suggesting that it was admired and circulated beyond its original context in subsequent centuries: an example, perhaps, of a non-literary text crossing into the literary domain (unless the text is a New Kingdom pastiche claiming to be a Middle Kingdom composition, as has been argued by Derchain 1992).
The Konigsnovelle tradition continued in subsequent periods, with some of the most unusual being produced in the Second Intermediate Period: for example, one king turns the disastrous flooding of the Temple of Karnak into an opportunity for ritual display by wading through the flooded forecourt (Baines 1974). One of the most unusual Konigsnovellen was composed in the reign of the Seventeenth Dynasty king Kamose, and recounts that king’s battles against the Hyksos rulers of northern Egypt.
A slightly different type of royal inscription is represented by the greater Semna stela of Senwosret III (Eyre 1990). This boundary marker was set up at the southern limit of the Egyptian empire in Nubia, and it contains a lengthy speech by the king extolling his own virtues, and his achievements in subduing the Nubians. The text is a rhetorical tour de force, notable for its strong ethnocentrism in denigrating the Nubians as ‘‘wretches, broken of heart... they are not people to be respected.’’
It also addresses future Egyptians and urges them to maintain the borders established; Senwosret III even goes so far as to disown any heir of his who abandons it.
A non-literary genre that pre-dates the Middle Kingdom is the royal annals: tabular insciptions set up in temple contexts recording in labeling format the comings and goings at the royal court. The only Middle Kingdom example dates to the reign of Amenemhet II (Altenmuller and Moussa 1991), and records the departure and return of royal expeditions, the establishment and endowment of cults, and the celebration of festivals. It is intriguing that these annals also contain a passage narrating a royal expedition to the marshes which ties in nicely with the mention of Amenemhet II in the literary text The Account of the Sporting King.
World History
