Tales

The collections of texts in P. Harris 500 and P. Chester Beatty I enable us to bridge the gap between the Love Songs and the New Kingdom narratives. Grouping together tales such as The Taking of Joppa, The Doomed Prince, and The Contendings of Horus and Seth with Love Songs, and the Tale of Apophis and Sequenenre with Miscellanies (P. Sallier I) suggests that it is possible to reconstruct for the New Kingdom narratives a common use with all previously discussed educational, didactic, and lyrical genres. This observation is significant, because Egyptological research makes a clear distinction between narratives and other genres of New Kingdom literature and manages, at the same time, to under - and over-rate them. That they are under-rated results from the fact that their narrative character makes them intuitively an independent literary mode. This, combined with the supposed simplicity of literary Late Egyptian and the application of formalistic motif-analysis (Assmann 1977b), resulted in labelling some New Kingdom narratives as traditional fairytales. However, the fact that there are motifs in Egyptian narratives which literary critics had defined as folkloristic in other cultures, does not mean that the Egyptian narratives are folklore. On the other hand, especially mythological tales are over-valued because Egyptology tends to over-contextualize those texts which are not based on real events, relates them - on the basis of preconceptions - to specific historical episodes of the New Kingdom (e. g. Wettengel 2003) and interprets them as highly complex theological and political tracts. However, the following section will attempt to locate the Tales using their association with other texts, along with their family resemblance, within a hypothetical sphere of general ‘‘courtly’’ usage.

Courtly Romances and Adventures

The Miscellanies of P. Sallier I, dating to the Nineteenth Dynasty, are the only textual evidence ofthe Tale of Apophisand Seqenenre (Gardiner 1932: 85-9). This says less about its folkloristic character ( contra Brunner 1975) than it does about the fact that a rather broader setting should be applied to reconstruct the use of New Kingdom narratives, which takes as its starting point a group of producers and users common to all genres. The fragmentary text features a heroic tale about the beginning of the conflict between the Lower Egyptian Hyksos King Apophis and his Theban counterpart Seqenenre Tao II. The historical background of the story is the ending of the political status quo of the Second Intermediate Period during which Egypt was divided into two. In Lower Egypt, and with a nominal claim to Egypt as a whole, the Hyksos ruled as legitimate kings, while Upper Egypt was governed by local magnates obliged to pay tribute to the Hyksos. Starting at Thebes, and under the pretext of the Hyksos’ ‘‘foreignness,’’ a war of conquest began under Seqenenre Tao II, advancing increasingly further north and eventually ending at the transition from the Seventeenth to the Eighteenth Dynasty under Kamose and Thutmose I with the complete expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt as well as the subsequent Egyptian expansion in the Near East. The tale glorifies the beginning of the rebellion under Seqenenre Tao II as the point at which Egypt began to develop into a great Levantine power, a fact which renders it unlikely that the story originated prior to the emergence of a corresponding Egyptian feeling of supremacy, which itself began to develop under the Thutmosids of the mid-Eighteenth Dynasty.

The heroic tale The Taking of Joppa conveys a similar cultural feeling of elation (Gardiner 1932: 82-5). The only example of the tale comes from the collection of texts of P. Harris 500 (early Nineteenth Dynasty), on the verso of which the story is transmitted in full. It glorifies the historically documented capture of the Levantine city of Joppa during the time of Thutmose III by his General Djehuty and, therefore, represents a fictionalization of the historical res gestae of the first Palestinian campaign of Thutmose III ( Urk. IV, 783,13; see also Botti [1955]). After Djehuty offered himself to the rebel prince of Joppa as a hostage, thus bringing him under his control, his uncontested takeover of the city eventually succeeded thanks to a trick in the course of which Egyptian soldiers hidden in sacks - supposedly a tribute following the Egyptians’ surrender - gained entry into the city (the ‘‘Trojan-horse’’ motif) and took the population prisoner. There is almost 200 years between the actual conquest during the time of the Thutmosids and its first appearance as a fictional heroic tale during the Nineteenth Dynasty. Depending on whether the motivation behind the story is seen as a contemporary expression of Egyptian feelings of supremacy, which can be dated back to the Eighteenth Dynasty, or as an early Ramesside memory of that particular time (perhaps relating to the attempts to recapture areas lost since then), the story’s date of origin is estimated to be somewhat earlier or later in this 200 year period. Its use as a historical romance which mirrors role ideals of exemplary individual success on the occasion of courtly banquets is very likely, given its transmission in the same manuscript as some Love Songs. Furthermore, the mentioning of Joppa itself might have had rather hedonistic undertones as becomes clear from P. Anastasi I 25,2-6, describing the frivolous adventure of an Egyptian army officer in a vineyard at Joppa (Fischer-Elfert 1986a: 212-22).

A similar situation of use and time of origin is likely for the story The Doomed Prince (Gardiner 1932: 1-9). This also is only transmitted on the verso of P. Harris 500 (early Nineteenth Dynasty), though the end is lost. Its prestigious military and intercultural setting suggests that the story may originate in the Eighteenth Dynasty (Helck 1987). In contrast to the two previously discussed texts, The Doomed Prince does not treat any historical events but presents the story of an incognito prince’s individual quest for success and happiness abroad. The imaginary nature of the text, which includes supernatural powers and abilities, has often been misinterpreted as evidence of its fairytale nature but should rather be understood as a marker of its fictional status. The prince was the longed-for child of an Egyptian royal couple, whose death by a crocodile, a snake, or a dog was foretold even before his birth. In order to protect the prince from these fates, his father initially kept him isolated in a specially built desert house, but the prince became convinced that he could not escape his fate. Disguised as a member of an internationally operating class of free chariot warriors (the Mariannu), the hero went to Syria and gained the love of a local princess by defeating rivals in a jumping contest through his supernatural capacity in this area. The princess’s love also delivers him from her father’s attempt to kill him because of his supposedly low pedigree. The rest of the text presents the hero holding off his predicted fates. The story’s outcome remains open due to its fragmentary transmission, but it is very likely that it concluded positively. Also this story is a courtly romance (Simon 2003) probably used during banquets, since its hero’s disguise as a charioteer offers a possible role model for the members of contemporary Egyptian elite, comparable in his supernatural abilities to the quasi-divine figure of Mehy in the Love Songs.

Mythological tales

The so-called mythological tales have acquired a particular significance in Egyptological research (Baines 1996b). Although these texts do not treat any obviously recognizable real history, they are interpreted as an expression of ideas supportive of the state on the basis of their quasi-mythical subject matter and are, as a result, directly related to specific episodes of Egyptian royal activity. Indeed, because the manuscripts on which they are transmitted are dated, it may be possible to reconstruct specific historical situations of use within the setting of royal festivities for the Tale of Astarte (Collombert and Coulon 2000), the Two Brothers (Wettengel 2003), and The Contendings ofHorus and Seth (Verhoeven 1996). However, a clear context of use neither proves that the works were royally commissioned, nor argues against their fictionality (Moers 2001: 30-1; 149-51). Some of these tales have been copied by scribes from whom Miscellanies also originate (Two Brothers) or have been transmitted in collections of texts together with Love Songs and hymns (Horus and Seth), which implies that it is possible to reconstruct for the New Kingdom mythological tales the same group of (re-)users and similar contexts of use as for the lyrical genres and the courtly romances.

The oldest mythological tale of the New Kingdom is the Tale of Astarte (Collombert and Coulon 2000). The story is long by Egyptian standards and has only been transmitted in a fragmentary manuscript (P. Amherst IX, New York, and P. BN 202, Paris), dating back to the time of Amenhotep II. The text is a heroic tale rich in

Near Eastern motifs and set in the realm of the gods. The tale’s hero is the god Seth-Baal, an internationalized version of the positive, productive brutality of the otherwise ambiguous Egyptian god Seth, who was increasingly revered as the god of kings in the New Kingdom. In the text Seth-Baal defends the realm of the gods against the hybris of the untamed and raging sea, personified as a god (Yam) who claims not only tribute but also Astarte as a wife and, with the jewels of Nut and the ring of Geb, the symbolic handover of world domination. The text begins, however, with a dated encomium to Amenhotep II, which offers the possibility of contextualizing the story. Euhemeristic readings interpret it as aetiology associated with the establishment of an Egyptian cult of Seth-Baal in Lower Egypt, though historicizing interpretations assume a reuse of the text during a commemoration of the accession to the throne of Amenhotep II. While both readings are possible, the one proposed here builds on the second interpretation which associates the text directly with Amenhotep II. In principle, the well-attested function of Seth-Baal as a kings’ god as well as the textual allusions to the personality of Amenhotep II enable us to interpret the story as a royal heroic tale. In it the king himself is the focus, disguised as his own divine role model and described accordingly as performing his royal duties as keeper of the world. The manuscript could have been used in the context of a royal banquet and offers the possibility of rendering homage to the king in two different literary forms: firstly in an encomium and secondly in a heroic legend which shows the king at his work and by which his historic res gestae are elaborated in a quasi-mythological form (Collombert and Coulon 2000: 208).

The Tale of the Two Brothers (Gardiner 1932: 9-30; Wettengel 2003) is transmitted in its entirety in P. d’Orbiney (P. BM EA 10183). It was copied by the scribe Enanna, known from Memphite Miscellanies, in the time of Sety II and dedicated to three fellow scribes. At the beginning of this multi-layered and narratively complex tale is the happy life of a peasant family made up of Anubis, his unnamed wife, and his unmarried brother, Bata. Bata symbolizes the figure of the good shepherd, who is the victim of an injustice following his rejection of the advances of his brother’s wife (Biblical Potiphar’s-wife motif) and, therefore, commits symbolical suicide. Transformed into a sexless godlike being, Bata is drawn into an alternative universe where, following divine intervention, he is given a wife. This wife is let in on Bata’s secret and in the course of the tale becomes the catalyst for his final return to human form. Meanwhile, the Egyptian king learns of the existence of Bata’s wife after a lock of her hair was washed up from the sea, falls in love with her because of her divine lineage, and has her brought to him. Bata’s wife betrays her husband’s secret to the king, after which the king arranges Bata’s second death. His brother Anubis learns of this second death, thanks to a previously agreed sign, and set out to rescue Bata. After a long search he discovers Bata’s dislocated heart, revives it and reunites it with Bata’s lifeless body. Bata then transforms into a bull, travels back to Egypt, and reveals himself to his wife who wants the king to kill her spouse once again. From two drops of the slain bull’s blood Bata transforms into two trees, which were felled at the behest of his wife. In doing so a splinter of wood enters the wife’s mouth, and she thereupon becomes pregnant with the reincarnation of Bata. Bata becomes Crown Prince and ultimately the king, tries his wife at court, and dies after an ideal reign of 30 years.

The internal structure of the story, indicated by rubrics, corresponds to the 24 hours of the day, during which a turning point is introduced every six hours: the sunrise, the tempting, the second death in the alternative universe, the killing of the bull and the eventual accession to the throne. Overlaid on this we have the story’s tripartite topographic setting: in Egypt, the alternative universe, and finally back in Egypt. Thus, the story integrates central aspects of different Egyptian ideas about creation and regeneration in the figure of Bata. His story symbolizes him as the sun god Re with his obvious day and mysterious night; as the symbolic Osiris he is killed, found, and resurrected, and as a bull he represents Amon-Re-Kamutef, who sired children with his own mother. On the other hand, Bata also has the traits of the kings’ god Seth-Baal, who has already appeared in the Tale of Astarte. Popular interpretations see the text as either a traditional fairytale (Hollis 1990; from a gender perspective Katary 1994) or as a specific Lower Egyptian artificial literary myth, which was to serve as ‘‘commissioned work’’ and an ‘‘official document of the Ramesside dynasty’’ for the political legitimization of the ‘‘new theory of descent’’ of the Ramesside kings from the god Seth-Baal (Wettengel 2003). The double mention of the name of the Crown Prince Sety-Merneptah, the son of Merneptah, on the papyrus appears to suggest indeed a certain connection of the manuscript to the dynasty. However, it remains debatable whether Sety-Merneptah must inevitably be seen as the initiator of an artificial myth by the scribe Enanna, when it could be argued that the Tale of Astarte, a text with similar royally oriented motifs, had already been produced in the Eighteenth Dynasty. In addition, the repeated occurrence of copying mistakes and the dedication of the text to three scribes in the colophon indicates, if anything, that the character of the manuscript is comparable with the Miscellanies and that the name of the Crown Prince was added later purely for practice purposes. The notes on provisions appearing on the verso could ultimately indicate a use of the manuscript in the context of a festive ceremony, which, as with the Tale of Astarte, could of course have also taken place in a royal environment. It is very probable that the Two Brothers exhibits a mythologized form of the narrative worship of the royal hero, who eventually triumphs and takes his place in the line of succession as Bata-Seth-Baal. The presentation of the path to the throne as problematic may be an early-Ramesside element, but that we are dealing with a commissioned religio-political work is difficult to accept. Rather, we may suspect the use of the text at courtly banquets where the story of a typical accession to the throne, with all its difficulties, can be retold, comparatively free from consequences, in a festive environment.

There are similar attempts to contextualize politically the Contendings of Horus and Seth (Gardiner 1932: 37-61; Broze 1996) by locating the text historically within the coronation-ceremonies of Ramesses V and thereby challenging its fictional status (Verhoeven 1996). The text is contained on the recto of the P. Chester Beatty I from the Twentieth Dynasty, along with Love Songs and hymns to Ramesses V. The story gives a burlesque description of a tribunal arranged under the chairmanship of the Lord of All Atum-Re-Harakhty for the purpose of reviewing the claims of the gods Horus and Seth to the throne. In the course of the tribunal the gods demonstrate their most human characteristics: Atum-Re-Harakhty is capricious and easily offended; Seth is as brutish as he is stupid, seeking, on the one hand, to rape

Horus and, on the other hand, being defeated during a race in a ship made of stone. Horus starts out as a weak child, who, without the help of his mother Isis, would have hardly a chance of survival against Seth, while Isis herself even wounds Horus with a harpoon during one of her many rescue attempts before she can strike Seth down. Chaos reigns amongst the gods as each of them tries to get the better of the others. Of course, the throne of Egypt is eventually given to Horus, as established by the Myth of Osiris which is the basis for the story.

As a mythological tale the text documents explicitly doubts about mythical ideas of a well-ordered world by opening them to literary investigation in a humorous fictional text. It is possible to laugh about the gods in whose day-to-day relevance it is barely possible to believe in view of the intrigues and disputes surrounding the throne which took place during the late Ramesside period (Vernus 1993), even if one prays to them continuously in the context of personal piety (Baines 1996b: 373). In reality, the text reflects the contemporary conditions of the late Ramesside elite from a fictional and ironic distance (Junge 1994), transferring them into the realm of the gods and thereby freeing the commentator from any possible consequences. This view is made all the more valid if the text is regarded as a template for a dramatic performance on the occasion of the coronation of Ramesses V (Verhoeven 1996). The specific setting then applies not only to the Contendings of Horus and Seth but also locates the whole of P. Chester Beatty I with its hymns and Love Songs in the context of courtly celebration in which different text types were juxtaposed for the same purpose, i. e. ‘‘to have a lovely day’’ (iri hrw nfr).

The tale of Truth and Falsehood (Gardiner 1932: 30-7; Burkard and Thissen 2008: 30-4), transmitted fragmentarily in P. Chester Beatty II from the Nineteenth Dynasty, offers another fictional treatment of the social conflicts of the Ramesside period. It is a tale of conflict between two brothers emblematically named Truth and Falsehood. Truth is brought by Falsehood to the divine high court for the return of a borrowed and allegedly oversized dagger. As Truth is unable to furnish the dagger, he was, at his brother’s behest, blinded and assigned to Falsehood as a doorman. Not yet satisfied, Falsehood charged Truth’s own servant with his abduction and murder. Truth, however, managed to convince the servant to hide him. He is later found by a lady who falls in love with him and bears him a son. This son grows into a fine specimen of erudition and military proficiency but is ridiculed by his companions for his status as a half-orphan. At her son’s insistence, his mother discloses to him the fact that Truth is his father. Truth is then able to tell his son his tale of woe. Imbued with thoughts of resentment, the son leaves a particularly beautiful ox in the custody of Falsehood’s herdsman. Falsehood discovers the beautiful animal and demands that it be eaten. As Truth’s son reclaims the animal, he discovers that it cannot be released. Hereupon Falsehood is brought before the tribunal for the return of the animal, which the son now describes in similarly exaggerated terms as Falsehood’s alleged dagger. The son then demands that the tribunal ultimately judges between Truth and Falsehood. Falsehood swears that he would be blinded, were Truth found to be alive, and Truth’s son swears on his part that this would happen. Here ends the tale. In spite of its rather allegorical nature (Baines 1996b: 374), Truth and Falsehood is identified as a mythological tale because of the divine tribunal, and because it overlaps, in terms of its motifs, with the Two Brothers (peasant life, incognito exile, woman’s role, eating the bull) and Horus and Seth (juridical tribunal, fantastic elements). The family resemblance between these texts also makes plausible a similar context of use for Truth and Falsehood, which might have been employed in rather contemplative moments of public performances. However, its serious tone could also hint at its function as an educational narrative (Griffiths 1967; Baines 1996b: 374). This would be a further indication of the fact that genre should not be the primary analytical category for Egyptological research into literature, since generic borders obviously cannot be directly represented by functional differences.

Social conflicts of a different character are dealt with for the same reason in The Fable of Head and Trunk (Lopez 1984: 50-1 and pl. 184; Kammerzell 1995). The text is transmitted fragmentarily on a tablet from the Twentieth Dynasty and describes the claim brought by Head and Trunk before a divine tribunal concerning the acknowledgement of their mutual supremacy. Only parts of Trunk’s final speech have been preserved, yet it is he who considers himself to be the more important one because he conjoins all other parts of the body. The text, therefore, can be seen as depicting social conflicts between particularist interests which are negotiated symbolically in a fictional fable, a literary form otherwise unknown in Egypt. It presumably extols the merits of an integrative solution. In this respect the tale, like Truth and Falsehood, may be regarded as an educational text in spite ofits quasi-mythical characters (Burkard and Thissen 2008:137), but a use to encourage contemplation during public performances is not impossible.

The last New Kingdom narrative worth mentioning is the Tale of Khonsuemheb and the Ghost (Beckerath 1992). This is transmitted fragmentarily in two texts on Ramesside ostraca from Deir el-Medina, which are clearly copies from a papyrus-based original. The fictional text centers around the complaint of a revenant (see Anii, B 21, 22-3, Quack 1994: 182-3) to a high priest of Amun about the desperate condition of his tomb and his burial cult, after which the high priest sympathetically arranges their restoration. The theme of the text is, therefore, the increasingly uncertain status of Egyptian belief in burial rites, which is also expressed in other texts of the New Kingdom (see Antef Song). Although direct contact with the dead, e. g. the Letters to the Dead (Gardiner and Sethe 1928), is not unusual in Egypt, the key difference with the revenants of the New Kingdom is the fact that these already inhabit the collective imagination and consequently must be regarded as literary personifications of contemporary sentiments of alienation from Egyptian culture. Interestingly enough, the high priest responsible for the restoration work stays up all night celebrating (iri hrw nfr) with his workers after the problem of the revenant has been overcome. The function of the tale is not easily reconstructed, but its origin as a student’s exercise from Deir el-Medina suggests that it was used by the same groups of the cultural elite and in the same contexts as the other texts in circulation there. The prominent figures featured in the text along with the motif of the prolonged celebration can possibly be interpreted as a reflection of an actual usage of the text during a banquet, in the course of which one central problem of the Ramesside period could be examined from the safe distance of a fictional work before, as in the text, returning to the celebration.

Epilogue: Early Third Intermediate Period Narratives Two fictional tales - the Tale ofWenamun (Gardiner 1932: 61-76; Schipper 2005) and the Tale of Woe (Caminos 1977) - have been transmitted from the beginning of the Third Intermediate Period, These differ in many respects from all previously

Discussed texts and are unlikely to be counted as core pieces of New Kingdom literature. They were found together in el-Hiba, a Middle Egyptian city which at this time was situated on the border of the sphere of control of the Theban theocracy of Amun and the sphere of influence of the reigning kings at Tanis. In addition, they give the impression of being functional texts rather than fictional literature, and both are dated palaeographically in the Twenty-first Dynasty. Also linguistically they are barely comparable with earlier Late Egyptian literary texts, e. g. early Demotic elements are already evident in the Tale of Woe (Quack 2001c: 170-1).

The Tale of Wenamun is transmitted only in the fragmentary P. Moscow 120 and focuses on the challenge-laden business trip taken in the Levant by Wenamun, an official of the Theban Temple of Amun. Having set off to acquire timber for a new barque for Amun, Wenamun was robbed, humiliated, and marginalized. Through a series of confrontations he discovers that he is at the mercy of foreign potentates and becomes aware of the dubious nature of the Egyptians’ concept of their country as the supreme culture. While older interpretations took the text to be an original report, more recent research insists on its function as a fictional medium of reflection on contemporary cultural and social circumstances (Baines 1999c; Moers 2001: 263-73). Recently these readings have been combined into a historicizing interpretation which regards the text as an example of religio-political literature with whose help the future king Shoshenq I wanted to limit the power of the Theban priests of Amun in favor of the central kingship at the transition from the Twenty-First to the Twenty-Second Dynasty (Schipper 2005).

The Tale of Woe is transmitted in P. Moscow 127. This fictional text uses the intertextual foil of contemporary execration formulae (Fischer-Elfert 2005: 215-32) and describes the odyssey through Lower Egypt of Wermai, a Heliopolitan priest who was exiled and found himself a foreigner in his own country. Interestingly, Wermai’s guilt and the resulting punishment correspond to the kind of behavior criticized in New Kingdom Teachings. Wermai’s misdeed can be reconstructed as an infringement of a divine decree issued by an oracle, while his punishment consists of having to live as a foreigner in his own country and dealing with corrupt officials, who amongst other things falsify the measurement of corn and starve him. The text illustrates from the fictional perspective of an uprooted (un? )guilty person the life of precisely those segments of the population described as ‘‘foreign’’ in the Teachings, who are dependent on the good will of those around them, provided that they actually pay any attention at all (see above).

Each of the texts, therefore, reflects in its own way and from a fictional distance upon the manifest disintegration of the Egyptian society during the transition from the New Kingdom to the Third Intermediate Period and demonstrates the results of the social developments which have already been mentioned in other texts from the New Kingdom.