Tales

There is no clear Egyptian genre term for the literary narrative (though it is possible they might have been described as sdd(t), ‘‘tales,’’ ‘‘accounts’’; see Parkinson 2002: 109), and the surviving examples have quite different opening formulae. Moreover, some texts begin with a narrative frame or setting, but rapidly abandon this and move into a non-narrative mode (an example of this is the Words of Neferti), while other narratives such as the Tale of the Eloquent Peasant contain lengthy discursive passages. This generic interweaving is characteristic of Middle Egyptian literary texts. The works listed in this section are those where the narrative thread is dominant and continuous throughout the text as preserved.

The Tale ofSinuhe is perhaps today the best known Middle Egyptian narrative, and this is undoubtedly related to its popularity in antiquity, to judge from the large number of surviving manuscripts from the Middle and New Kingdoms (Quirke 2004: 70; Parkinson 2009: 172-207). The tale is presented as a copy of an official’s tomb biography, though this is very probably a travesty since its contents are unlike any real biography that is known. The ‘‘biography’’ is of a royal official named Sinuhe, who flees Egypt when he hears of the death of King Amenemhet I. Sinuhe eventually establishes himself as a Asiatic tribal strong man in the land of ‘‘Retjenu,’’ probably in modern Lebanon. After defeating a rival strong man in single combat, Sinuhe comes to realize that his life outside Egypt, isolated from the royal court, is devoid of meaning. After an exchange of letters with the new king Senwosret I, Sinuhe leaves Retjenu and returns to Egypt, where he is readmitted into the royal presence, and in due course is buried in a tomb within the enclosure of the royal pyramid, a signal favor. A persistent theme throughout the tale is the motivation for Sinuhe’s original flight. The setting of the tale around the period of transition from Amenemhet I to Senwosret I is significant: although it is not explicit in the tale, it is likely that the succession was a troubled one, with the old king perhaps being assassinated (Obsomer 1995: 131; these events are dealt with in much more detail in the Teaching of King Amenemhet). The ultimate forgiveness accorded to Sinuhe by Senwosret I could therefore be read in political terms as a kind of amnesty. However, this fails to account for the enduring popularity of the tale over several centuries; the main interest of the work perhaps lies instead in its fictional exploration of the possibility of a life outside Egypt and Egyptian cultural values.

Travel is also central to the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, in which one official, the ‘‘follower,’’ tries to reassure the other, the ‘‘count,’’ that all is not lost as a result of the implied failure of an expedition to Nubia. He does this by launching into a story of his own past experiences, designed to illustrate that initial disaster can still lead to a happy conclusion: he is shipwrecked on a supernatural island in the Red Sea, where he meets a divine snake who predicts that he will return home safe. The snake in turn tells his own story of disaster and fortitude, recounting the destruction of his family by a falling star. The ‘‘moral’’ seems to be that if one is stout-hearted, one can survive almost anything, and indeed in due course the ‘‘follower’’ is rescued from the island, returning triumphantly to the royal court laden with exotic gifts from the snake.

However, the optimism of the follower’s advice is sharply undercut by the count’s curt rejoinder which closes the tale, implying that nothing can save him from his doom: ‘‘Don’t be clever, friend. Who would give water [to] a bird when the day dawns for its slaughter in the morning?’’ Although the outward style of the tale is simple, it contains esoteric allegorical allusions to Egyptian religious ideas (Baines 1990: 55-7, 65-7), with the snake representing the creator god, and his island representing the created universe.

In the Tale of the Eloquent Peasant, a peasant (or perhaps more accurately a marshman: Quirke 2004: 40-1) sets off to sell his wares at the royal city of Herakleopolis, and his donkey is stolen from him on a deceitful pretext by a corrupt local official called Nemtynakht. The peasant complains to Nemtynakht’s superior, the High Steward Rensi. Rensi is so astonished by the peasant’s way with words that he reports it to the king, who orders that the peasant be detained so that he can continue making eloquent speeches which the king orders to be recorded for his enjoyment. Over the course of nine petitions, the peasant delivers a lengthy discourse on truth and justice, which gradually becomes more desperate and denunciatory, culminating with the peasant’s threat to seek retribution through a higher court in the afterlife. Eventually, Nemtynakht is punished, the peasant’s ass is returned, and he is rewarded for his eloquence. It is unclear how an ancient elite audience would have reacted to the distinctly ambivalent portrayal of the king and the High Steward Rensi; the pervasive irony of the plot, where the peasant’s very eloquence about justice delays his receipt of it, undercuts any simplistic culturally affirmative reading of this story (see Parkinson 1992).

The Tale of King Cheops’ Court (also known by the name of the sole surviving manuscript, P. Westcar) is in fact a cycle of stories whose setting is at the court of the Fourth Dynasty king Cheops (Lepper 2008). The king is bored and his sons take turns to amuse him by telling tales of wondrous events from the reigns of his predecessors. One story concerns the adulterous wife of a lector priest, and her lover’s demise at the hands of a wax crocodile brought to life by the cuckolded husband. Another story centers upon a lector priest magically dividing up the water of a lake to retrieve a lost pendant from the lake bed. One prince offers to show Cheops a wonder before his very eyes: a sage called Djedi who can reattach a severed head, among other feats. After duly performing these feats, Djedi upsets the king by revealing that his family will eventually be replaced on the throne by the children of a priest of the sun-god Re. The scene then shifts to this priest’s household, where his wife Ruddjedet is having a difficult labor. Several deities associated with childbirth disguise themselves as musicians and offer to assist at the birth. Three children are born with marks of divinity (their skin is gold, and their hair is lapis lazuli), and the birth goddesses decree their royal destiny. One of Ruddjedet’s maidservants runs away, perhaps to inform Cheops of the births, but she is seized by a crocodile in the final surviving words of the sole surviving manuscript, and it is unclear how the tale may have ended. The style of the tale is again fairly simple and episodic, but it alludes to central cultural ideologies, not least the divine, solar origin of kingship. The tale may also represent the beginning of the negative portrayal of Cheops which is best known from Herodotus’ much later description of his tyrannical pyramid building methods: the fact that his dynasty will be replaced would then be a kind of judgement on his conduct.

Several other narratives are attested from the Middle Egyptian literary corpus in a more or less fragmentary condition. In the Tale of Neferkare and Sasenet, a king steals away from the palace for night time assignations with his general (Parkinson 1995: 71-4); a man called Tjeti finds out, and perhaps attempts to reveal the scandal at court but is drowned out by musicians. In the Tale of the Herdsman, a terrified cowherd encounters a female divinity at a pool in the marshes, and she apparently makes advances to him (Morenz 1996: 124-35). Another fragmentary tale seems to contain a ghost story, with the spirit of a man called ‘‘Khentika’s son Snefer’’ appearing to a king (Verhoeven 1999b: 261). Of another seven or so Middle Egyptian narratives, only disconnected snatches survive, and the plots cannot be made out clearly (for a set of translations, see Quirke 2004: 179-86, 198).