Introduction

The Middle Kingdom was regarded by subsequent Egyptians as one of the high points of their culture: Middle Egyptian, the language stage occurring in Middle Kingdom texts and inscriptions, was seen in later eras as the most prestigious ‘‘classical’’ version of the language, and many monumental and religious texts continued to be written more-or-less accurately in a form of it down into the Graeco-Roman Period, millennia after it had ceased to be spoken. Likewise, the poems of the Middle Kingdom were copied and read for hundreds of years, and Middle Egyptian authors and literary protagonists were honored in eulogies and in lists of the blessed dead (Parkinson 2002: 31-2; Fischer-Elfert 2003: 124-30; Quirke 2004: 33-6). It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that modern scholarship also accords Middle Egyptian texts pride of place in Egyptian literary history, and that the Middle Kingdom is often seen through the prism of the literary texts that it produced.

Unfortunately, the problems of interpreting Middle Egyptian literature are significant: the language is still not perfectly understood, and the Hieratic script in which most literary texts are written only preserves the consonantal skeleton of the living speech it represents; the manuscripts themselves are often fragmentary; and the enormous distance in time and cultural outlook between the creator(s) of an Egyptian work and a modern reader inevitably make it difficult to be certain that a modern interpretation bears any relation to a plausible ancient response. Although the literal meaning of a passage can often be rendered, subtler features such as humor, sarcasm, irony and absurdity are much more difficult to demonstrate. If a text only survives in a single copy, even identifying simple textual errors becomes problematic: modern editors have to decide whether a particularly difficult grammatical construction, or a seemingly out-of-context word, is the result of ancient copying errors, or a deliberately unusual idiom or stylistic effect intended by the ancient composer(s) of the text. For these reasons, modern interpretations of Egyptian literature often differ widely.

Contemporary cultural preconceptions also create complexities in interpretation: modern literary editors are accustomed to think of a hypothetically perfect original text (often known by the German term "Urtext") created by an author, which over time gradually becomes corrupted in the process of textual transmission; by comparing surviving textual witnesses, it is thought possible to reconcile the differences and decide what the “original” text said. However, this model of authorship and transmission may not be entirely appropriate for the Ancient Egyptian cultural context: although the standard scribal colophon, “so it ends, from beginning to end, like what was found in writing” (Parkinson 2002: 75) implies that an exact copy of a text was perhaps the ideal, it is clear that in some cases in the Middle Kingdom copyists intervened and actively reshaped the texts. For example, the Teaching of Ptahhotep is preserved in two significantly different versions (Parkinson 2002: 314), and it is likely that it was “re-edited” at some point in the Middle Kingdom. Even where textual differences arise through misunderstanding, they can still have the potential to significantly affect the subsequent interpretation of the text: for example, in the Middle Kingdom manuscripts of the Tale ofSinuhe the central character is simply a non-royal official in the service of the royal family, but by the later New Kingdom the manuscripts consistently make him into a prince in his own right (Parkinson 2009: 185), a re-interpretation that has significant bearing on the reasons for Sinuhe's flight from Egypt in the plot of the tale. For reasons such as this, it is perhaps more appropriate to talk about “Tales” of Sinuhe in the plural, circulating in differing versions with different horizons of meaning for different audiences at different times.

A more basic problem is the sheer paucity of surviving evidence, and its restriction to a relatively small number of sites. Papyrus is fragile, and does not survive well outside the sheltered context of the tomb. For this reason, the majority of well preserved literary papyri dating to the Middle Kingdom come from a very small number of tombs, though our picture is somewhat augmented by a significant number of fragments recovered from the Middle Kingdom town site of Lahun at the entrance to the Fayum (see Quirke 2004: 11-23). Many more textual witnesses survive from the New Kingdom, but a large proportion of these are restricted to the community of Deir el-Medina, where the builders of the royal tombs lived. Although it is possible to build up a fairly detailed picture of what literary texts this rather atypical community had access to, it is difficult to ascertain whether this was representative of Egypt as a whole at this period.

The largest single find of actual Middle Kingdom papyri comes from a Thirteenth Dynasty tomb constructed at Thebes, in an area where the much later Ramesseum temple was constructed; hence it is known as the “Ramesseum tomb” (see Parkinson 2009: 138-60). This tomb probably belonged to a lector priest, and along with various artefacts of magical significance, it contained a chest full of some 24 papyri. These covered numerous topics: 3 were ritual liturgical texts, another 16 are technical manuals of magical and medical texts and incantations (one of which was a re-used roll that had originally contained administrative records), another 4 contained literary texts, and a final papyrus contained an onomasticon.

If the contents of this tomb had not survived to be discovered in modern times, at least two Middle Kingdom literary texts (the Discourse of Sasobek and the

Ramesseum Maxims) would remain entirely unknown, and unsuspected, by modern scholars, since they each survive in only a single copy from this tomb. We would also be considerably the poorer for not having important early witnesses to the textual transmission of the Tale of Sinuhe and the Tale of the Eloquent Peasant. These accidents of preservation illustrate just how contingent much of the current thinking on Middle Egyptian literature is: a chance discovery at any time could necessitate a major revision of scholarship in the field.

This selection of written material surviving in the Ramesseum tomb does not suggest that the Egyptians made a strong separation between their literary texts and their more functional writings, and the same is generally the case with other finds of papyri from other periods (see Quirke 2004: 14-23). Partly as a result of this, distinguishing Middle Egyptian ‘‘literature’’ from the other culturally valued texts created in the Middle Kingdom is problematic, and no simple modern definition is entirely satisfactory (see Parkinson 2002: 22-9). A broad view would include all texts transmitted within the Egyptian ‘‘stream of tradition’’ (for the term, see Oppenheim 1977: 13) that were not limited to the immediate conveying of factual information; this definition would include some artfully formed texts which were strongly bound to specific functional or situational contexts, such as religious, liturgical and hymnic texts. A more narrow definition would limit Middle Kingdom ‘‘literature’’ to a discrete group of approximately 40 or so texts within the stream of tradition lacking an immediate functional context (Assmann 1974) and characterized by the occurrence of fictional elements. This group of texts is highly self-referential and intertextual in its use and re-use of language and themes, and the individual texts often have an attested transmission and reception over significant times and distances (Loprieno 1996: 39-58). This group of texts can largely by subdivided into the following distinct generic sub-groups:

Are generally pessimistic in tone, and consider problematic areas of the Egyptian world view (see Parkinson 2002: 109-12).

The following discussion focuses first on texts falling within this narrower definition ofMiddle Egyptian literature, and then moves on to deal with other, more marginally literary genres. Non-literary sources, such as letters, administrative and documentary texts, and technical texts (e. g. magico-medical, mathematical, onomastica) will then be summarized briefly.

The narrow definition of literature is far from perfect, and many texts described below fail the above criteria in some way (for example, several compositions are only attested in a single surviving manuscript). Moreover, the narrow definition excludes many texts, such as commemorative tomb biographies and royal inscriptions (Konigs-novellen), which demonstrate technical virtuosity in terms of artful verbal composition, rhetorical display, and emotionally affective wording, but which were composed for a specific occasion and location, and were not intended to be copied and transmitted beyond their immediate functional context.

Little evidence survives to establish the chronology for the creation of individual Middle Egyptian literary texts. Many works claim to have been written in, or at least have as their temporal setting, the Old Kingdom and First Intermediate Period. Although these text-internal attributions used to be taken largely at face value (as for example in Lichtheim 1973), it is now generally agreed based on linguistic and content analysis that they are fictitious inventions of the texts’ authors (who are otherwise largely anonymous) intended to imbue their compositions with greater antiquity and cultural authority (see Burkard and Thissen 2003: 72-3). The contemporary archaeological record for the Old Kingdom does not preserve any texts that fit within the ‘‘narrow’’ definition of literature given above, though a number of genres which developed in that period demonstrate verbal artistry and compositional skill (Assmann 1983; Baines 1999a), which may have served as an impetus for the later creation of Middle Egyptian literature.

The earliest actual surviving literary manuscripts date from the late Twelfth Dynasty (probably not much earlier that the reign of Amenemhet III; Quirke 2004: 9), and it is increasingly recognized that the production of literary texts is unlikely to have begun until the Twelfth Dynasty (Parkinson 2002: 45-50). At the other end of the time scale, many texts whose language and themes clearly place them as part of the Middle Egyptian literary corpus are not attested until the New Kingdom or even later, and attempts have been made to revise the compositional date of some of these down into the Eighteenth Dynasty (e. g. Gnirs 2006), though these arguments have not thus far been widely accepted. The current discussion assumes a compositional date for the Middle Egyptian literary corpus within either the Twelfth and Thirteenth Dynasties or the Second Intermediate Period.

The social context in which Middle Kingdom literature was created, disseminated, and received remains the subject of much Egyptological debate (Parkinson 2002: 64-85). The royal court appears constantly in Middle Egyptian literature, both as a locational setting, and as a central topic of ideological and moral discourse; it is therefore the most likely place where literature was created, and from which it was disseminated, though finds of manuscripts in provincial cemeteries demonstrate the wider participation of the elite throughout the country. Many interpretations of Middle Egyptian literature have focused on its political potential, either as propaganda in support of royal and state ideology (Posener 1956), or as dissident protest at these ideologies (e. g. Cruz-Uribe 1987; Simpson 1991; Helck 1992). While some literary compositions, most notably the Words of Neferti, do have clear programmatic potential in support of the ruling dynasty, a purely political approach to literature is now seen as overly reductive, and fails to account for the texts’ complex and often equivocal juxtapositions of alternating viewpoints (Enmarch 2008: 59-60).

The same objection applies to the characterization ofMiddle Egyptian literature as a set of‘‘cultural texts,’’ that is, texts central to the self-fashioning of Middle Kingdom cultural identity, learned at school and codifying societal norms (Assmann 1999b). Another frequently drawn opposition is between texts presenting core cultural values (mainly the genre of‘‘teachings’’), and those which submit these values to a more or less questioning examination from the standpoint of the individual (mainly the ‘‘discourses’’ and particularly the narratives; for this opposition, dubbed topos vs. mimesis, see Loprieno 1988). Building on this, some scholars have suggested that the concerns of literature in the Middle Kingdom reflect the rise of a class of lower members of the elite (valorized as the nds ‘‘the little man’’ who is a frequently occurring protagonist type in Middle Egyptian literature) who were relatively independent of royal patronage (Loprieno 1991-2: 14), though the lack of surviving evidence makes it difficult to evaluate this proposal (see Franke 1998).

The identity of the actual writers of Middle Egyptian literary works is unknown, and is deliberately obscured by the texts’ pseudepigraphic self-attributions to figures from a more or less distant past. In the New Kingdom, the literary protagonists seem to be treated as if they were the real authors, appearing for example in a list of revered figures from the past in a Ramessid tomb relief from Saqqara known as the ‘‘Daressy fragment’’ (Fischer-Elfert 2003). The only major exception to this general rule is a Ramessid scribal miscellany text that honors an individual named ‘‘Khety’’ as having written the Teaching of King Amenemhet, and the name Khety appears later in the same papyrus among a list of Middle Egyptian literary figures (Quirke 2004: 31-6). Attempts have been made to identify this Khety with the writer of the Middle Egyptian Teaching of Khety (Derchain 1996: 83-4), but the evidence is circumstantial. Khety was a popular Middle Kingdom name, and so the two individuals could be entirely different (and equally fictitious).

The concerns of Middle Egyptian literature are generally focused on the life of the elite class, particularly the relationship between the king and his officials, and on the behavior of officials towards others above and below them in the social hierarchy; the emphasis on correct social relationships emerges most clearly in the teachings. Lowly members of society occur quite frequently, and are sometimes sympathetically portrayed as in the Tale of the Eloquent Peasant, but their concerns when expressed seem to reflect an elite perspective rather than representing a plausibly authentic non-elite voice. Although divine beings occasionally appear as literary protagonists in an earthly context, as is the case with the gods disguised as a troupe of musicians in The Tale of King Cheops’ Court, there is a dearth of evidence in Middle Egyptian literature for purely mythological narratives; the major possible exception is a late Twelfth Dynasty fragment from Lahun with an episode from the myth of Horus and Seth (Collier and Quirke 2004: 20-5), though this excerpt may instead be part of a magico-medical incantation rather than a fully developed literary narrative. Another Midlde Kingdom fragment, called the Cairo Mythological Tale, seems to portray a group of gods in council discussing the fate of a man called Ukhekhiu (Parkinson 2002: 294-5).

One of the most notable features of Middle Egyptian literature is its concentration on problematic aspects of human experience that are generally ignored in other, more culturally central modes of discourse (e. g. temple inscriptions, mortuary texts). For example, the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor is, in part, a parable of success and failure, and begins with the return of an official from a failed expedition outside Egypt; these topics would probably have been close to the heart of an Ancient Egyptian official (for whom expeditions on royal business would probably have been a part of life), but cultural decorum would never permit a real expedition leader to ever record the ultimate failure of a real expedition.

Some Middle Egyptian literary works are more pervasively ‘‘pessimistic’’ in their portrayal of a dystopian world completely at variance with normative cultural ideology. These texts often lament the breakdown of social order, and sometimes question the core assumptions of Egyptian culture. The Dialogue of a Man with his Soul, for example, casts doubt on the utility of building tombs, while the Dialogue of Ipuwer and the Lord of All debates whether human beings or the creator god are most to blame for the existence of evil and suffering in the world. Nevertheless, these texts tend ultimately to affirm, albeit somewhat grudgingly, normative ideologies. Rather than being counter-cultural, they present a kind of cathartic exploration of the limitations and problems inherent in core cultural beliefs (Enmarch 2008: 63-4).

What survives is inevitably written, and hence part of the elite cultural sphere; there is very little surviving information on the oral traditions which are likely to have been a more widespread feature of Egyptian society, although some of the compositional techniques that occur in the literary texts are clearly related to those found in oral composition (Eyre 2000: 9-10). Indeed, performance has been stressed as a central factor in the creation and dissemination of Middle Egyptian literature (Eyre 1993), and recent stagings of translated Middle Egyptian literary works have revealed features of the texts that fail to emerge from the printed page (Parkinson 2009: 267-70). It is unclear how far down the social hierarchy ancient performances ofliterature could have reached.