Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
A collection of Egyptian literary texts made accessible through subtle notes and introductions.
They had judges, senior members of the community, in front of whom you, as an individual, would plead your case.
The book by Richard Parkinson is another collection of translations, but this time of poems and other literary texts from the Middle Kingdom (1940-1640BC), the so-called classic period of Egyptian literary production. When I do public lectures or take tourists to Egypt they are often surprised that Ancient Egypt had a literature. We think mostly of Greek and Roman material when we think of ancient literature, but Richard has been at the forefront of changing that.
This is a wonderful collection starting with the most famous Egyptian poem, the Tale of Sinuhe. It’s short, only about 16 pages in this edition. Although numerous written copies are known, including versions used in teaching at Deir el-Medina, we think the life of these stories was primarily oral, performed by one story-teller or a group of performers, perhaps in court contexts.
Is the fact that people don’t know much about Egyptian literature to do with the fact that it was translated so much later than Greek or Roman?
There began to be good translations in the mid-to-late 19th Century and then really thoughtful ones perhaps only in the 20th, so there isn’t the long tradition of ‘the classics’. But the Egyptian stories are also really different. They don’t have the plot structure and the characterisation that we are used to. Richard tries to open up the material so that we can understand it and see the beauty of the language. The Tale of Sinuhe, for example, is the story of an individual who flees Egypt when the king dies; he is worried that he will be accused of conspiracy. He becomes very successful in his new life in Syria-Palestine but all this success is hollow because the only life that is meaningful is a life in Egypt.
It is easy to read a story like this just as propaganda for central Egyptian ideology and the king, but it isn’t that simple. Sinuhe ran away from Egypt after all, and the story can be read as a questioning of what it is to be Egyptian. There is a long eulogy to the king in the middle but it too is full of little contradictory nuances and critiques. Richard’s introduction and notes help you to understand the subtlety of the story, but at the same time allow you to develop your own ideas and thoughts, which is really important for my students and any reader.
Richard’s anthology offers a sense of the range of literary production. My favourite is a poem in which a man debates with his soul about views of death and his own existential anxiety. There is rhythm and metre and sound play – it’s an extraordinary poem:
Death is to me today
like a sick man’s recovery,
like going out after confinement.
Death is to me today
like the smell of myrrh,
like sitting under a sail on a windy day.
Death is to me today
like the smell of flowers,
like sitting on the shore of Drunkenness.
Death is to me today
like a well-trodden path,
like a man’s coming home from an expedition.
Death is to me today
like the sky’s clearing,
like a man grasping what he did not know before.
Death is to me today
like a man’s longing to see home,
having spent many years in captivity.
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Dr Elizabeth Frood is a lecturer in Egyptology at the Faculty of Oriental Studies and a fellow of St Cross College, University of Oxford. Her research interests include elite representation and biography in the late second millennium and early first millennium BC. She is also involved in field projects in Egypt. She tells FiveBooks that we should think again about our perception of the Ancient Egyptians – they wrote shopping lists too.
