The book features The Tale of Sinuhe, acclaimed as the masterpiece of Egyptian poetry, which tells of a courtier's adventures after he flees Egypt. Other works include stories of fantastic wonders from the court of the builder of the Great Pyramid, a lyrical dialogue between a man and his soul on the nature of death and the problem of suffering, and teachings about the nature of virtue and wisdom, one of which is bitterly spoken from the grave by the assassinated king Amenemhat I, founder of the Twelfth Dynasty.
A general introduction discusses the historical context of the poetry, the nature of poetry, and the role of literature in ancient Egyptian culture. Parkinson's book provides, for the first time, a literary reading to enable these poems to entertain and instruct the modern reader, as they did their original audiences three-and-a-half thousand years ago.
BOMC Main. Sinuhe: What's In a Name? Language and existence By Piotr Laskowski. Publication date Publisher New York, G. Reviewer: rbroderri - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - March 4, Subject: Mika Waltari I read this novel when I was a sophomore in high school. I found it absolutely absorbing and it led to a lifelong interest in ancient Egypt. I still find it absorbing but now I recognize what a stunning piece of historical fiction it is.
Books for People with Print Disabilities. Internet Archive Books. Scanned in China. It seems that AOS probably had the same elements as B in the same order. As for R, six lines are missing just after iT. B BH mnmn. AOS mnmn. AOS Xrw. AOS m wa. The wording of BA was probably also obscure for those who were responsible for the NK recension see infra. The word order retained by AOS, mwt — anx instead of anx — mwt in B , suggests that they probably decided to follow the R-line, to which, in my model, BA belongs.
Ostracon Senmut The case of S is a bit different. This interesting, but unfortunately very damaged, ostracon belongs to the few documents dating from the 18th dynasty. The first case, the ascending of the dead king to his horizon, is very well known R : R ar nTr r Ax. Two verses later, R reads sHr.
The Ramesside tradition has sar, with different spellings and some fluctuation in the grammatical understanding. My impression in this case is that S and G follow the same model, which cannot be reconciled with R, but could well fit what remains of Am.
In the second case R 3 , which is not free of some palaeographical difficulties, S probably read ns. The conclusion is that S cannot belong to the same branch as R. Now, it could be a more or less direct descendant of the tradition whose B is a witness, or it could also be one of the first witnesses of the recension that probably took place in the 18th dynasty see below. In this case, the reading in R 7 is Ha ntr Abx m ir sw , if not supported by the Amherst fragments but one will never know , is an idiosyncracy of S.
This man was writing hastily, but not unthinkingly, and in his constant self-correcting he was anxious to produce an accurate copy of the poem that could be read. Parkinson Of course, the fact that the B-scribe intended to produce the best possible copy does not necessarily imply that the model of B was a perfect and fautless copy. Despite a long tradition of scholarly work, it is difficult to objectively assess the respective values of both manuscripts.
If we disregard minor mistakes easily explainable by the copying process itself, B and R stand in opposition in several cases, with different kinds of variants presence or absence of a verse, lexical or morphological variations, spellings. The text of R unfortunately breaks up well before the end. The roll would have probably contained 50 pages. Only parts of the 27 of the first 31 pages survive, that is, a bit more than half. For my purpose, it suffices here to note that by the end of the Middle Kingdom, there were two lines in the tradition, and that these traditions apparently coexisted in the same place.
The fact that the Harageh papyrus supports the tradition of R strongly suggests that the origin of the two lines has nothing to do with a geographical division between north and south. On AOS As was immediately recognized by its first editor, the Ashmolean Ostracon has sometimes readings of its own that are worth considering.
For Barns, this was sufficient to postulate that AOS had inherited genuine readings from a line distinct from that of B and R. In the other sections, either B or R is missing, and in the last section, B stands alone. When AOS stands against one and only one manuscript, it will always remain 64 Parkinson In some cases, AOS readings can be safely ignored. When AOS has a reading that should be preferred over the rest of the tradition, either B or R is missing, which prevents us from considering AOS as the heir of a line independent from B and R.
B wsx. This is of course the most important point. The following figure shows how many times AOS stands against B and R according to the type of variation: 67 This of course the case in the numerous cases where AOS changed the text under the influence of the spoken language of its time, i. Late Egyptian: e. The XVIIIth dynasty recension The conclusion is that there is no solid argument for defending the existence of a third independent line in the tradition of Sinuhe.
The available evidence suggests that the text of Sinuhe underwent a recension, probably during the 18th dynasty. For unknown reasons, the R-line was chosen as the default model. On the other hand, in B 81, AOS added nn wn mitt. In B , AOS has rdi. The second part, present only in AOS, is probably an addition the presence of the construction wn.
Now, the sequence qni — sn is attested in the Shipwrecked Sailor mH. The reasons why those ancient philologists sometimes decided to shift loyalty to the B-line can only be guessed at. It can of course be a simple matter of individual preference, but the most obvious reason probably is that the model of the R-line was badly preserved in some places. The manuscripts sometimes let us have a glimpse at what probably happened.
As already seen, in B 91, B has iw ir. Actually, B did not exactly miss it; rather, it left a blank space, which suggests that its model had become impossible to read or was damaged.
It is a fact that the acceptable readings that AOS has in some places always show up when one of the two main manuscripts, B or R, is missing. It most often happens when R is missing, which is consistent with the claim I am here making that those who did the NK recension mainly followed the R-line. In those cases, it makes better sense to consider that AOS simply reflects the missing line instead of postulating a third and, in my opinion, totally impossible to prove independent line. In some rare places, it is possible to see how the scribe s managed to resolve the puzzle raised by the conflicting traditions of B and R.
Let us first consider what happened in B 7: B n Dd. To avoid what they considered an ambiguity, they wrote instead of a simple —f, which is the lesson of B, a more fleshy pfA, a pronoun typical of the 18th dynasty76, and added nTr pn mnx, which might have been first intended as a gloss before eventually entering the text. But it remains exceptional in the MK. It is not part of the vocabulary of Sinuhe. The reading of AOS qnn. It is of course difficult to precisely determine when the recension took place.
Most of the innovations that appear in AOS are already present in the P. Golenischeff, that can be dated to 19th dyn. Berlin OB1 , that has been assigned to the 18th dyn. It always sides with R, except in one case B 36 , where it seems to connect with B, but the reading of the ostracon is unfortunately corrupt.
The ostracon coming from the surroundings of the tomb of Senmut S is also attributed to the 18th dyn. It supports the readings of R, but on two important occasions sides with the NK tradition against R. If this hypothesis were correct, it means that S would be the earliest witness of the new recension I am looking for. It obviously took place between the reign of Sesostris I and the date of our most ancient manuscript, that is, somewhere in the second half of the 12th dynasty.
If one allows for some time between the historical setting and the literary creation, the second half of the 12th dyn. Some scholars have also advocated an earlier date, contemporary with the reign of Amenemhat II.
Now if one can argue that R sometimes has better readings than B — or at least variants as acceptable as those of B —, the unavoidable consequence is that meaningful differences, that is differences that are not the mechanical result of the copying process, showed up very early in the history of the text.
This once again raises some important issues like the process of literary creation, its reception and its transmission. The implicit postulate of any stemma codicum is the existence of one — and only one — archetype Ur-Text. As already seen in the introduction, there is every reason to remain sceptic about this. Although we have some idea of how a literary piece of work was performed in the elite circles, we simply have no idea of how a literary text in the Middle Kingdom was composed.
It seems difficult to imagine a piece of work like Sinuhe be the ultimate fruit of an oral tradition or the outcome of a multi-author enterprise. A much more interesting discussion is whether the existence of a single author ipso facto implies that of an Ur-Text.
At first sight, it seems to be the inescapable conclusion. At least, it is on such an assumption that critical studies of the ancient classics, Greek and Latin, have developed over more than five centuries. Buenos Aires, P. Hawara or P.
UC , have little to show. The history of a literary piece like Sinuhe strongly suggests that it had a living tradition probably till the beginning of the New Kingdom once the tradition became frozen or closed. The first stage is probably to be connected with how the literary texts circulated.
Texts were probably made accessible to the audience above all by oral performances. If the author performed himself his poem on different occasions, maybe in different places, then variations were only to be expected. Different performances could give birth to different written versions, equally licensed by the author. I am here interested in the written transmission of literary pieces, especially in the very beginning, when a new poem was created and performed for the first time.
How would someone interested in having a copy manage to have one? The very simple idea of entering a library to make a copy is of course anachronistic. The process of writing down literature during a performance is documented for the Middle Kingdom in some literary pieces Neferti, Eloquent Peasant.
How this model can be expanded to narrative literature remains of course debatable. For Greek and Roman literature, a time when literary production and diffusion was more organized, at least from the IVth century onwards, one has some hints suggesting that an author sometimes introduced variants into a text already published.
The explanation offered by Dover is that this piece was represented twice, in and in BC, and that the manuscript tradition conflated the two versions into one. Dorandi Gardiner was first tempted to regard it as original, but because of the agreement of G C and An was forced to admit that the verse was interpolated. The argument advanced — nolens volens — by Gardiner cannot force the decision.
Now, the balance of the two sentences introduced by tj sw and the presence of Hm in the second one are arguably a sound indication that the two sentences are closely bound.
The stemma below is a modified version of the previous one. In this model, the performances are the ultimate sources of the written tradition.
There is no Ur-Text anymore, but the possibility of an array of texts, some of which will eventually be fixed in writing. Their internal organization is of course subject to discussion.
Given the available data, the presentation given here is only one possibility. From what we know — but we know so little —, the copies of literary texts that have survived till our times are never the products of professional scriptoria as was knowingly the case in the Middle Ages for Latin and Greek literatures. In Egypt, copies were made by individuals who took a personal interest in them, probably because they had heard a performance of it before, maybe several times. This is an important difference with the medieval copyists, who often were professional ones.
This means that, at least in some cases, they probably discovered the text for the first time when they began to copy it.
The individual who made a copy of an Egyptian literary text like Sinuhe most probably knew the text very well or at least large portions of it in advance.
This familiarity with the text could of course be the source of interferences between what he knew, probably by heart, and what he saw on his model. His memory could betray him, but there is also the possibility that his memory in some cases preserved a slightly different text.
The transmission of the text seems to have been quite open in the beginning, but became closed or frozen from the New Kingdom onwards. This is of course reminiscent of the division between productive and reproductive transmission as has been advanced, inter alia, by Assmann for religious texts. The new text is the result of some deliberate choices between the R-line and the B-line, with the occasional insertion of glosses and the re- arrangement of some verses.
As already suggested, the available evidence points to a date somewhere in the 18th dyn. Recent studies on the 18th dyn. Philological practices on classical texts have already been advocated for wisdom texts, like Ptahhotep.
For this text, the two successive recensions 18th dyn. We have already come across some examples of this before. One could reconstruct the following process. The copyist of B, or rather its model, made an interpolation B , while keeping the verse in its original place.
Those who made the NK recension, having access to the B-line and the R-line, merged the two branches of the tradition; the result of this can be seen in AOS, which has the verse under discussion in the two places.
Assmann Quack Stauder forthcoming. Vernus Kahl , Gardiner Although I firmly believe that reliable results can be reached for non- literary texts,97 I have my doubts when it comes to the literary corpus except for some very general considerations.
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