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language: Egyptian (English tr. Toby Wilkinson)
country: ancient Egypt
year: ancient
form: mixed anthology
genre(s): mixed anthology
dates read: 30.10.24-9.11.24
Writings from Ancient Egypt, edited and translated by Toby Wilkinson, is an anthology of ancient Egyptian texts spanning multiple periods and genres, although it skews towards the Middle Kingdom. the largest component of the anthology is monumental inscriptions — royal commemorations, battle narratives, dedications — but it also includes (religious) poetry, funerary texts, poetic “lamentations”, prose narratives, the fascinating full text of a middle class woman’s will, and (the longest individual section) six “teachings” (i.e., wisdom texts).
overall, I enjoyed the collection (in spite of some puzzling and some frustrating exclusions — why no Sinuhe? why none of the New Kingdom prose narratives? why none of the more secular or lyric poetry?). the highlight in terms of Things That Made Me Think was probably, appropriately, the wisdom literature, which raises interesting questions about authorship (vs. attribution), and paints an extremely striking picture of Egyptian society, which is so heavily associated in the Western imagination with intense religious piety and an obsession with death.
now, before you read that last sentence and think, “oh, it shows ancient Egyptians’ concerns with the business of everday life!” — yes, it does do that, it’s true. however, more importantly, it also paints a really dramatic picture of a society where, at least in the imaginations of the aristocratic and also middle-class scribes who produced and transmitted these texts, everyone was out to get you at all times. look at maxim 8 from the Teaching of Ani:
Do not enter another’s house until he lets you in and greets you. Do not snoop around in his house, but let your eye observe in silence. Do not speak about him to an outsider who was not there with you: it is a great and mortal vice when it is reported!
while, yes, Ani, Ptahhotep, and Khety do provide advice about things like making money, dealing with an angry boss, or how to treat your wife (Ani’s advice is the least objectionable on this — essentially, “leave your wife alone. she knows what she’s doing”), the strongest impression these texts leave for me is of a society where it was advisable never to say anything to anyone, at any time, because if you did ever say something to someone, they or someone else would immediately begin using it to plot your downfall. that’s pretty fucked-up! and it doesn’t necessarily surprise me in a text aimed at an aristocratic audience, like the Teaching of Ptahhotep, but it was surprising to see it so strongly reiterated in Ani.
wisdom texts aside, the highlight for me was probably the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor — I love the way it plays with form and repetition, and also that it ends with such a stark (perhaps even humorous) rejection of the sailor’s pious advice.
as I mentioned previously, my biggest complaint is Wilkinson’s editing. there are three types of marked emendation in the anthology. he uses angle brackets and square brackets as expected, for corrections to presumed errors or omissions in the first case and restoration of lacunae in the second. he also, however, uses parentheses to “indicate words inserted by the translator to facilitate understanding or flow”. the problem with this is that most of the time the words he inserted add nothing to the text and in some cases in fact actively alter its meaning, sometimes in ways that clearly contradict its explicit content. in basically all of the cases where the words he inserted do clarify anything, I think it almost certainly would have been reasonable translatorial practice and much less awkward to just…stick the relevant words in. look at this one, from the restoration decree of Tutankhamun:
the perfect ruler who does whatever is effective for his father and all the gods, having restored what was destroyed as a pious act for all time and having driven out Chaos throughout the Two Lands so that Order remains [in her place]; and who causes falsehood (once again) to be an abomination and the earth (to be) as it was in the beginning.
“(once again)” is clearly just Wilkinson’s extrapolation — that is, not necessarily reflective of the original — and “(to be)” is simply unnecessary.
a final observation — queerness is here, in the form of words Wilkinson has translated as “pansy” and “sodomizer” but which he glosses as referring specifically to “effeminate men”. the later instance was particularly striking because his note says:
The Egyptian word — a pejorative term for effeminate and/or homosexual men — has no direct equivalent in British vernacular English.
really? you don’t think there’s a contemporary English slur or several that spans the semantic range from “gay man who receives anal sex” to “effeminate man” to, perhaps, “trans woman”? but of course it wouldn’t be scholarly to use a full-on slur in this context.
moods: informative, reflective