Phil Christman

I learned nothing about the literature of ancient Egypt in college. Luckily I recently ran across John L. Foster’s Ancient Egyptian Literature (2001), a book that makes their poetry seem as interesting as their public-works projects.

According to Foster, the two masterpieces of Ancient Egyptian narrative writing are the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor and the Tale of Sinuhe, short works that deal with homesick sailors afraid they’ll never see their beloved Egypt again. (That this was an almost obsessively returned-to theme for ancient Egyptian writers is attested by several other poems in Foster’s book. We could call it the “Sweet Home Alexandria” theme, if we’re willing to sacrifice accuracy for the sake of a bad pun, which Lord knows I am.)

The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor packs a lot of enigma into a few pages. At the beginning, a ship’s crew celebrate a successful landing. The deckhand/narrator admonishes his captain, who is anxious for an unspecified reason and, apparently, short-tempered:

Purify yourself! Pour water on your fingers! 
            Thereafter you can answer what is put to you
That you address the King staunch-hearted,
            responding with no hesitation.

The mouth of a man can save him;
            speech can soften an angry face …

                         —Well, never mind.
You do whatever in the world you want, then.
            It gets to be a bother, talking to you!

The bubbly narrator then tells his captain a wacky story about the time he got lost at sea and washed up on a fabulously opulent island ruled by a talking snake.

 It bared its mouth at me—
I lying prone in fear and trembling—
and spoke: 

What brings you? brings you?
            little man, what brings you?

(I love that onomatopoeia with the repeated “brings you, brings you.”)

The snake turns out to be nice enough, though not really someone to trifle with. He feeds the narrator, predicts that a boat will arrive in a few months to take him home (this is a magic talking snake, see), and tells his life story. He once shared the island with a large family, including, poignantly, a “little girl brought to [him] through prayer,” but they all died after a shooting star crashed into the island. The snake thus enjoins the man to take all the pleasure that he can from the comforts of home and family—as this is precisely what the snake can no longer do.

In due time the boat arrives. The snake loads the man up with traveling gifts, asking him only two things: that he spread the snake’s fame back in Egypt, and, again, that he enjoy his home gratefully.

The man (our first unreliable narrator?) takes the gifts, goes home, gives the snake’s gifts to his king with no mention of the snake, and, one surmises, totally ignores the snake’s advice about enjoying your family and friends, because here he is narrating from, you know, another boat. He concludes:

 Now let what I have told you sink in, my leader—
            you know, things people say can help you! 

The “leader” (I’m assuming captain) replies, oddly enough, 

            “Don’t try to play the expert, friend.
Does one give water to a sacrificial bird
            the morning of its execution day?” 

I don’t know what this means either. With considerable artfulness, the tale’s introduction and conclusion add the suggestion of a whole other story, but let you reconstruct what they mean. Is the captain afraid of being executed by a king less forgiving than the snake? Or what? 

Meanwhile, the Tale of Sinuhe tells of a member of the royal court who happens to be abroad, making war on Bedouins, when Pharaoh turns into a god (i.e., dies). Sinuhe hears rumors of a coup and runs east, where he’s welcomed and nourished by Bedouins—the same Bedouins, presumably, that he’s been making war on—and, over time, becomes a major local power. Some guy tries to kill him and take his stuff, which leads Sinuhe to realize how much he wants to die in Egypt. Finally he becomes a big enough deal that Pharaoh’s court hears of him and invites him to return home. Without a moment’s thought he leaves his wife and family and his Bedouin allies, returns home, gets a shave and a haircut, begs Pharaoh’s forgiveness—three times—for running away in the first place (which anybody might’ve done), and becomes once again a taxpayer/functionary in the nation that will presumably continue kicking the asses of the people who saved his. (There is, at least, no overt narrative acknowledgment of the irony here, though perhaps the audience needed none.) It’s a marvelously put-together story, but the main thing you get from both the Tale of Sinuhe and the Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor is a sort of unquestioning Egyptian jingoism—it never crosses Sinuhe’s mind, even after Bedouins show him every kind of hospitality, to question the anti-Bedouin prejudice of his homeland—and a pious terror of authority. Sweet Home Alexandria indeed.