In Our Time - The Tale of Sinuhe

Episode Date: May 1, 2014

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss The Tale of Sinuhe, one of the most celebrated works of ancient Egyptian literature. Written around four thousand years ago, the poem narrates the story of an Egyptian official who is exiled to Syria before returning to his homeland some years later. The number of versions of the poem, which is known from several surviving papyri and inscriptions, suggests that it was seen as an important literary work; although the story is set against a backdrop of real historical events, most scholars believe that the poem is a work of fiction.With:Richard Parkinson Professor of Egyptology and Fellow of Queen's College at the University of OxfordRoland Enmarch Senior Lecturer in Egyptology at the University of Liverpool.Aidan Dodson Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of BristolProducer: Thomas Morris.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. For more details about in our time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com. UK slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in 1895, the archaeologist Flinders Petrie was excavating a burial site in the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes. He discovered the tomb of a priest who died around the middle of the 17th century BC and had been buried with a chest containing a bundle of pens

and several rolls of papyrus. This hall of Egyptian text is one of the most important ever found and contains a fragment of a work now seen as the masterpiece of ancient Egyptian literature. The tale of Sinuha tells the story of a court official who flees Egypt after the death of the pharaoh and spends many years abroad before finally returning home. He deals with events which are known to have taken place

around 4,000 years ago, although it's not clear whether the poem is a word. work of pure fiction or has some basis in reality. It was widely copied for many centuries after it first appeared, but why was it so popular? And what can it tell us about the ancient Egyptian world and about early fiction? With me to discuss the tale of Cinawa are Richard Parkinson,

Professor of Egyptology and Fellow of Queen's College at the University of Oxford. Aidan Dodson, Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Bristol, and Roland Enmarsh, Senior Lecturer in Egyptology Egyptology at the University of Liverpool. Richard Parkinson, the history of ancient Egypt is conventionally divided into three areas or kingdoms over about a 2,000 years span.

Can you give us some idea how that breaks down? Well, the first of them, the great old kingdom, is the Pyramid Age, and that's about 2570 to 2150 BC. Then the next is the Middle Kingdom, about 1950 to 1650. and it's followed by the new kingdom, which is the age of empire, about 1550 to 1050 BC, and then the history gets more complicated as Egypt has more involved with the other great empires of the ancient world. So it's an enormous span?

It's an absolutely enormous span. I mean, some empire? It's a huge empire, and in the Middle Kingdom, Egypt is very centralised, but is also looking eastwards and looking south, and so it's very involved with foreign affairs. I know this is convenient and conventional break, down, but are there

other continuities there? Are we having continual disruptions, warlords breaking in and so on? It's hard to say, the Egyptians valued central authority very highly, and these are periods they recognised, but the so-called intermediate periods are not

the ages of chaos they've often thought to be. It's a very continuous tradition, and the written stream of tradition of course continues throughout. Now, how did the book, the poem, we're going to talk about Where and how did that fit into your basic scheme? In broad terms, it's pure Middle Kingdom.

In more exact terms, it gets complicated. The first earliest manuscript was discovered in the 1830s and dates from around 1800 BC. The date sounds familiar, 18, 18, 1980, 19. BC, we talked in 4,000 years ago. About 1800 BC, the first manuscript, was written that we have and the poem deals with events from around

1908 BC and the following 30 years so the poem must have been written somewhere in the period between those two dates but we don't know when, we don't know who wrote it we simply know sometime before 1800 the poem was composed so if no idea who wrote it

with no other evidence around it did the context in which it was found offer anything? No. As usual, we have the manuscripts and we know they were discovered by an agent of the British Consul around 1830, the very first manuscript, and that comes from an official's tomb, but we don't know where the tomb was or who he was.

With the Ramaseum Papari, which are a bit later, we have the context, it must have been a priest's burial. So this just came out of the earth, really? It came out of the earth, and it came out of the earth with three other wonderful poetic manuscripts. So it's one of the most, it's a wonderful find. And one, unfortunately, the British Museum failed to buy because it was too expensive, which is why they're now known as the Berlin papaya. That'll cut you to the quickening.

Oh, it did. I see you still carry a grudge against your arms. Oh, massive. It's the tragedy of my career, I can tell you. Aidan Dodson, it said it as we've heard, beginning of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, which began about 1960 BC. How would you characterise that period? Can we go into more detail?

What was that period of like in Egyptian history? The Middle Kingdom has often been called the feudal period of Egyptian history because although there is a strong centralised government involved, also there are far, many of the provincial rulers have large tombs, which

we don't have at many other periods, which suggests that the country was although with a strong centralised authority, there was also a large amount of local government involved there, and that we see that there, therefore, there seems to quite a lot of provincial, local culture and so on. This is probably a hangover from the period which comes directly before the Middle Kingdom, which was when Egypt had largely lost centralised control,

and therefore the provinces became the main building blocks, if you like, of the state. Then the countries reunited, a little bit before the poem we're talking about, which was composed, but then there's still that underlying bedrock of provincial rulers there as well. Can you thicken out the idea of culture? What are we talking about? Can you tell this as when we know what we mean about culture generally? What was culture then to them? I suppose. I said culture to them was the things which made you in Egyptian, things about your common understanding of what religion, what the gods were all, about. The idea

that you had, that there was an overall ruler who was the God's representative on earth, a divine king. Whether that king was regarded himself as a god is another issue. But there was this idea that there was a divinely defined order

of things. The Egyptians called it a thing called Ma'art, which is very loosely translated as truth or order, but also means the way the world ought to be. So there's a certain sort of There's an Egyptianness which underpins everything. So the culture is built around a sense of religion?

I'm not sure, well, that's quite sure. It's probably more in the set, because bear in mind in that period, you can't really distinguish religion from culture. You know, very much Islam is a way of life rather than simply a religion nowadays. I think the Egyptians would take the same kind of view, that there was a whole, there was a cosmic order and teasing out what was politics and what was religious. religion is something, if you ask an Egyptian that question about his religion, he'd say, what do you mean?

He would think about his way of life. But when we think of Egyptian, when we go to the British Museum and so on, we see things, lots of things. And what things were being made then at the time in which we're talking? Well, you've got, most of the things which survive tend to be from funerary contexts. We've got coffins, the mummies which were in them, the things that came in the tombs with them, including people's reading material. what Richard has been talking about there about these papyri coming from some of this tomb. They're also producing the tombs themselves.

Beyond that, you've got the places of worship, the temples, although from the period we're talking about now, the Middle Kingdom very few actually survive. Many were been rebuilt over the coming hundred thousands of years. But all of, and throughout them, you've got a very distinctive art form. And also, of course, everything is kind of. covered with hieroglyphs, the Egyptian language.

And that language is something which unites everything we call ancient Egypt. It starts around 3,000 BC, and it's still being used, at least in temples, when paganism is abolished under Theodosius in the 4th century AD. So probably one thing which reunites all of this is ultimately there is this language lasts for thousands of years. is still with us in the Coptic church. In this tale, tale of Sinawa, there's two Egyptian rulers who are known to have existed.

Now, I'm going to tie this, you correct my pronunciation. Aminemmat and Senwareret. Yeah, Amenemhat I first and Senwaseret the first, yeah. There you go, right. Now tell us briefly about those two. Okay, the first two kings of what we call the 12th dynasty. Richard was talking about division into kingdoms and so on. Those are subdivided into dynasties,

which are in big handfuls very much like our House of Winds, a House of Plantagenet, that kind of thing, a group of kings who come together. And many of that the first is the first of that line. He, we think that before he became king, he was the vizier of his predecessor, a king called Montegiotep the 4th, who was the last king of the 11th dynasty.

And we've got, there's an account of him going out, quarrying material for the king's sarcophagus. We assume he therefore, this Amenem hat who is this vizier is the same person. And whether he seized the throne or whether or not he was simply the air, lack of a lack of an air, we're not sure. So that's him. He ranged for about 30-odd years.

And he very much re-establishes sort of normality, if you like. And his son is Sinwasrette I, who is the other major character, royal character in the tale of Sinuha. And he, the death of the first one, as it were, is the starting point of the story. Roland and Marsh, can you give us a brief, can not brief, can you give us a summary of the story? The central character of the story, Sunuha, is a courtier, and he works in the private parts of the palace, in the capital of Egypt. At the start of the story, he has accompanied Prince Senwasrit, the heir to the throne, out on a military expedition to Libya.

And while they're on their way back to Egypt, a message is sent from the capital that the old king Ammanemhat has passed away. And Prince Sen Wozrit makes a beeline for Egypt. He returns to the palace, presumably to secure the throne, without even telling the rest of his expedition. A message is also sent to the other royal children who are on the expedition. and while one of them is being summoned, Sunouhei overhears unofficially from a distance the news,

and he's overwhelmed with terror, trembling falls over his limbs, he doesn't know what to do, and he immediately runs away, leaping and bounding and becomes a fugitive. He explains that he thinks that strife is going to happen, so the implication is that there might be trouble with the royal succession. He then flees eastwards back towards Egypt, crosses the Nile, and then heads north-eastwards to the borders of ancient Egypt and then exits Egypt altogether going into the deserts of northern Sinai. Unfortunately, he there runs out of water and very nearly dies of thirst. He says this is the taste of death at one point. He's then rescued by Bedouin.

sand travellers or sandfarers who... Sand travellers, that's nice. Yes, the sandfarers, the ones who travel the sand. And they rescue him, bring him back to health, feed him, give him milk and water, and send him on his way. And after that, he spends a certain amount of time travelling around the lands of Syria-Palestine

where eventually he is made an honoured retainer of a local sheikh called Amanenchi. and Amanenchi appoints Sunuha to be the controller of one of his border areas and to fight against his enemies. And Sunuha marries the daughter of Amanenchi and he builds a life for himself in Syria or Lebanon possibly outside of the Egyptian world. And eventually he's challenged to battle by an enemy and he has a very dramatically described duel which he wins. and he then reflects on his life and his career outside of Egypt, and he realizes that ultimately outside of Egypt, his life is devoid of real meaning,

and he suddenly, urgently asks God to let him go home, what's more important than being buried in the land where I was born? The king in Egypt, Senwasrit, sends a message to him and says, it's fine for you to come home. There's nothing wrong. I'm not angry with you. And Sunuhay responds graciously, returns to Egypt, and at the royal court is presented to the king, and the king forgives him for his flight, and he's restored to a position as an honoured official at the court of King Semwazrit, and in due course he's given a splendid burial in the Royal Cemetery.

Well, you didn't miss a thing. Very good. Thank you very much. So listeners, you know everything about this 600-line work of 609 poem of fiction. Thank you. Richard, Richard Parkinson. How we talk at this time of a time when there was literature around? There were many books, many poems, many. Yes, the thing is, written literature, fictional, poetic literature, seems to be an innovation of the 12th dynasty. And presumably there were stories, songs,

for fun, for pleasure already throughout the Old Kingdom. But the Royal Court of the 12th Dynasty seems to expand the uses of writing and it starts putting on papyrus very sophisticated works. And Sineu Hare really plays with all the different

existing genres of the time, not only the fictional ones, but also the monumental ones, royal records, administrative documents, hymns to the king. It sort of, it has an insight epipedic feel, an epic feel. It really pulls in very many forms of writing in a way which I think implies literature must have existed for quite some time. It's not a first attempt at poetry. It's drawing on

a very long tradition. Can you take this little on a bit further, Hayden Dodson? It's modeled on, Richards mentioned the inscriptions on Egyptian tombs. These are a very useful background information. for this poem. Can you tell us more about them what they were, why they were how many, at all. Well, in Egyptian tomb chapels, there's often an inscription called, we often called it an autobiography, probably better as self-presentation,

whereby the person basically tries to present themselves in the best possible light, and often in doing so, talks about how they provided charity, they also want to present how close they were to the king, all those kinds

of things. And that's... Very like Victorian tombs. Oh, very, oh, absolutely. In a parish church. Absolutely. And often what we, certainly in the old kingdom, some of the history we've got is actually from there. Because they want to show how wonderful they were,

they give them an account of what they did in their lives. And it seems that a lot of the structure of Sunuhei is a owes a lot to these kinds of tomb self-presentations, where they will include facts, talk about how they dealt with things. So these kinds of self-presentations, I think, are crucial

in understanding this where the concept for Sunouquet comes from. But there is, which we will get to now, but just mention it so we can trail it as a way inside our own programme. There is an essential difference that it is thought to be fiction. Yes. But whether or not,

I think the big argument with the Egyptology, is it 100% fiction or is it based on reality? Is it a fictionalised version of somebody's real life? Or is it purely fiction? I think that remains a matter for some degree of debate. I think purely fiction is a grail. I mean, historical fiction is now, as we see with Hillary Mantel

in The Ascendant, and quite rightly, and we have no problem calling that fiction. I think it's quite whether you've got, where there ever was a man called Sunouhei or not, I think it's the big question. I think he's a big question. are often quite naive. They assume there's fiction and history as black and white categories. And Sinojah is clearly somewhere between the two. It's very, it has a lot of historical facts in it, a very detailed historical setting.

But whether there was an individual called Sinoa, I personally would doubt, because his name is just too good to be true. It has all these poetic resonances. Such as. He's the son of the sycamore. The sycamore is the tree representing the home. A son of a sycamore. Yeah. Oh, I see. And throughout the poem, there's illusions to the goddess of the sycamore as embodied in the queen. So it's an awfully neat name for what happens to him. But everything that does happen to him is entirely plausible.

Seems to fit perfectly with the early 12th dynasty that we know both at home and abroad. Including being lost in the desert and found by a Bedouin fed milk and water? Well, Bedouin certainly feed milk and water. And people must have got lost. in the desert. But what distinguishes Sunuha is, as Aidan said, normally the autobiographies tell of a glorious career.

And this is a career that goes spectacularly wrong. You don't normally hear about people getting lost and nearly dying in the desert because no Victorian would want to say that on their parish church. But Sinouhei does and that's the heart of the story. So you basically...

Can, yes. I'm getting involved. in this. It's awfully involving. I'm afraid of the story. The question that's never answered, really, Roland Anmar, is why he fled.

It's you enter in your account of the story. He, I think I can't remember, use the word, panicked or fearful, but there's no sense of really why he did it. Well, in some ways, that's the central question of the story, and it's never given

a simple answer. Several different possible explanations are hinted at and often juxtaposed and sometimes outrightly denied by different characters at different points in the story. If you want to try and read it into a historical context, Egyptian listeners and readers of this poem would have been aware that there was a tradition and indeed other literary texts that claimed that King Ammonemhat, the old king, had in fact met a violent death in the private chambers of his past. palace in an assassination. And so the message that Sunuha overhears probably would have been

understood by the ancient audience to have been the king has been assassinated, and that's why he fears that strife might actually happen. And so the most historicising explanation for his flight would be fear at effectively a civil war over the succession and fleeing from Egypt as a result of that. But when Sunouhei finds myself abroad, he's asked again and again by different characters, why did you flee? And he blames different aspects of himself in the Egyptian world. He claims that his heart led him to flee. And in Egyptian culture, the heart is a vital part of the human being. It's the seat of the intellect and the emotions. But it's not totally reliable. It's potentially flighty and it can let you down. And so Sunuhay tries to

externalise to some degree his fault, his guilt. by saying that his heart let him down. But elsewhere, he claims that it is God, not a particular God. He just uses the generic word God, who fated his flight. And he asks at one point, whichever God fated this flight, be merciful, be gracious to me, and send me home. So we have an opposition between the idea that the gods control human fate, or possibly that the human heart is in fact responsible. and there's an unresolved tension in the text

between the order of the world, the way that the gods control human beings, they created the human heart, but they made it unreliable. And this is never explicitly resolved in the text. There are other explanations as well. The daughters of King Semwoswry. Can I just pause for a second there, Ron.

It seems to me that already what the three of you are saying is that there's much more flexibility and shades of meaning in early Egyptian literature than that. had generally come across. We regard it as monolithic and in many, many ways. You can take the metaphor right through the current. But we're talking about it. We're talking about the way we would be talking about a work of fiction. This is every bit as subtle as the great works of literature from Western and other

cultures with which we're more familiar today. Full of meanings, possibilities, wrong turn, past not taken. Yes. And so there are all these different explanations and nothing is ever simply stated. Did he flee because of the king? Was he afraid of Semwell-Wilts' anger? because he fled and deserted his position. He did not follow his lord. But also it's very modern to hold back the real reason, isn't it?

That's very clever. I think it's exactly like a passage to India where it's never resolved what happens in the matter of archives, and it remains at the heart of this work. People are constantly asking why, what is the meaning of this life story? And it's left very much unresolved at the end. Do you think he's left deliberately left?

Oh, deliberately. Yes. And the poet, of course, stages it as a funerary, formal, grandiose autobiography, and then destroys it through most of its course. So it's the exact opposite of what it's claiming to be. The story of a glorious career, please. One of the things that's remarkable to me is that it's so comparatively short, 600 lines of the poetry about I'm told by you.

It's extraordinarily dense language, but even so, six hundred lines. And yet we're already finding more and more in it, but although Roland's given us a good run-through, there are more meanings in it, aren't there? The life story is staged not just as a sequence of episodes, but as very vivid scenes and moments, the moment he panics,

the moment he fights this foreign challenger and tries to define his identity abroad, the moment when he returns to the Egyptian court. And it's almost, it's rather like cinema. You see, very vivid flashbacks through a life, some of which contradict each other.

They echo, they resonate together. I think it's extraordinarily subtle in its architecture, in the form and the individual style of words, of lines. Very, very dense. As I understand it, it is. It has a symmetry in the very structure itself. A, one, two, three in the middle,

four, five, echoing one, two. And at the very centre is the moment when Sineu He fights a foreigner. and what better way than staging a clash of cultural identities he's trying to find out is he an Egyptian, is he a foreigner? He's living abroad. What does it mean to be Egyptian? But again, the wonderful subtlety is that when he wins over the foreigner,

he utters a non-Egyptian war cry of victory. Yes, and he then realizes he's fine, he's perfect, he's got everything he wants and it's meaningless. So he's not an Egyptian, but then it is meaningless? He is an Egyptian, but he is meaningless. But then he's saying to himself, because I've done that, I can't, I must wonder now whether I am an Egyptian. That's a better way to put it. And he says in a soliloquy where his mind changes as he speaks, I've got white linen, I've got fine linen.

I've got everything in Egyptian has. Somebody who is a coward who was a foreigner who wouldn't do this. Memory of me is in the Egyptian palace and at that moment his life falls to pieces. And he realizes what he really wants is to go home. which Hayden Dodson takes us to one of the important themes of the second half, a massive theme, the idea of homecoming, particularly the idea of going back to Egypt for an Egyptian, to have the proper rituals of burial observed. It's no good being buried in a, what is it, a ram skin,

it doesn't work, you've got to be buried properly in Egypt. And that is of great pull, isn't it? Yeah, there's a great, very clear that, you have to make sure that you went through to the next world properly, Everything had to be done properly. It's quite clear amongst everything else, which Sunu Hay's feeling, is he cannot be confident that out where he is in Syria, Palestine, that that will be done for him. So apart from putting any other demons to rest,

he wants to make sure that when he is buried, he's buried by people who know what they're doing, and therefore the rituals be carried out properly, and therefore he can get, be sure that he is going to get the eternal life he believes, is due to him by all those rituals and the equipment being done properly. Can you just give us a brief

upsum, summary, I do think I'd ever say up some, of those rituals? Well, first of all, there is the preservation of his body to make sure that doesn't decay. The process of mummification, the artificial desiccation of the body is to make sure the body will remain intact forever. And there's a belief that the body needs to remain intact

for the spirit to survive. when the actual moment of burial comes, there's a thing called the opening of the mouth, whereby the mummy is ritually brought back to life again by a priest who offers up and adds to his mouth so he'll be able to speak again. And then there's also the fact that once he's actually in the tomb, then offerings will be regularly placed,

or a tomb will have been constructed with all the right magical formulae so that food and drink will be magically provided for him for eternity. So all those things, so he won't go hungry, thirsty, and will continue to exist forever. Roland Henmarch, can we say something about the style of this work, how it compares with other sorts of Egyptian literature at the time, about 4,000 years ago? I think we can say that in terms of the language it uses,

it's very, very dense. Lots is expressed in few words. It uses the full range of the Egyptian language in terms of grammatical constructions, the vocabulary is full of recondite and exotic Syrian phrases. And in that sense, it's very noticeable when you teach this in a university today. The students usually are dismayed at how difficult it is compared to some of the more easily readable texts that were created at the same time. So it's very dense, it's very rich.

As Richard explained earlier, it's also got... many different genres within it. It has letters from the king and to the king. It has praise poems. It has tomb biographical descriptions. And so in some ways it's a compendium of the sorts of writing one might have found at that time. What does the fact of its richness say to you? I think it explains why this was so popular for the Egyptians. It's not purely a text that tells them about a historical event or even a fictionalized historical setting. It's a The Egyptians love new phrases, extraordinary words that haven't been tired out by repetition, as another poem says. And so it's novelty, really, I think, that the Egyptians love the exoticism, travel in foreign lands.

It explores how you might live outside of Egypt and outside of the Egyptian world view. And all of these things, I think, are what lead to its enduring fascination for the Egyptians for the next 750 years. It'd rather suggest, though, that it was one of many, doesn't it? if this was being written in such a complicated way, you can't really think, well, this is a one-off. This sort of complex, but popular among the, I suppose, minority of literate people

must have been around briefly. Richard. When it was found the manuscript from 1800 BC, it was found with two other poems and they're very similar in density and complexity. One's a dialogue about death, one's a great plea for justice, which is so vivid that Ardaf Suaf is still citing it

in connection with Tahrir Square. So it's part of a tradition of very vibrant works. Ruhl, it's been suggested that this was propaganda for the fair. It's another suggestion. What do any of you make of that? Does that make any sense? I think we can say that the literature that was created in this time period is courtly literature,

a fundamental concern of most of these poems. is the court, the king, the relationship of courtiers to the king. And as such, it has been traditional for much of the 20th century to read these texts as having effectively been created by a small circle at the court to put the court's point of view and disseminate it. And so this is what we might call the propaganda model of literature. Sunuhei, the texter, shows an all-powerful king Senwasrit granting an amnesty to an official of dubious loyalty,

and you might easily see, if you wanted to read it like that, how that has a propagandistic value on behalf of King Semwazrit and his dynasty. However, I think it's very important not to forget that these are works of art. As we've explained, there are exotic terms, interesting narratives, interesting depictions of life outside of Egypt, and we've got to remember that people probably enjoyed these. We must imagine that people read and listened to performances of these texts and actually would have had pleasure out of them.

Well, there are great scenes, aren't there? The battle with the man with axes and arrows and such. They're almost dying in the desert. The return to court in Egypt where his children scream because they don't recognise him. It isn't as if it goes along in a thoughtful interior way all the time. You want to come in a little interesting thing is that actually there's quite a lot of this literature which survives

is set around Amenemap First. There's one which is supposed to be his sort of death, his post-postumous sort of testament to his son after his assassination. It's another one which is supposed to be a prophecy which brings about his accession. So I think there is something very special about that whole nexus, Amadham Hat I first, Send Moucrette the first. There's an awful lot of, you know, part of the issue is the preservation,

that leaves things that be survived by accident. We've got quite a lot which comes from, or is set at least, in that period. I come to a moment. The more we talk, the more the way the court operates, is making it much less like the slab-like Egypt that we see in a way metaphorically mummified. It's poets, it's courts,

it's taking advantage of taking liberties with inscriptions and so on. Have you any idea of the level of literacy? That's a good question. It's often been put in sort of two or three percent, but it's really a guesswork. We don't know how many people really actually lived in Egypt at this time. And then what proportion of those might well have been literate. Probably it's something like that kind of small single figures.

It's the people, the literate people are people who are running the country. It's the bureaucrats fundamentally, the priesthood, But beyond that, it's very small. I don't know whether either the other two have got a thoughts on that. One of the things that's very interesting about civilisations for many thousands of years is how few literate people it takes to make civilisation which does great things. Absolutely. I think our problems in interpreting sinew heads, either being propaganda or being subversive,

they're very similar to questions that come up with Shakespearean drama. And we're in a very similar, quarterly society, where literature can only be produced with the agreement of the central authorities, but at the same time is tackling some very dark themes. And, of course, through performance, works like this, would reach a slightly wider audience than the strictly literate bureaucrats. So the performance, as in Shakespeare, obviously, the performance was the thing.

That's how most Egyptians vast majority of it. Were the theatres, were there places where performance, were done? No. I think the best model is to think of modern Arabic performances

of epic literature where it's done at a soire it's done in an evening entertainment. But I think performance is probably the way that

most people experienced a work like this and it is when it's staged we've tried modern recitals it comes across

it's incredibly dramatic and you really get a sense of the structure. Now you heard of a papyrus in front of you and you can read Ancient Egyptian Egyptian from 4,000 years ago.

So this is an incredible treat. You're going to read part of... I hope you are. Yes. You're going to read part of this... What I do is just one couplet, which is my favourite two lines of the poem, which is the moment when Sunuhaer returns to the court,

and it's done very formally, very grandly, and the king announces to the queen and the children, you know, this is Sunniuha, he's come back as a foreigner, offspring as the barbarians, and you expect everybody to continue very formally. And what happens is the poet says, wedesseba a-aw-eret, mesut-nissut-wit-wat. The queen gave a very great shriek, and all the children cried out as one. And then they turned back to the king, and they say,

is this really him, sovereign, my lord? And the king says, this is really him. and it's just like the recognition scene of Leon Cordelia. Very simple language, but it has a huge emotional impact. This is pushing it a bit and imposing me. Can you read a bit more or read that again? Because I was not quite prepared for it. The couplet is weddes, seba a-a-a-weret,

mesu-nissut emdiut-watt. She gave a very great cry, and all the royal children shrieked as one. Have you got the next bit at your finger? And there's, the king says, enentef emma'at. They said to the king, and he says, Entepu emmaat. Jedin's hemef ensen, Entef puemmaat. And of course, as Aidan said, Ma'at is the key word of Egyptian culture, its order, its justice.

And the poet sneaks in this key word of Egyptian culture. Is it him in truth? really him? Yes, it is. This is the truth about Sinoa. There we are. Words from the tombs of the pyramids. Indeed. It's wonderful stuff. It is. The Roland, Roland March, how was this, well, we've talked about it being read and performed,

and we've just had a little glimpse. I can have done with a lot more, but perhaps you can do a recital. Indeed. Indeed. or later in the evening. How did this fare in the next, let's say, thousand years in Egyptian history? Well, it becomes a classic of Egyptian culture. So we have the papyri we've discussed from the Middle Kingdom, but from later periods we have one more papyrus from around about 1350 BC,

by which time the text is over 350 years old. maybe 400 or so years old. But also we have an awful lot of Ostraca. And Ostrica are pot shards or flakes of limestone, which are a cheaper writing alternative than writing on expensive papyrus. And a lot of these survive from the Egyptian New Kingdom, which is a period approximately 1,500 to 1,100 BC. And they appear to be scribal exercises.

So Sunouhei has become part of the curriculum for students learning literacy and learning to write in the by now archaic, middle Egyptian, prestigious stage of the language. And they're quite advanced students. They're not beginners. These are people who've got wonderful calligraphy, but they're copying out passages, set sections of the text. And we have several dozen of these from various parts of Egypt and the New Kingdom.

Can we develop, Aidan, can we develop the idea of influence? Yeah, because I think one of the things which has been pointed out is the way, is how rich the text is and the fact it contains bits which are from autobiographies, hymns and so on. So I think it's probably one of the reasons why it was chosen as part of the curriculum, if you like,

because it allowed the student to actually see excellent examples of all these different kinds of genres in one text. And from that, they would then be able to, that would probably then give them a basis for producing new material in that same

genre. Because Middle Egyptian was that became the classical form of the language. So if you're doing a hymn of praise to the king, you write it in Middle Egyptian, you've got some very nice examples of hymns of praise in Sunuhei. So therefore having Sunuhei as your basic text gives you a very good basis to carry on your scribble career. What influence has this had on writers since its discovery by Petrie in 1895? It was lost, of course, for many centuries. And its treatment in Europe has been a bit trivial.

It's been retold for children's stories. And there's a truly horrible rewriting by an Australian author about 1900 called a professor of Egyptology, where Sunou has reincarnated. And he stabbed the queen in the 12th dynasty. And he comes back from the dead to beg her forgiveness because she's also been reincarnated. There's an awful Finnish novel made into a catastrophic Hollywood film. film called The Egyptian. Not a happy ending so far, Richard.

But there is Nagibah Fuz who writes a superb short story called The Return of Sinojah in which he adds romance. He won't a bell prize, isn't it? Indeed, yes, one of Egypt's greatest authors. And it's very short. It reinterprets

the story, but it somehow captures that it's all about the mystery of the human heart. And in this, the queen and Sinoa were in love. He abandoned her. and actually she loved him all along. So it's a very romantic rewriting, but it still gets to the heart of the story, I think.

Well, very briefly, because we... Do you, would you say, with the consensus, it really is brief, do you think it could be called a work of fiction, an early work of fiction? Absolutely, yes. Well, that's all right, then, REL. What about you?

I think it's one of the supreme masterpieces of world literature. You don't say fiction, though? It's fictional, but like Shakespeare's. I think I would agree very much it's a wonderful work of literature it's there are large amounts of fiction in it but it's a genre it's not just straightforward fiction genre

it's a broad, it's a much richer genre than that. Would you say that Richard the 3rd though it's not fiction? Well there was a person called Richard the 3rd therefore that's what I'm saying the lines between fiction and non-fiction can be blurred and this sort of thing

they're definitely... Sorry, it might fault red herding, whatever that is in ancient Egyptian We've got to leave us all now. Thank you very much to Aidan Dodson, Richard Parkinson and Roland. And March, next week we'll talk about the Sino-Japanese War, 1937 and 1945, often overlooked. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now

with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. I hope you enjoyed it. Ah, you're papyrus there. You're rolling it up. Yeah, no, no, it's very hard to find odd passages without us doing it. Can you remember any more of it? The opening line, Sunuhes' opening words, are Inek Shemes Nebeth.

I am a follower who followed his lord, which is a standard way of beginning to autobiography, but of course is exactly what he doesn't do. He spends his life running away. And you wonder how do you perform that, ironically or straightforwardly? Is it like any other language? Is it like Hebrew?

Is it like... Can you tell us? Very much. the problem is we only have the consonants written so with the vowels we're purely guessing so there's a lot of the appeal of the language that the appeal of the poetry is completely lost just due to the writing system

we'll never know what it sounded like when you tell your students about this do they find it revivifies or it vivifies Egyptian I think certain parts of the text are more appealing to a modern audience than others So the very long praise poem that Sunuhei utters in praise of the new king, I usually find my students sort of beginning to nod off at that point. But then we get to the duel between Sunuhei and his opponent,

the hero of retinue, and we have this very vivid description of the combat. I find my students perk up. And this happened in antiquity too. We can actually see if we plot how many ostrichre we have for different passages of the text. We have lots of the start of the work of literature. Also, this is this writing on Pops. Exactly. So we have lots of examples of the beginning

of the text being copied out, but then it drops off as you carry on through the text. And then suddenly, the fight between Sunouhai and the Hero of Retchinu, you have a blip, a larger number of copies. And so people clearly found this more interesting in antiquity as well. On a trivial level, it's action movies, really, they get the audience.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yes, yes. No, this is... It's a very exciting story. It's just... He doesn't play it just for that. I find it quite a depressing. I'm quite like the sort of meaning of where is my homeland? I'd like that to get more involved. And he said it's it's the Goliath with the axe against

the man from Egypt, really, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, no, everybody loves that part. It's like that. You've even wonder how far there is a common origin of the Goliath story, the idea of having this great, the great big champion and the appearance of underdog

being able to... I mean, when Cesar came here. I mean, the Celts, special art. One thing is their best warrior went out at the front and challenged the entire Roman army or the best man. It's absolutely. But actually universally happened for a long time, didn't?

Yes, I think it probably is a sort of face-to-face combat culture. I think even you in your brilliant summary might not have mentioned the fact that when he went back to Egypt, he left his new wife and children behind.

Behind. I was trying to think of the correct word. Yes, as soon as he's told he can go back to Egypt, he hands over all of his social positions and his goods to his children, he calls them his chicks, so there is a slight moment of tenderness that these grown-up children he's abandoning are being called the chicks,

but then we don't hear about them anymore. He goes back to Egypt, and that's that, really. But abandoning is not quite true, as I remember from a few times ago reading it, he does give them, or they inherit what he has made. He's

made quite a lot of himself by then. He's a successful chiefdomen and a border tribe in his semi-nomadic life. It's done properly, but it's there's hints that it is a big wrench through the use of the word chicks. Not as big a wrench as you as the British Museum before your time, not getting held of these.

Oh, we found... I could see the pain. I could see the pain. We found the memo where they're described saying, not perched, I was nearly sick when we found that. What were the monies involved? Oh, I can't remember, but it wasn't much. And it is like saying, oh, we've got the only copy of Shakespeare, the only copy of Milton, the only copy of Jane Austen,

and it's a bit expensive. We'll let somebody else. Who were the guilty man? Can we name them? Samuel Birch was the person who wrote the description. It will have been the trustees. At that period, of course, Egyptian literature, Egyptian papari were just exotic. They'd have spent it if it had been Greek,

but it was part of the time. Horrible. The British Museum has a long track record of not buying stuff, which they should have bought. You bought some very good stuff as well. But there was also a wonderful golden treasure which was on available in 1914, which ended up going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This is, Sinu He's worth much more than any goal that possibly be. Well, here's Tom Morris to put an end to these wild proceedings.

Tea or coffee. That's a tea or coffee. That brings up to an end at the table. Coffee. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programs to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.com.uk slash Radio 4.