LECTURE

The Archaeology of Ancient Egyptian Poetry: reading The Tale of Sinuhe

Lecture chaired by Martin Sturge

Dr Richard Parkinson

Egyptology Department of the British Museum

11 May 2005

After holding the Lady Wallis Budge Junior Research Fellowship at Oxford, Dr Parkinson was appointed Assistant Keeper in the Department of Ancient Egypt & Sudan at the British Museum, specialising in epigraphy and papyri. His research interests centre around the interpretation of literary texts. He was curator of the special exhibition celebrating the bicentenary of the Rosetta Stone’s discovery in 1999-2000. The lecture was illustrated with numerous slides.

Egyptology is usually presented as archaeology, but many scholars work on text - this is also archaeology but involves the reconstruction and excavation of sometimes less tangible things - words. After nearly 4000 years our link to what we read is more tenuous and fragmentary than it first appears. The Tale of Sinuhe c1870 BC, is the best known work of literature from Ancient Egypt, [slide: Itjtwai] and seems to have been a classic text in Egypt, much read and copied over many centuries. It is a narrative in the first person about how a courtier left Egypt at the death of his king Amenemhat I, and tried to find a meaningful life abroad in Palestine, but was summoned back to Egypt by the new king Senwosret I, and was restored to royal favour and given a traditional Egyptian burial. An apparently simple historical account of one man’s adventures abroad, proclaiming that Egypt is best. The poem provides a sense of how an individual’s life can depart from the expectations of his culture, and when considered as whole is an almost subversive probing of that culture’s values rather than propagandistic. Underlying this discussion is the question of how we can understand any ancient work of poetry from a different culture, or excavate meanings and emotions. By stressing the role of empathy as well as scholarship, we can consider the process of reading as a way of sharing the experiences of the original audience, and of conversing with the ancient dead.

I’d like to examine what happens when we try to read such a text from a different world, and illustrate the possible original contexts of the poem throughout its life in Ancient Egypt, in order to suggest that the response of the original audiences was much livelier, and much closer to entertainment than that of many academics who have worked on the tale. I will draw on close readings of the poetry and on the experience of modern performances of the poem.

The very basic facts about the text that we call Sinuhe are far from certain: The type of text that Sinuhe is, is debatable, and it seems so realistic to us that it has been regarded as copy of a genuine tomb autobiography about a real courtier’s adventures, as opposed fictional poetry. The difference between fact and fiction is central to the historians’ task, but fact and fiction are surprisingly hard to tell apart. Even in our own culture - when we read Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, with its great house ‘more like a town than a house’, with deer wandering in the hall, it is obviously fantastic, until one reads an annotated edition that points out that deer have been found wandering thus at the very factual house of Knole; Orlando is fiction, but its relationship to reality is more complex than we at first suspect. Poetry is as much a material artefact of its culture as pottery, and we cannot read it without the context that shapes its meaning.

When we read Sinuhe now, however, we study it as a scholarly exercise, in editions with parallel texts laid out as a modern book. [slide of Koch edition] None of the surviving manuscripts are complete, and they are not all coherent copies, and much philology and textual-criticism is necessary before we can try to translate. Inevitably the text becomes a piece of evidence, a clinical object. Many scholars read Sinuhe to learn Egyptian grammar, to study individual idioms, a vitally necessary task, but not the reason it was written. Scholars such as the great Jan Assmann have said that Sinuhe was written to be learnt as a cultural text and not read - a text from before the era of literature. It is anachronistic to assume that the ancients had ‘literature’ in our modern sense, but it is also anachronistic to assume their texts were written to be student exercises as they are now. His analysis, while it admirably expresses the poem’s role as a self-conscious expression of its culture - is surely influenced by his own context rather than the original one of the text. We study Shakespeare in schools, but he did not write school texts. [slide of Globe] As Philippe Derchain observed the model reader of an Egyptian text was never meant to be an Egyptologist.

In assessing the role of poetry, the original social and cultural context is the determining factor, of course, but we know little about this or the original audience. We can, however, try to imagine some of the ancient readers of the tale: three stages [slide] here you see an ostracon from Deir el-Medina (c 1190BC), an apprentice scribe’s copy which though slightly incoherent gives us important evidence for the text of the final stanza. [slide of EA 562] At this period classic Middle Kingdom texts were used as texts for education, excerpts for copying - but this does not equal the original context. [slide of Deir el-medina] These readers belonged to a highly privileged ‘middle class’ of artists and craftsmen who are employed by the king and his deputies, belonging to the upper 1% of the population, although they were not part of the courtly elite.

From 19^th Dynasty Deir el-Medina also comes an ostracon of the start of the poem [slide of Cairo ostracon] which was found in the famous painted tomb of Sennedjem which overlooks his house at Deir el-Medina. [slide] The only time we have a ms, name and a location. As well as being used as a copying exercise, the tale was quoted in monumental inscriptions as here in the small temple at Abu-Simbel, showing it was still ‘read’.

Earlier still, in the late 18^th Dynasty the tomb of the army man [slide] Amenemheb at Luxor shows the tale was used as a model for Amenemheb’s own biography – reality as it were aping art.

Earlier still, we have a copy from the late Middle Kingdom 1750BC, excavated as part of a collection of papyri deposited in the tomb. This tomb [slide] is part of the Middle kingdom cemetery at Thebes now under the magazines of Ramesseum, excavated by Petrie – new French excavations at our request: The papyri [slide of P Ram] also include liturgical and magical manuscripts and magical equipment, as this figure [slide] BM project. The combination of papyri and figures suggest that the tomb-owner was a lector priest. [slide] We are in the same sort of social context as Deir el-Medina - lector priests were transmitters of written culture through temple scriptoria - but no Middle Kingdom literary manuscript gives us the name and titles of its owner, so it is all approximate.

Here is the earliest and main manuscript. [slide of Berlin papyri] The physical presence of the manuscripts is the closest we can get to the poem in many ways. The papyrus is fine, but there are errors in the copying. [slides] Hence the scribe has been denounced as incompetent by academics. But he shows high literary taste: As well as copying out Sinuhe, he also made his own copy, with some enthusiasm and haste, of another masterpiece, The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant; he abandoned this, dissatisfied by the quality of the verso, and he had got and cut down another roll that provided him with a copy of the end of the tale. He also possessed a roll with the poetic Dialogue of a Man and his Soul. When this man died, his collection of literary manuscripts was buried with him and preserves his handwriting and taste, if not his name. But where were they found? The only information we have is in the sale catalogue of the man who found them, Giovanni D’Athasnasi, who says ‘a tomb at Thebes’.[slide] Tragically they were offered for sale to the BM on several occasions, but we turned them down, and they are now in Berlin. Most probably the area was a cemetery near Deir el-Bahri, where similar papyri found in the 1970s by the Austrians. [slide] The four papyri were probably placed o top of the coffin, as par of a funerary ritual – to display his elite courtly culture – as with these other papyri. [slide] This is the tomb of a High Steward found about the same time as d’Ath – some idea of rank and context?

The owner probably lived in the reign of the great king Amenemhat III, at Thebes around 1800 bc. This reign - long and prosperous is in many ways. [slide of A III] the high point of Middle kingdom. The name and identity of the owner of the Berlin papyri has simply not survived, but his position in the state bureaucracy was high enough for him to build a tomb on the west bank of the Nile. He was probably the sort of man who could dedicate a small, but tasteful, statue of himself in the local temple – such as this statue in the BM.[slide]

If we try to excavate his context, we find that little survives at Thebes that he would have seen. The Middle Kingdom temple at Karnak is extremely ruined; [slide] the reconstructed White Chapel [slides] shows us the magnificence of the royal workshops, and also the world of Senwosret I’s court that Sinuhe is set in. His world was probably not the grandeur of such royal temples, however: I think the world of Middle Kingdom literature is most easily sensed in terms of material culture as one stands by the shrine to the local saint Heqaib [slide] at Elephantine, a temple built by the local governor Sarenput I in the reign of Senwosret I. Around the temple are Middle kingdom streets [slide] - one known as Heqaibstrasse by the excavators. This is the world of Sinuhe’s readers, not the glamour of Egypt in monumental hieroglyphs, of great state events, but the daily life of the officials, writing administrative reports in hieratic.

1 Far left Lector priest as might have read out or recited The tale of Sinuhe 13th Dynesty stela in British Museum.
2 Princess Ashayet listening to a lector priest from her 11th Dynasty sarcophagus in Cairo.

If we try to imagine how Sinuhe was read, we face further problems. Reading and recitation leaves no archaeological traces. The reading was probably an actual recitation, since other texts describe fictional literary recitals being given before the king. Such as recital is never illustrated, and literature presents itself as a purely aural performance. Singers are shown on tomb-walls, [slide] but the tale was probably not sung. Perhaps one can imagines a performance as being similar to this scene on the sarcophagus of the 11^th Dynasty queen Ashayet from Deir el-Bahri, where a man is reading out a liturgical text to her. [2] What did the audience experience when hearing such a performance. For an assessment, we can study the intertext - the textual world which shapes the poem and of which it is a part. This is the stratigraphy of the poetry - the material that allows us to interpret the surviving traces of the poem. Although little survives, this allows us to reconstruct a sense of style - which passages are most formal like royal inscriptions, which most lyrical like ritual songs, all the overtones and nuances that different passages have. One cannot translate Sinuhe into a contemporary literary manner, or recreate it in modern poetry, since we have no correlative for its style or genres; they are all different from ours. The elegance and exuberance of its diction defy translation: the sheer sound of its poetry probably dominated the ancient audience’s perception of the poem.

Most importantly in intertextual terms, Sinuhe draws on essentially Egyptian genre of a funerary Autobiography. [slide] In these commemorative tomb inscriptions the dead man addressed the passer-by with an idealised description of his virtues, as manifested in his life and career, in order to preserve his reputation and his funerary cult as on stelae and tomb-walls; the poem, however, encompasses a wide range of genres and techniques: narratives of conquest and combat, eulogies of the king, a royal decree, meditative prayers, ceremonial lyrics, and royal inscriptions such as this of Senwosret I.

The poem is concerned like an autobiography with narration of achievements, but one cannot stress enough that Sinuhe is not just a tale of adventure in foreign lands, but a meditation that probes the ideals and fears of Egyptian culture, as embodied by the king. It tells us so much of what we want to hear about Egypt, that it seems a self-conscious presentation of Egyptian culture: Sinuhe speaking from his tomb is the closest an Egyptologist can ever get to hearing a mummy speak, - and he tells us about the quintessentially Egyptian things that have fascinated the outside world: the distinctive burial practises; what it is to be an Egyptian. But the poem is not just an unmediated presentation of political or cultural values, since Sinuhe tells how for him the usual pattern of an official’s ideal life was destroyed by a moment of panic in which he fled Egypt. His life diverges from the norms both in intertextual terms, and in political terms. This moment of panic is an intensely described emotional crisis and physical collapse. What causes it - and here I side-step years of controversy among Egyptologists who have endlessly rewritten (literally) this passage to ensure that it says what they expect it to - his panic is because he overhears the news that the old king Amenemhat [slide of statue] - the upholder of the fragile cosmos against the forces of darkness and disorder - is dead. This death is narrated right at the start of the autobiography in a stately manner, but later Sinuhe overhears the king’s children being told exactly how their father died, which the original audience knew meant assassination, the ultimate horror. As Sinuhe panics and flees, the style moves away from that of an Autobiography, and instead of commemorating an ideal life ‘in truth’ as monumental discourse always does, he narrates ‘dreams’, ‘half-truths’, and things that are ‘unrepeatable’. Throughout, there is a constant tension between the ideal and the actual, as Sinuhe’s voice struggles to reassert the autobiographical style, and there is also a questioning of his motivation that is unparalleled in actual inscriptions.

Sinuhe flees Egypt in what is, in effect, an unwitting renunciation of all his culture’s values: he collapses and almost dies as he leaves, but is rescued by nomads. He abandons the fixed security of Egypt for the impermanence of life amidst the nomadic ‘sandfarers’, and he finds refuge in a substitute Egypt, in the Palestinian kingdom of Retjenu. [slide – typical view of ideology] The settings of the tale form a symmetrical pattern of Egypt-Palestine-Egypt, and this is reinforced with many ironic verbal echoes and contrasts, which combine to heighten the difference between the real with the substitute life, and his true and substitute identity, the real king of Egypt and his Palestinian patron, the ruler of Retjenu. [slide of one such on Sinai stela] No less than the later Aeneid, the Tale is a ‘web of antithetic symbols, of tensions and oppositions never finally resolved’. [slide] A strange and exotic world – certainly so to Berlin scribe who miswrites Retjenu throughout – not so familiar with world of court as he’d liked o be!

As Sinuhe struggles to establish a social identity in the midst of an alien herd, he fights a duel with a local challenger, [slide] which is structurally the central incident of the Tale, embodying the conflict between the real and the substitute, between Egypt and the desert. His victory however leads to a dramatic realisation of his true state. Sinuhe has already proved himself unable to explain his actions, and his unaccountable, unintentioned fault raises broader questions about whether the gods can be just: for how could the powers above allow an innocent man to transgress and still be just? This sudden self-awareness is the central emotional crisis of the poem. At this point, the new king miraculously summons him home, wit the promise of a lavish burial; [slide] and the poem’s happy ending is his return to Egypt for burial and resurrection. The climax is the recognition scene where Sinuhe meets the king. This is the point at which his life returns to normality, and many scholars assert that this makes the poem a propagandistic treatise asserting the mercy and greatness of the Egyptian king.

The scene comes at the end of many questions voiced by various characters all probing the meaning of Sinuhe’s life, in particular the question of motive: why - how - did Sinuhe flee? His journey to the palace is a resumption of ideological normality: the rulers that he mentioned by name while abroad become unnamed accompanying ‘Asiatics’ (B 245), and his bringing of foreigners into Egypt restores the normal ideological pattern of boundary-crossing, in which they come to Egypt with ‘tribute’, rather than Egyptians leave Egypt to live. The progress ends as Sinuhe falls prostrate before the enthroned Senwosret. [slide of palace]

Some modern readers have interpreted Sinuhe’s fear at this point as a sign of some secret guilt about his flight, but this is to interpret it in modern terms as a detective story (that’s the phrase he uses!!) - and such an approach also underestimates the awesomeness of such a context. His collapse enacts a second panic and bodily disintegration and quasi-death on leaving Egypt; the image of ‘dusk’ recalls the nighttime associations of the flight, when his heart carried him off.

The king’s subsequent speech considerately distances the consequences of the flight from Sinuhe. The scene turns about Sinuhe’s inability to find his voice when his name is officially pronounced (B 259-60). When he is asked why he ‘does not speak though your name is pronounced’ (B 259-60) his reply explicitly expresses this meeting’s parallelism with the initial panic, since he is silent because of

As the scene develops, the circumstances of the original terror are re-enacted with great symmetry, resulting in a sense of resonant closure for the reader: as in the first instance, there is a summons to the royal children. Modern readers who find the subsequent arrival of the queen and princesses charming trivialise its significance at least in part. The queen is Sinuhe’s patroness from start: Neferu the lady of honour, and she is associated with the goddess of rebirth. She and the children shriek when they finally recognise him, and while this is a charming humorous touch, it also demonstrates how dramatically Sinuhe has changed physically: his paradoxical state of being a loyal wrongdoer is revealed in the physical terms of an Egyptian who appears, unrecognisably, as an aged foreigner. Both aspects are of course relevant; there is no need to posit a single tone

The princesses enact a rite of rebirth of a type known from tomb scenes and stelae. [slide] The princesses act as Hathor and offer ornaments to the king in return for him being gracious to their old servant:

Your hands upon this beauty, enduring king,

these insignia of the Lady of Heaven! .....

Give breath to him who suffocates!

Give back the good we give on this good day -

present us with North Wind’s Son,

the barbarian born in the Homeland...

In this multi-layered lyric, Sinuhe is renamed as ‘Simehyt = Son of the Northwind’, presumably evoking a practice of Asiatics adopting new names in Egypt. The renaming expresses the paradox of a ‘bowman born in the Homeland (T3-mrj)’, summarising the poem’s entire paradox and echoing the central section’s contrast between the Egyptian and foreigners. The transformation also evokes the concern of pessimistic literature with the invasion of Egypt by such Asiatics. The song renders the incident as almost an epiphany - lyric, erotic, and sacred - in part breaking the hitherto naturalistic mode. The gods are suddenly present in person in the form of the king and queen - , providing a sense of immediate and benign reality against which the past exile is dismissed as a ‘dream’, elsewhere an image of fallibility of human life. If Sinuhe’s misfortunes cause the reader to wonder if the gods are just, this reasserts their justice. Echoes of earlier incidents abound, but most significantly, in the song the princesses offer a final explanation of Sinuhe’s panic and flight:

In this formulation the panic - the symptom of chaos - is accommodated within the order of the court; the king is now the god who controls Sinuhe’s life. In terms of specific details, however, this explanation differs slightly from Sinuhe’s original account, in which it was fear of the interregnum - rather than of ‘this god’ - that inspired the flight. Such fear was a realistic reaction, as we know from inscriptions recording the conflicts in Senwosret’s reign (Tod). The symmetry of emplotment induces awareness of this discrepancy that is then swept away as the king responds more broadly:

This resonant statement, which is a concluding climax to the princesses’ coup de theatre, moves the action forward by reassuring the fearful supplicant, but it also dismisses the tale’s entire panic-driven plot and Sinuhe’s narration, which the king earlier urged and enabled (‘Raise him up and let him speak’: B 256-7) as no more than incoherent gibbering.

3 far left Throne room at the Palace of Ramses III at his Medinet Habu temple, similar to that in which Sinuhe was received by Senwosret I.
4 Dr Parkinson reading a copy of The Tale of Sinuhe in the Chapel of Haqaib, 2001.

The incident dismisses any idea of the unjust fearfulness of the royal order: the life of Sinuhe is a fine example of propaganda for the 12th dynasty. But would the audience have been inspired to loyalism to his king by reading this passage, or would it have operated on a more personal level, producing relief and joy at another human being’s happiness - the relief at the end of Shakespearean comedy. That we can’t know, of course, but total closure is resisted, and minor elements of the plot are left unresolved: Sinuhe’s new name establishes a tension between his name as given in the opening titles: which is now his true name? The punning new name, Northwind’s-Son turns the allusion of his original name (Sycomore’s-Son) to Hathor as the goddess of that tree into an allusion to her as goddess of the northwind who presides at once over his rebirth as an Egyptian but also over his travels in the north. The new name thus does not completely negate Sinuhe’s experiences, even though the rebirth distances him from the preceding narrative.

The final stanzas of the poem lead the reader swiftly from the recognition scene through a series of courtly dwellings, into a description of the tomb which the king bestows as a sign of his favour - imagined as one of the subsidiary pyramids at el-Lisht. [slide of Lisht] The conventional concluding words of an autobiography become here hugely resonant, and the poem ends exactly as it began, with Sinuhe in his tomb, addressing the tomb-visitor. In formal terms, the description of the tomb-building completes a generic progress back towards the biographical genre, which can include building motifs, as in the tomb inscription of Sarenput I. [slide of tomb: showing inscription just over doorway]. The description of the king’s actions for Sinuhe crystallises into the final formulaic:

This conventional end to Sinuhe’s travels does not negate his exceptional experiences, since he explicitly comments on his exceptional treatment by the king. The metaphor for death as ‘landing’ after voyage is disturbingly appropriate.

Again one must think beyond philology at this point, but ask what would the audience feel? - he is in a sense back where he started, listening to a tomb biography. In objective terms, Sinuhe has not changed; the convention of presenting the titles that one attains at the end of a career at the start of a biography further neutralises any sense of transformation. Nothing has happened, but there is a sense in which everything has happened (just as the final aria at the end of the Goldberg Variations is the same as the opening aria, but does not sound the same after 30 variations). The tomb- with the inscription we are supposedly hearing is a wonderfully emotional ending, so different from the effect of official descriptions of tomb-building.

This is clearer with lighter tales, such as those of P. Westcar [slide] where literature is associated her and in other texts with the good old King Sneferu [slide] who wants to see young women in nets rowing him, to provide hi relief for boredom. This is the framework – entertainment, pleasure, relaxation: but also a dark entertainment, since in one text he is given a dark prophecy of an age of darkness engulfing his land.

Modern readings [slide] are embedded in another frame altogether now – we read these texts in academic editions, in limited contexts – universities, museums etc. We forget the living context and seek to erect historical facts out of fiction. Excavators The Tale’s description of Sinuhe’s tomb places it among the subsidiary pyramids around the pyramid of Senwosret at el-Lisht. [slide] This area was excavated in 1907-8 by a team from the Metropolitan Museum, slide who ‘undertook intensive excavation work in order to establish the identity of the owner of pyramid 5, because for unknown reasons they had assumed it to be the tomb of the famous Sinuhe’. The burial of a non-royal person in a pyramid and in such a place is extraordinary and would probably have struck the original audience as a sign of the tale’s fictionality. This misguided archaeological search is in some ways a concrete embodiment of many philologists’ search for the master copy, the uncorrupted Urtext, [slide] as imagined by scholars such as Barns, Gunn and (to some extent) Gardiner. As Jonathan Goldberg has commented on early modern studies: ‘a textual criticism based on a search for an irrecoverable urtext has committed itself to an unfounded Platonism’. All that survives of Sinuhe are the records of various individuals’ experiences of the poem at different times and in different places, and also in - un-surprisingly - different versions.

This reshaping of the text, however, is true of all readers - we appropriate the meaning when we interpret a text. We can see this most spectacularly with Sinuhe by comparing the original with the 1940s rewriting [slide] of it by the Finnish author Mika Waltari as a historical novel, when he moved Sinuhe’s narrative into the more glamorous Amarna period, and utterly rewrote the ending. Influenced by the tale’s similarities to the Exodus narrative and the Biblical attitudes to Egyptian culture as an emblem of slavery, he made Sinuhe die abroad in splendid existentialist isolation, and turned him from a minor courtier into a proto-modern man, a scientist, sorry Doctor. For the modern audience, the value of Sinuhe’s return is always the key problem - it can’t be a happy ending it can only be propaganda! A good historical novel, but very much a post-war one in which the theme is a distrust of all ideologies and governments. As you see, his reshaping culminated most tackily in a deeply regrettable Hollywood epic The Egyptian, [slide] in which Akhenaten dies as a spokesman of US Christianity, and liberalism. It betrays our preoccupations when dealing with the ancient world, the exotic spectacle of strange larger than life individuals behaving in a foreign manner - or as the video box has ‘a bawdy blazing blockbuster, filled with torrid passion, merciless brutality and the wonders of the ancient world’ (like describing Austen’s Pride and prejudice as a ‘bodice-ripper about serial sex’). And this exotic splendour, of course includes, sex: [slide] which is completely lacking form the original. Sex is a preoccupation of movie -goers, while objective facts are the preoccupation (they say) of scholars, but neither were the concerns of the original actors. We have conducted an archaeology of texts, and not of poetry - of philological and historical fact instead of the world of experiences the poems evoked in their living audiences.

In modern Egypt, the poem has fared better. There is a superb short story by Naguib Mahfouz, which rewrites the tale to suggest the other story of the queen’s heart (she loved Sinuhe). [slide] It is as much as rewriting as Waltari, but done by a master writer, and quite beautiful. It is part of his early work, before he started on modern Egyptian settings (recently translated by Raymond Stock, Mahfouz’s official biographer).

What I find most characteristic of the poem is not the presentation of Egyptian culture, but the voice of Sinuhe himself: the reader overhears conversations, secret communiques, allusions to speaking, as if the poem is about finding a voice for an individual among the various forms of official discourse. (Especially true in performance) The great novel Memoirs of Hadrian [slide] as a portrait of a voice and that phrase of Marguerite Yourcenar’s is a phrase that has much relevance to Sinuhe. Her magisterial survey of how one must balance different concerns when trying to read a work of the past and recreate it, is a wonderful description of the task of the historian and translator as much as that of the novelist. Her novel offers points of comparison in many ways, being concerned with the fact ‘ce qui compte est ce qui ne figurera pas dans les biographies officielles, ce qu’on n’inscrit pas sur les tombes’. The Egyptians were more aware than many Egyptologists of the boasting nature of monumental discourse. The kaleidoscopic range of genres in Sinuhe gives the reader a sense of crossing more than physical boundaries that no domain of discourse is of restricted access to individual personality. The tale that can seem propagandistic at first sight, retains a potentially subversive voice, and unconstrained by ideology. In particular, the treatment of the autobiography genre seems designed to suggest the limitations of official discourse to present human experience. In contrast to the autobiography genre, which normally advocates the values of self-control and silence, the emotional centres of the poem are those of cultural doubt, the moments when Sinuhe’s emotions are in crisis, his body in disarray, or his mind fluctuating as he speaks. The very status of the individual’s voice is thus rendered problematic: it utters not just a narration of strange events, but a struggle to find and define itself. The densely allusive texture of the poem, full of ironic self-echoes, heightens the tensions inherent in a search for meaning, while the whole discursive culture is centred around the uncertain impulses of the human heart: in Wolfgang Iser’s words ‘literature confronts people with themselves’, and in Sinuhe’s voice with all its uncertainties the audience was invited - and still is - to recognise one related to its own.

This reading reverses the paradigm established in the 1950s by the great Georges Posener, and opens up the potential dissent of a text usually assumed to be propagandistic, or at least normative. This is my reading, and like all reading, it is very subjective - your view of say Vergils’ Aeneas is different from mine - is he a heroically determined, or despicably cold in his treatment of Dido? or both - your picture of how attractive Jane Austen’s Mr Knightly is also varies. Reading is a dialogue between author and reader. Emotional involvement is integral to the reading process - Sinuhe relies on our empathy with the hero, and our emotional responses are vital factors in the way the poem is constructed. Sinuhe is not a technical exercise in genre, but each shift of the intertext strikes at the reader’s heart, and so one must respond in a personal manner. The reader’s search for meaning echoes Sinuhe’s in the poem. He speaks in the first person in a struggle to find himself: as the queen cries when she sees him again

and the poem constantly tells of difficulties in speaking:

Such aspects are more noticeable when the tale is performed – I think here of modern Egyptian performers, such as the rabab players or the great Egyptian diva, Umm Khalthoum. [slide] We have experimented with actors reciting a translation of the tale, and the results have been remarkable. [slide] The text that takes weeks to read in class with students speaks out for 35 minutes, and becomes rapid and fascinating. The text that has been dissected by textual criticism sounds like a swiftly paced unity. It was of course not a period performance, since we used two actors to give variety for an audience not used to listening to a single work recited for such a period.

I remain convinced Sinuhe is much more is usually claimed for it. It is not just a fine Egyptian text, but is poetry of the highest order, the equal of Milton, although it comes from a very different world from ours. We can of course never reconstruct what a Middle Kingdom person experienced. Our subjective experiences are very different from theirs, but all readers’ experiences are subjective, and in our subjectivity we have something in common with the ancient readers. [slide of ms in hands] In reading a copy of this poem, carefully inducing, intuiting and imagining what we cannot objectively know, we are in effect reading it over the shoulders of the ancients. We thus draw a little closer to conceiving that experience, since it enables us to engage in a dialogue with the ancient author, as the ancient readers did, a dialogue that asks us to consider who we are and what we are doing a parts of our own culture.

Which returns us to that disturbing question: why do we read these texts? All reading is to some extent an appropriation of the original text by the reader. The institutional frame for the texts is now the school, or university; we study and do not read, and it is we who learn cultural norms (and not necessarily the original audience). Good objective scholarship - publishing a text with a solid philological commentary - runs the danger of leaving the texts for dead. As an end in itself, scholarship alone - although an absolutely essential prerequisite - is perhaps not enough for these ‘texts’, as they were conceived by their authors. The language used in much Egyptology can be dismissive, withholding our language of cultural privilege: We have art, fictionality and literature; they have ritual, cultural texts. (And it’s a nasty scholarly word, that ‘texts’- quite enough to make any author of a ‘text’ spin in his grave). Such attitudes are conceivably justifiable only because the Middle Kingdom is long dead: if such language was used of a living culture, it would verge on the unethical.

Empathy is the ultimate anachronism in academic terms, but it is necessary, and is found with Geertz: ‘the culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong’. Without an imaginative focus on practical concerns of the texts, their circulation, context, and the experience of reading them we can scarcely hope to understand them. Desires - intellectual, entertaining, fully human rarely acknowledged by western scholars. We may defend the withholding of our language of privilege (wit, fiction, humour, art, aesthetics and literature) as historically objective, scientific, and un-anachronistic, but without such talking with the dead, without using our own language, any historical discipline is perhaps rather dishonourable, if not meaningless. We must engage on what common ground there is: the search for objectivity in scholarship is a prerequisite but one can move beyond the limitations of academic discourse in modelling reality by cautiously engaging in speculative metaphors, such as Marg. Yourcenar [slide] envisaged by invoking not only ‘érudition’, but an imaginative ‘magie sympathique’. I conclude with a passage which describes how our culture makes use of the ancient world for its own particular ends: Louis Macneice’s Autumn Journal published in 1939. Macneice is famous for his poetic declaration that the world is ‘incorrigibly plural’, but he was also a university classicist, and so well aware of reality and academic schemas:

The Glory that was Greece: put it in a syllabus, grade it

To train the mind or even point a moral

Models of logic and lucidity, dignity, sanity,

Though there were exceptions of course but only exceptions -

So the humanist in his room with Jacobean panels

Chops the ancient world to turn a sermon

To the greater glory of God.

But I can do nothing so useful or so simple;

And when I should remember the paragons of Hellas

Of the crooks, the adventurers, the opportunists,

The hair-splitters, the pedants, the hard-boiled sceptics

Of the demagogues and the quacks; the women pouring

And the trimmers at Delphi and the dummies at Sparta and lastly

And how one can imagine oneself among them

It was all so unimaginably different

Dr Richard Parkinson