How to survive in ancient Egypt
Beware the crocodile of resentment
The Book:
The Tale of Sinuhe: And Other Ancient Egyptian Poems 1940-1640 BC
Translated by R. B. Parkinson
Oxford University Press
1997
The Talk:
“We thrill at the weirdness of the heretic king Akhenaten and all his works, but do not question what it is like to live under a despotic, fanatical ruler (despite the modern parallels, such as in North Korea, that fill our television screens).” ~Toby Wilkinson, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt
During the Middle Kingdom era, the population of Egypt was around one million people. That’s about the population of Delaware. You could fit twenty Middle Kingdom’s into the New York City metro.
And yet that civilization lasted for three thousand years. You could fit six United States histories into ancient Egyptian history. And the mystique generated by its culture was so powerful that it dazzled Shakespeare’s audiences, Napoleon’s armies, and Netflix subscribers today.
However, in his book The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, historian Toby Wilkinson reminds us that what we are looking at when we look at pyramids and tombs and the like is official state propaganda. Underneath the giant monuments to eternal order and divine perfection, most of the population lived in abject squalor.
But what did it feel like to live somewhere in between, among the inner and outer orbits of the divine king? We have a remarkable peek into their lives, beginning in the Middle Kingdom, through the preserved papyrus manuscripts discovered in the tombs of the aristocracy. R. B. Parkinson’s collection brings together all substantial surviving works from this period. It’s not very much—its 300 pages are mostly footnotes—but what we do have hints at a thriving literary culture through which Egyptians attempted to sort out how to personally live, survive, and thrive within a complex, self-contained system of ritual, magic, and myth.
Love Big Pharaoh
In many ways, reading these poems reminded me of the novel 1984. In Orwell’s novel, the main character Winston Smith is a member of the Party. There is, in fact, a whole society outside the Party, out beyond the periphery, but Smith can’t imagine ever living outside of the world he knows. It’s a world of paranoia, in which it’s nearly impossible to trust anyone completely. For a portion of the book, Smith believes he can find someway to carve out a private life inside this surveillance state existence, but that dream is ultimately an illusion.
In ancient Egypt, the king and God were one in the same. That meant that political theory and theology were the exact same activity. Political anxiety in proximity to the king was spiritual anxiety about the righteousness of one’s heart. The author of the The ‘Loyalist’ Teaching writes:
Praise the king within your bodies!
Be close to the majesty in your hearts!
Put terror of him throughout the day!
Create acclaim for him at every season!
He is the Perception which is in breasts:
his eyes probe every body.
He is the Sungod under whose governance one lives:
the man under his shade will have great posessions.
He is the Sungod by whose rays one sees:
he illumines the Two Lands more than the sun.
To ask about the problem of evil—”Why does God allow evil to happen?”—is the same as asking, “Why does the king allow evil to happen?” And a few of the tales and dialogues in this anthology deal with that very question, properly couched in non-subversive praise of the king.
Trust no one
Much of the literature deals with advice for elite nobles, how to live well in a dangerous world where reversals of fortune are common. Although we don’t know who actually wrote many of these lists of proverbs, the genre is typically framed as a father giving advice to his son. The author of The Teaching of Amenemhat writes:
Trust no brother! Know no friend!
Make for yourself no intimates—this is of no avail!
Distrust of others is a common theme throughout the teachings. The Teaching of King Merikare says:
The life of the clear-sighted man will be respected;
he who trusts will suffer.
Speak little
The Teaching of the Vizier Ptahhotep was my favorite piece in the book. The author threads the theme of hearing throughout the text. Speaking gets you into trouble, but listening has countless benefits. He cautions the reader to become an “artist of hearing.”
For example, when a petitioner comes to you, listen even if you can’t help them.
Everything for which a man petitioned may not come about,
but a good hearing is what soothes the heart.
Similarly, when you are in a council, talk as little as possible, and only when you in fully command of your material:
If you are an excellent man,
who sits on the council of his lord,
concentrate on excellence!
You should be quiet! This is better than a potent herb.
You should speak when you know that you understand:
only the skilled artist speaks in the council.
Speaking is harder than any craft:
only the man who understands it puts it to work for him.
Being silent and listening to others increases your own influence and power. The author puts it succinctly: “The hearer becomes one who is heard.”
He also promotes generosity through the text, as a kind of insurance policy. One memorable line goes:
No matter comes awry in the midst of favours—
But the lurking crocodile emerges, and resentment exists.
Do Truth
The idea of Maat is central to the Egyptian philosophy of life. According to Parkinson its meanings include “truth, right, justice, equity, reciprocity, and social and cosmic order.” The Teaching of King Merikare bids the reader:
Do Truth so that you may endure upon the earth!
Quieten the weeper! Do not oppress the widow!
Do not expel a man from his father’s property!
In this particular case, “Truth” sounds something like righteousness or mercy. In other places, it seems to suggest loyalty to the king or giving a proper response to an action done to you.
The afterlife was originally promised only to the king, but over time it became the expectation of the upper levels of the social order. In the way that stoicism gave Roman aristocrats something to hold onto in world of political intrigue, the Egyptian afterlife promised a final accounting of one’s time on earth, in a world that was filled with unfairness and injustice. The Day of Pain (a personal day of judgement after death) terrorized the conscience of the unrighteous and offered solace for those who who did the right thing. From King Merikare:
It is for eternity that a [man] will be alive;
the departure of him who issued from the Creator will be like the release of a favoured man.
Clearly for some, death was a welcome relief—if you considered yourself good. In Wilkinson’s history that I quoted at the beginning, he writes:
“In time the heart itself came to stand for the deceased and his deeds, and the pictorial representation of the weighing of the heart against the feather of truth became an essential image on funerary papyri, an encapsulation of the final judgement.”
Over time the external performance of the royal cult evolved into an inner journey of the heart, one that required self-scrutiny and constant mindfulness.
A single day gives to eternity,
an hour benefits the future.
Or as Prince would put it in his classic 1984 song:
Dearly beloved
We are gathered here today
To get through this thing called lifeElectric word life
That means forever and that's a mighty long time
But I'm here to tell you
There's something else
The after world
Related:
Gore Vidal's Creation: An entertaining adventure tale of the ancient world
Hypatia of Alexandria: A philosopher for polarized times
Business Secrets of The Pharaohs (Amazon)
I don't know if it's in there, but the ancient Egyptian text I love the best is from the tomb of a high court official: he inscribes in stone the full text of a note sent to him by a nine year old pharaoh
“You also say in this letter that you have brought a dwarf of divine dances from the land of the horizon-dwellers. Like the dwarf whom the Treasurer of the God, Baurded, brought from Punt in the time of King Isesi....
Now come northward at once to the Court. You must bring the dwarf, alive, sound and well to rejoice and gladden the heart of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt.
When he comes down with you into the ship, appoint reliable people who shall be beside him on each side of the vessel and take care lest he should fall into the water.
When he sleeps at night, appoint trustworthy people who shall sleep beside him. Inspect him ten times a night because my Majesty desires to see this dwarf more than the all products of Sinai and Punt.
If you arrive at the Court and the dwarf is with you, alive, and well, my Majesty will make you many excellent honours to be an ornament for the son of your son for ever. All the people will say when they hear what my Majesty does for you: “Is there anything like this which was done for the privy counsellor Harkhuf, when he came down from Yam.”