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This story is known to us not from historical documents, but from two literary texts. The one that tells of the assassination is called The Teaching of Amenemhat, and purports to be a series of admonitions from the king to his son. There is bitterness in Amenemhat’s words; he gave to the beggar and nourished the orphan, but those whom he trusted rose against him and those to whom he gave his hand came by night to murder him. “Do not fill your heart with a brother,” he concludes. “Know not a friend, nor make intimates for yourself. When you sleep, guard your heart yourself, for a man has no adherents on the day of evil.”

It may seem somewhat startling that this discourse is written in the first person, by the murdered king, and it has led some scholars to believe that Amenemhat was not killed by the conspirators, but lived on to write his admonitions. However, poetic license allows a voice from the tomb even in our own literature. The death of the king by assassination fits in with the second half of the story, for it is unlikely that if Amenemhat had died peacefully in his bed his son would have received the news with such alarm, or hurried away from his army to take possession of the throne unless that throne had been threatened.

The dramatic night march of Senusert is told in one of the most famous of all Egyptian literary works, The Story of Sinuhe. Sir Alan Gardiner, the doyen of Egyptian philology, considered this a tale that should rank as a world classic, and his opinion was shared by Rudyard Kipling, who was himself no slouch at writing good stories.

At the beginning of the tale we find Sinuhe, overseer of the king in the land of the Asiatics, taking his ease near the royal tent as the army made camp on its way back from the war with the Libyans. He saw the messengers from Ittawi arrive, and heard them speak to Senusert. The results were electric. “My heart pounded,” Sinuhe admits. “My arms went limp, trembling fell upon all my limbs.”

Such bodily enfeeblement might be due to shock—very proper when hearing of the death of one’s king. But Sinuhe’s next move makes us wonder: “In leaps and bounds, I sought a hiding place; I put myself between two bushes in order to separate myself from the road.”

Having made a good start, Sinuhe did not stop; he crossed the Nile and kept right on going, through the Walls of the Ruler which marked the eastern boundary of Egypt, and out into the wilderness of Sinai.

The rest of the story is wonderful fun to read, but we will have to pass over it briefly because it has no bearing on political events. Sinuhe rose to great eminence among the “Asiatics”; at last he settled down somewhere in Syria and took himself a wife or two. But although he was honored in his adopted country, his heart increasingly yearned for home. And, with the pleasing harmony found only in fairy tales, the all-knowing king of Egypt got wind of his old servant’s heimweh. He sent messengers to invite Sinuhe back to Egypt.

The king’s letter is marvelously tactful, but it asks a question to which we ourselves would like to know the answer. “What have you done, that action should be taken against you? You have not blasphemed, you have not spoken against the council of nobles….”

What ever their cause, Sinuhe’s apprehensions were removed by the letter. To return to his home was no small thing, but his greatest reason for rejoicing was the prospect of laying his bones within the blessed soil of Egypt. He was so moved when at last he was brought face-to-face with the majesty of the king that he was on the verge of collapsing, and could not speak. The king received him kindly and sought to relieve the tension by summoning the royal children and the queen, whom Sinuhe had once served.

“Here is Sinuhe,” said royalty affably, “returned as an Asiatic, a true son of the Bedouin.” The queen shrieked aloud, and the royal children exclaimed, with one voice: “Is it really he?”

This is a real Egyptian happy ending, but we cannot help