Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs_ A Popular History of Ancient Egypt - Barbara Mertz [64]
The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant must have been the special bane of little Egyptian schoolboys. It was copied extensively and used as a school exercise; its style is so confoundedly literary and artificial that a translation cannot be read by a non-Egyptologist without pages of commentary explaining the figures of speech. Some of these, let us add, are not precisely clear even to an Egyptologist.
A peasant of the Fayum is on his way to market with a train of donkeys when he encounters a petty official belonging to the house hold of Rensi, the great steward of the king. This petty official, whose name is Thutinakht, covets the peasant’s property and concocts a dastardly plan; he spreads linen across the path, forcing the peasant to lead his donkeys along the edge of the field. One of the small sad animals succumbs to temptation and snatches a bite of grain, whereupon Thutinakht confiscates the whole caravan and drives the protesting peasant away. After several days of fruitless appeal to the unscrupulous official, the desperate peasant seeks out the grand steward. He addresses this mighty man in a speech so eloquent and so poignant that the steward is loath to relinquish the plea sure of listening to him speak. So he makes no answer to the plea. The peasant, who can certainly count persistence among his character traits, returns again and again to the seemingly indifferent steward and addresses him in no fewer than eight fine speeches. In the meantime the steward has reported the peasant’s plight, and his eloquence, to the king, who orders that a copy be made of each beautiful word. He also orders that the peasant’s family be fed while the orations are being delivered—a nice touch, which we might not have expected from a tyrant. The story has a happy ending and even a touch of poetic justice: the peasant gets his property back and is further enriched by the goods of the greedy official who robbed him.
In the course of his travail, the peasant makes use of every device to sway his impassive audience—threats, pleas, exhortations, flattery. Among his arguments is an appeal to a more solemn matter: justice for the sake of justice. “Righteousness descends with the doer thereof into the tomb, and he is remembered because of it.” The argument of the peasant, and the events of the tale, pronounce the same conclusion—justice is the same for rich and poor alike. It is a conclusion that may startle us, coming at this time and this place; perhaps in no other culture did the monarch enjoy such absolute power as in ancient Egypt, where dogma proclaimed him a veritable god. But we have seen hints of this ideal in other texts and in other areas of life, so we can understand why some scholars venture to use the word democratic about certain aspects of this particular period.
Even Paradise begins to lower its barriers, for the prerogatives of immortality have been usurped by the nonroyal dead. Here a peculiar twist is given to our notion of equality; all men were equal, because every man was a king. The Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom had assured the ruler of life everlasting; the Coffin Texts of Middle Kingdom commoners endow them with a similar privilege. The soul of the dead man must face a judgment, but the judge is no longer Re, as in earlier times. He is now Osiris, ruler of the kingdom of the dead. Since the deceased was also Osiris, imitating the status of the dead king, this presents a picture that may be confusing to modern eyes—Osiris the deceased being judged by Osiris the god. But it did not bother the Egyptians. Very few inconsistencies bothered them.
Of course when we talk about commoners