THE ELOQUENT PEASANT
By Alan H. Gardiner, D.Litt.
Among the few literary compositions which have survived from the Middle Kingdom, the tale of the Eloquent Peasant has the distinction of being one of the longest and the most complete. The two fine Berlin papyri which contain the bulk of the text comprise three hundred and seventy-eight lines, if we disregard the overlap, and except towards the end are practically free from lacunae. To this number of lines have to be added fifty-one more, from that Ramesseum papyrus which, by a miraculous chance, has restored to us the lost beginning, not only of the Peasant, but also of the story of Sinuhe. Here then, dating from a period when literary papyri are not wont to show deep-seated corruptions, we have a composition consisting of nearly four hundred and thirty lines, an absolutely invaluable source of information for the grammarian and the lexicographer. But unhappily, much of the book has resisted previous attempts at translation. Twenty years ago scholars were accustomed to stop short after the introductory narrative, the peasant’s nine petitions to his judge being deemed wholly untranslatable. At that time, however, Egyptian philological studies were making rapid strides, and a young German student, Friedrich Vogelsang, had the courage to take the story as the theme for his doctoral dissertation (1904). Not many years later, in editing a photographic facsimile of the texts in collaboration with the present writer, he prefixed to it the first attempt at a complete rendering[1]. In this first attempt so much of the meaning was elicited with comparative certainty that Maspero was able to include a French version, here and there displaying improvements, in the fourth edition of his Contes populaires de l'Égypte ancienne. In 1913 Vogelsang published his revised translation and commentary, a valuable though by no means impeccable piece of work[2]. Since that date the only contributions to the subject have been a valuable review by Grapow[3] three short articles of my own[4] and a very free translation, based on Vogelsang and Haspero, by Sir Ernest Budge[5].
The new rendering which I venture to submit to the readers of this Journal is the outcome of some weeks of close study during the past summer, when an opportunity presented itself of collating the original manuscripts in Berlin. I am deeply conscious of the deficiencies of my effort, and would gladly have added a few more to the notes of interrogation which I have sprinkled so freely over it. There are whole passages where I am
- ↑ Hieratische Papyrus aus den königlichen Museen zu Berlin, vierter Band: Literarische Texte des Mittleren Reiches, herausgegeben von Adolf Erman. 1. Die Klagen des Bauern, bearbeitet von F. Vogelsang und Alan H. Gardiner, Leipzig, 1908.
- ↑ K. Sethe, Untersuchungen zur Geschichte und Altertumskunde Aegyptens, Band VI. Kommentar zu den Klagen des Bauern, von Friedrich Vogelsang, Leipzig, 1913.
- ↑ Gottingische gelehrte Anzeigen, 1913, nr. 12, pp. 735–51. I have found nothing helpful in the article by Lexa, Recueil de Travaux, 34, 206–31.
- ↑ Proc. Soc. Bibl. Arch., 35 (1913), 264–76; 36 (1915), 15–23; 69–74.
- ↑ The Literature of the Egyptians, 1914, pp. 169–84. A summary, with some quotations, in Breasted, Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (1912), 216–26.
