jꜥ tw jmj mw ḥr ḏbꜥw.k jḫ wšb.k wšd.t(w).k mdw.k n nswt jb.k m-ꜥ.k wšb.k nn njtjt
Wash yourself, put water on your fingers, so you might answer when you are addressed, speak to the king with your mind in your possession, and answer without stammering.
One who is averted of face against feeding the heart (i.e. one who doesn’t indulge himself), the harsh man has to be more kindly to him than his (own) mother.[4]
Archaic or greatly restricted in usage by Middle Egyptian. The perfect has mostly taken over the functions of the perfective, and the subjunctive and periphrastic prospective have mostly replaced the prospective.
Declines using third-person suffix pronouns instead of adjectival endings: masculine .f/.fj, feminine .s/.sj, dual .sn/.snj, plural .sn.
^ The beginning of this passage, encompassing the glyphs
, seems corrupt and has been emended in various ways. Gardiner takes it as an otherwise unattested word *ḫtr(“to be powerless”) and the entire passage as ḫtr.n ḥr r dfꜣ jb(“the face is powerless(?) over against one stolid(?)”). Allen restores it as ḫrtwr, as given here, based on the determinatives (with the assumption that the scribe forgot a
). Lichtheim, following Feder, reads ḫrr(“gentle/meek”) and considers dfꜣ-jb to mean something like ‘timidity, slowness’, reading the whole as ‘He who is gentle, even timid…’.
