User:Vorziblix/Shipwrecked Sailor

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This is an edition of the early Middle Kingdom Egyptian Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor.

Hieroglyphic transcription of the original hieratic text is done with reference to the hieratic as published in Goleniščev 1913 and 1912 as well as the hieroglyphic transcription given in Allen 2015 (but with differences in treating the hieratic). By technological necessity, vertical columns of text have been converted into horizontal lines. Transliteration and translation are my own, but with some consultation of Allen 2015, Nederhof 2006, and Lichtheim 1975, as well as occasional reference to the TLA, for notes and ideas where interpretation was difficult or ambiguous. The original text is separated into sections by coloring the first few words of each section red; the text as given here is divided into these sections. Since this translation is made for use in Wiktionary quotations, it errs more on the side of being literal than literary.

The line breaks here are made for convenience, but comments of numbers in the wiki markup of the hieroglyphic text indicate the original line numbering.

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Colophon

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Notes

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  1. ^ No existing interpretation of this last clause is fully satisfactory, and the text may be corrupt; if the verb is imperfective, the grammar is explicable, but the sense (‘our land, we reach it’) seems at odds with earlier statements that the expedition has already reached home. An interpretation as perfective would imply a general past (‘our land, we reached it’) rather than a perfect meaning (‘our land, we have reached it’), given that the verb is an intransitive verb of motion, so it also remains problematic. A perfect pḥ.n.n would fit the context and grammar perfectly but would require an emendation in the text. It is worth noting that the expression tꜣ.n (“our land”) is probably unparalleled in Egyptian literature (per Simpson, William (2003) The Literature of Ancient Egypt, page 51), further suggesting something is amiss with our current interpretations.
  2. ^ The beginning can alternatively be read as an imperfective emphatic jrr.k ‘You do …’.
  3. ^ Rather than an unmarked perfective in a main clause (which is rare in Middle Egyptian), the first verb fꜣ.t(w) might be better interpreted as an imperfective subordinate to the preceding sentence, thus ‘… the wind being lifted …’.
  4. ^ This sentence is extremely unclear. The main verb is here read as a false dual writing for the imperfective participle of ḥwj, but some authors instead postulate that it represents a separate reduplicated verb ḥwḥw (as per Allen) or ḥḥ – which is, however, otherwise unattested. The meaning of ḫt (“wood, stick, tree”) in context is also debated: it is variously interpreted as a reference to the ship’s mast or, more straightforwardly, to a piece of wood. None of these interpretations makes the sense particularly clear: ‘broke the wave’ is at best a guess for what ‘struck it’ might mean. Lichtheim accordingly amends the text to jn ḫt ḥw.s sw (“The mast – it (the wave) struck (it)”), but this would require jr rather than jn.
  5. ^ The verb form of the first clause is questionable. It looks like a ‘narrative’ infinitive, but this would be expected toward the beginning of a section or chapter of narrative, not in the middle, unrubricated. Other possible interpretations include a perfective relative form in a nominal sentence (not likely because an inalienable subject would be expected), a misreading by the scribe of šd.n.j, or an infinitive continuing the previous sentence rather than starting a new one: rdj.n.j r tꜣ n wr ḥr ꜥwj.j šdt.j ḏꜣ sḫpr.n.j ḫt (“… I put (some) on the ground because of the great amount on my arms and (because of) my taking of a fire-stick. I made a fire …”).
  6. ^ This can alternatively be interpreted as a noun clause rather than direct quotation, thus ‘I thought it was a wave of the sea’. See Uljas, Sami (2007) The Modal System of Earlier Egyptian Complement Clauses: A Study in Pragmatics in a Dead Language, page 40, for discussion favoring the direct-quote interpretation.
  7. ^ There are a number of peculiarities in this passage. The construction nn wj ḥr sḏm is unusual; nj sḏm.n.j would be expected. This is made doubly odd by the apparently superfluous pronoun
    A1
    attached to sḏm. Per Allen 2015, ‘not knowing oneself’ is also an idiom for fainting; if the last clause is a separate sentence, perhaps the intended interpretation is ‘―You’re speaking to me, but I’m not hearing it, though I am before you.―(Then) I fainted.’
  8. ^ The last clause is very unclear, with many possible interpretations. Because ktt (“little”) is followed by a
    B1
    determinative, it has sometimes been interpreted as nominalized and taken to mean ‘lowly woman’, with zꜣt ktt then meaning ‘daughter of a lowly woman’. The last word in the clause has been variously read as zšꜣ (“prayer”) or šsꜣ (“skill, experience”), allowing meanings that range from ‘by prayer’ to ‘from experience’ to ‘in wisdom’ for its prepositional phrase. Finally, jnt.n.j as a relative form can be read as ‘I had gotten’, though some authors instead take it as ‘I had fetched (i.e. to safety)’, but it can alternatively be read as a perfective passive participle with following dative jnt n.j ‘brought to me’. Thus, it is unclear both whose the daughter was, and whether she was saved and by whom.
  9. ^ Or ‘who loves people’, depending on whether mrr is an active relative form or a passive participle.
  10. ^ Or ‘You aren’t abundant in myrrh …’, if the initial particle is read as negative nj instead of interrogative jn. The expected negative particle for such a clause would be nn, so an interrogative is more plausible. For a detailed discussion see Scalf, Foy (2009) “Is That a Rhetorical Question? Shipwrecked Sailor (pHermitage 1115) 150 Reconsidered” in Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde, volume 136, issue 2, pages 155–159.
  11. ^ Or, with the latter clauses forming a balanced sentence, ‘Then I went. Just as I put myself in a tall tree, so I made out those who were inside it’.
  12. ^ This is the interpretation that the grammar best fits, and it goes along with the earlier promise in the story of being buried in one’s own town. The rejuvenation is then that of the afterlife. However, alternative proposals have read the last clause as rnpy.k m ẖnw qrs.t(w).k (“you will be rejuvenated at home, and you will be buried”) or rnpy.k m ẖnw ⟨r⟩ qrst.k (“you will be rejuvenated at home until you are buried”).

References

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  • Allen, James Peter (2015) Middle Egyptian Literature: Eight Literary Works of the Middle Kingdom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, pages 9–53
  • Goleniščev, Vladimir (1912) Le Conte du Naufragé. Cairo: L’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale.
  • Goleniščev, Vladimir (1913) Les papyrus hiératiques no. 1115, 1116A et 1116B de l’Ermitage impérial à St.-Pétersbourg. St. Petersburg: Direction de l’Ermitage impérial, plates 1–8.
  • Nederhof, Mark-Jan (2006–2015) Shipwrecked Sailor.
  • Lichtheim, Miriam (1975) Ancient Egyptian Literature, volume I: The Old and Middle Kingdoms. University of California Press, pages 211–215.
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