Chapter X - Rhetoric

In discussing the story of Saneha attention was drawn to the long-winded eulogies of the king, which appear to our literary taste so intrusive. Ancient Egyptian authors took pleasure in the multitude of such phrases, and rhetoric is lord of all especially in hymns to gods and kings, where commonplace poverty of thought is often concealed by a pompous diction. The best evidence that similar tendencies came to prevail in the lighter literature also is found in the so-called Story of the Peasant. It dates from the Middle Kingdom, and must have been extremely popular in antiquity, as the remains of at least three copies have been handed down through millenniums to our own day.

The actual narrative is simplicity itself. A peasant who had gone out to get natron and salt was returning with well-laden asses to Heracleo-polis Magna, in Upper Egypt. As he approached a narrow part of the road, with the river on one side and standing corn on the other, he attracted the notice of a servant of the High Steward Meruitensa.

This man coveted the asses and their load, and said within himself:

“The time is favourable unto me; I will rob for myself the goods of this peasant.”

To make a pretext for an angry dispute he laid down a piece of cloth on the narrowest part of the way and shouted to the peasant that he must take good care not to tread upon it. In the effort to avoid the cloth the peasant drove too near to the corn and one of his asses took advantage of the opportunity to munch a mouthful in passing. Thereupon the owner of the grain feigned to fly into a violent passion, and taking the asses from the peasant he drove them on to his own land. The peasant raised his voice in loud lamentation, but the only result was that a beating was added to his otl.er injuries. The whole day long he ceased not to wail and bemoan himself, but his property was not restored to him, and he departed to Herac-leopolis to lay his case before Meruitensa. This potentate left the decision to his counsellors, who, with but little delay for examination into the facts, pronounced against the peasant. He, now-ever, did not accept this award as final, but in highly poetic phraseology besought the aid of the Lord High Steward himself.

Astonished and delighted by this display of eloquence Meruitensa felt moved to tell King Rā-neb-ka-n of the wonderful peasant orator whom lie had discovered. This remarkable phenomenon interested the king, and he gave orders that the lawsuit should be dragged out to as great a length as possible, and that all the speeches made in the course of it by the peasant should be written down. While this was going on the peasant and his wife and children were to receive a plentiful allowance of food, but the source of the supplies was to be kept a secret from them.

The king's orders were obeyed, and yet eight times the peasant pleaded his cause, lamenting his hard fate in ever more and more touching language, till at length he lost heart and threatened to put an end to himself. Then Meruitensa’s compassion was aroused, and he ordered all the orations to be collected in one great papyrus roll. This was presented to Pharaoh, who took more delight therein than in aught else in his whole land. The kinsmen and property of the peasant were brought upon the scene, and at last he received the long-delayed justice.

In this story the nine orations formed the most important element in the eyes of the author, as well as of the ancient Egyptian reader. In elaborate phrases, continually increasing in exuberance, the peasant eulogised the Lord High Steward, and held before him the prospect of the highest honours as a reward for a righteous judgment. Occasionally the sentiments expressed would not be out of place to-day; as, for example, the statement that truth endures for ever and follows the upright man to his tomb. His name is not blotted out when his body is buried, but the record of his righteousness lives on amongst men. Again a modern note is struck when it is said of Meruitensa that he is the father of the poor, the husband of the widow, the brother of the outcast.

But however pleasing it may have been to the ancient Egyptians to hear the Lord High Steward spoken of as the apron that covers nakedness, the fire that cooks the raw flesh, the rudder that steers the heavens, or the beam that supports the earth, to us these similes appear no less strange than the very peculiar method of conducting a lawsuit. The authorities withhold justice from an injured man until, in his despair, he is ready to put an end to his own life and carry his plea into the next world—and all this simply to call forth from him certain feats of rhetoric. A similar conception of the duty of the rich towards the poor and oppressed runs through the tales in the “Arabian Nights.” There, also, the peasant is expected to be grateful for the comparative mildness of his treatment at the hands of those in power if,, after anxious and weary waiting, he is at length restored to the possession of property legally his own, of which he has been wrongfully deprived.

Enough has now been adduced to show that the ancient Egyptians were active in practically all the departments into which we are accustomed to divide our lighter literature. It is, surely, no slight evidence of their success that many of these works, though their details here and there strike us as remote, have considerable interest for the men and women of to-day. The stones and poems serve also to testify that the ancient Egyptian was no stiff simulacrum of humanity, leading the joyless and monotonous existence that later centuries conceived to become such an entity. He was, on the contrary, a genuine human being of ordinary flesh and blood; his interests, his feelings, his longings, and his sufferings were such as he and we share with all our brethren of mankind. Those long past ages have left many traces behind them in the life of the modern East. It is not alone the huts and the goods and chattels of the peasants that have remained unaltered in the course of five or six millenniums. In the conservative soil of the Nile Valley the life of thought and feeling also has undergone but tittle change during the long process of the ages.