FOREWORD

The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant has proved a revealing text about the reception of Ancient Egyptian literature in the modern world. The main two manuscripts of this Middle Kingdom poem were discovered at Luxor around the 1830s, and were quickly translated. The Eloquent Peasant is a masterpiece of poetry composed in classical Middle Egyptian. As such it has been published largely in German, French and English, and the poem's early publication history is dominated by the European figures of Friedrich Vogelsang （1877–1914/18）and Sir Alan Gardiner （1879–1963）. The latter, however, infamously remarked that it was a ‘clumsy and turgid’ piece of writing, revealing some limitations in his engagement with the aesthetic qualities of the original text. This Eurocentric dominance has been so extensive that when the Egyptian film maker Shadi Abd al-Salam （1930–86）wrote the script in Arabic for his film of the poem, he is said to have had to use English translations to realise it. His film, Shakawa al-fallah al-fasih , is a superb and poetic work, and won the Grande Prix CIDALC at the Venice International Film Festival in 1970; it has now been restored by the World Cinema Foundation in 2010. It conveys a quiet, intense and involving passion that sets its reception of the poem apart from many academic ones.

Egyptian literary studies have often operated within the framework of traditional European philology. The original poem was highly engaged with ethical issues, and the social problem of corruption. It is one of the most explicit meditations on the ideal of social solidarity, Maat , which has been considered to be the central value of Egypt's high culture. The poem proclaims the enduring and supreme triumph of absolute justice, but it also engages with the problem of its loss within the world of the Herakleopolitan dynasty: this dynasty was probably the relatively recent past for the original audiences, and so this dark mediation has an almost contemporary setting, making it potentially a very political document for the original audiences. The poem's concerns are embodied in a highly stylised way, with elaborate rhetoric and poetic imagery that, however, sustain and do not negate the passion of its protests. The genres of much Egyptian poetry are very alien to the western ideas of style, which were determined by the literary legacy of the classical Mediterranean world; while closer parallels lie in the familiar works of the sacred texts of the Old Testament,this comparison has not always been a productive one, causing the Egyptian poems to be judged as ‘extra-Biblical’ texts, despite some notable exceptions,such as the inclusion of the tale in Sinclair Lewis's The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Great Social Protest Literature of All Time （New York, 1963）.It seems that there has been a tendency among philologists, in the tradition of Alan Gardiner, not to appreciate that other styles of literature than their own can be truly literary or poetic. Over the past few decades, however, the study of Ancient Egyptian literature has emerged into the sphere of comparative literary studies, and Egyptian works are included in recent editions of broad-ranging anthologies of world literature, such as those published by Longman （2004）and Norton （2012）. In very recent years The Eloquent Peasant has been cited as relevant to the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, as noted by the Egyptian novelist and commentator Ahdaf Soueif. Egyptologists should remember that the poem exists beyond the framework of traditional philology, which has often tended to assume the role of a universal science, perhaps forgetting that it is itself shaped within a specific historical culture. Philology remains a vital tool, but a broader perspective is needed to place such works within a world context.

The concerns of the poem are in many ways common to many of the world's cultures and societies. For example, John Milton's Paradise Regained was published in 1671, in the years after the failed attempt to create an English republic. In this poem, Milton's quietly heroic Christ denounces his satanic tempter with the words

For lying is thy sustenance, thy food.

Yet thou pretend'st to truth ... （Book I, 429–30）

The couplet is a remarkably close parallel to the peasant's denunciation of corrupt judges:

Those hearers and winnowers are a basket,

but their fodder is speaking falsehood ... （B1 164–5）

There is, of course, no possible direct link between these poems, but they suggest how texts that deal with such common themes of the human condition are valuable tools with which to study how different cultures have embodied and considered such issues.

Despite the claims of the academic community to be global and international, it is a shock to realise that one usually expects any translation of an Ancient Egyptian text to be into one of the mainstream languages of Europe.As a philologist who has worked on this poem for over 25 years, it is a pleasure to realise that this Ancient Egyptian text now exists beyond a narrowly European or American framework, and it is an honour to see the text edition originally published by the Griffith Institute now included in this book by my colleague Wang Haili. On a visit by Wang Haili in the British Museum in 2004 to see a 12th Dynasty fragmentary papyrus of the Eloquent Peasant （P. Butler, P. BM EA 10274）, I was struck that when he read out to me a short passage of the poem in Chinese I found I could identify which passage of the original he was reading from the rhythm and the repetition of words. Poetry it seems, as the poet W. H.Auden claimed for music in 1947, can be indeed ‘international’. And international insights allow us to escape from the European colonialist legacy of Egyptological philology and move towards an understanding of world literature in world terms. This book provides a wider perspective on Egyptian literature and culture, and thanks to it there will now be new readers with new insights for the ancient peasant's portrayal of truth and justice.

R. B. Parkinson
Professor of Egyptology
University of Oxford