I got this book specifically for the Tale of Sinuhe, a fictional story of an Egyptian noble who flees the country in fear for his life after the death of Amenemhet I in what he believes to have been a coup; over the rest of his life, he engages in a few adventures and eventually returns home to die at peace. It’s considered by a lot of scholars to be the first fictional story ever written down and, in that context, it’s actually kind of sophisticated, though it is very short, only about thirty pages. The rest of the book contains a few other longer story-based poems, a few religious prophecies/sermons and then a section made up entirely of fragments, sections of one to two sentences from various poems. The section of fragments was basically a total wash; Parkinson does a decent job with the notes here in terms of them not being super-dull or anything, but in that section it’s basically just him talking for a page and then one sentence from a poem about the sun and then he talks for another half page.
I liked the story poems the best, particularly The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant. It’s the story of a poor man who journeys to the big city and is robbed and left destitute. He then, Job-like, begins a series of poetic speeches. They begin by lamenting his misfortune, move on to addressing the larger ills of society and then on to the very injustice of existence. Meanwhile, the Pharoah has become aware of the man simply because of how shocking it is for a peasant to be so well-spoken and intelligent. Overall, this one reminded me a lot of Job, one of my favorite books of the Bible; it’s the best-written and the best translated, I suppose, of the lot and while Sinuhe and the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor have more incident, I loved the sharpness and vibrancy and emotionality of the Eloquent Peasant and the way that his complaints about injustice, oppression and a host of other social ills all still rang true.
On the whole, I’m not sure I would say that the majority of the stuff here just holds up on its own terms as poetry or art. But it is interesting as a peek into the culture and the creative arts of the period and there’s definitely a sophistication of thought that I found kind of surprising. It was definitely a case of diminishing returns with the book starting with the strongest material, the stories, moving into dialogues, then into speeches and then into fragments with each section being somewhat less interesting than the one before it. But with the body of the book clocking in at under 300 pages, it wasn’t ever a slog. And it did have some really brilliant stuff in it, though it had more trivia, I’d say. Not that there’s anything wrong that. 2 ½ stars.
tl;dr – collection of ancient Egyptian literatures has some great pieces, like the Eloquent Peasant and the title story, but it also has a lot of more mediocre material and some trivia. 2 ½ stars.