Through the Eras

Literaturebiographies, Middle Kingdom stela, fictional narrativessuch as The Shipwrecked Sailor and Sinuhe, pessimisticstudies of chaos, or even advice manuals. In a traditionboundculture like ancient Egypt, it seems impossible thatthese genres were not carried forward. Yet the evidencethat does survive hints that Eighteenth-dynasty authorsdeveloped a new historical literature and created newhymns as a literary genre. This picture is even less convincingbecause of the hypothetical rebirth of narrativefiction in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties.These later writers created many variations on fictionalwriting that discussed politics, the gods, and used bureaucraticgenres to create fictional non-fiction. Only thediscovery of new manuscripts can solve the mystery ofthis gap in Egyptian literary history.SOURCESGiuseppe Botti, “A Fragment of the Story of a Military Expeditionof Thutmosis III,” in Journal of Egyptian Archaeology41 (1955): 64–71.John B. Baines, “Classicism and Modernism in the NewKingdom,” in Ancient Egyptian Literature: History andForms. Ed. Antonio Loprieno (Leiden, Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1996): 157–174.Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature II: The NewKingdom (Berkeley: University of California Press,1976).Edward F. Wente Jr., “The Capture of Joppa,” in The Literatureof Ancient Egypt. Ed. William Kelly Simpson(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973):81–84.DEMOTIC LITERATUREDEFINITION. The word “Demotic” refers to boththe natural developmental stage of the Egyptian languagein the Late Period (664–332 B.C.E.), Ptolemaic Period(332–30 B.C.E.), and Roman Period (30 B.C.E.–395C.E.), as well as a new script. The script developed froma highly cursive form of hieratic, the cursive form of hieroglyphs.This even more cursive hieratic appeared inMemphis toward the end of the New Kingdom (1075B.C.E.). In the seventh century B.C.E., there is some evidencethat scribes deliberately modified the script forwriting legal contracts and documents. These changeswere related to the Twenty-sixth Dynasty’s reorganizationof the government. Demotic, however, was not actuallyused to record literature until the fourth centuryB.C.E. Scribes used Demotic under the native Egyptiangovernment and subsequent Greek and Roman governments.DIFFICULTY. Most Egyptologists find Demoticmore difficult to learn than the earlier forms of theEgyptian language. This difficulty has influenced thestudy of Demotic literature and has to some extent keptthe study of Demotic literature separate from the earlierliterature written in Old, Middle, and Late Egyptian.Additionally, many early twentieth-century Egyptologistsconsidered the period when Demotic was used as aperiod of decline. The fact that this period coincidedwith the classical age of Greece in the fifth and fourthcenturies B.C.E. reinforced this perception of Egypt as abackwater. Most later twentieth and early twenty-firstcentury scholars, however, view Egypt of this period asa mature civilization that both reflected its ancient pastand created new and vital means of expression.GENRES. A genre refers to a type of literature. Eachgenre has a formal pattern known to readers and authorsand is related to the culture surrounding it. Egyptianauthors in the time when Demotic was writtenmight have had more familiarity with the ancestors ofmodern genres. Modern, Western literary genres derivefrom theories developed by the Greek philosopher Aristotle(384–322 B.C.E.). Demotic literature comes fromthe time when Greeks ruled Egypt. Yet Demotic literature,still written in the Egyptian language, seems notto have imitated Greek genre. The genres of Demoticliterature are not clearly understood. The Petition ofPetiese is the story of the wrongs committed against onefamily. It seems to date to the reign of the Persian kingDarius I (521–486 B.C.E.) who ruled Egypt at this time.The text does not follow exactly the form of petitionsknown from actual court archives. It is both too longand it includes hymns along with the legalistic material.There is also a mixture of genres in the text calledThe Demotic Chronicle. The text contains a series of oraclesthat the distinguished English scholar of DemoticW. John Tait called “baffling.” The action takes placein the reign of Teos (365–362 B.C.E.), though the dateof composition is probably in the later fourth or earlythird century B.C.E., nearly 100 years later. The text appearsto be a critique of Egyptian kings. Some scholarsview it as an attack on the Greek (Ptolemaic) kings ofEgypt, though not all agree. The text depends on wordplay, an important literary device common in the longEgyptian tradition but not so common in Demotic literaturein general.AUDIENCE. The intended audience for Demotic isan important issue because for most of the time Demoticliterature was composed the language of government wasGreek. Literate Egyptians still knew hieratic and hieroglyphicwhich they used for religious texts like the Book138 Arts and Humanities Through the Eras: Ancient Egypt (2675 B.C.E.–332 B.C.E.)