On Greatest Lit list:
• "The Eloquent Peasant" c.1875 BCE
Only three fictional works from ancient Egypt remain in nearly full condition and they are all very different. "The Shipwrecked Sailor" is an adventure and fable. "The Tale of.... more
We haven't much of a clue who this writer was. Truth be told, we're not even sure when he wrote. (Though it likely was a "he", or a collective "he".)
"The Eloquent Peasant" is thought to have been written around the same time as "The Tale of Sinuhe", about the middle of Egypt's Twelfth Dynasty of the Middle Kingdom, but this only narrows its author down to a couple of generations on either side of 1878 BCE.
Moreover, some say versions of the story were told in the centuries before this, noting that the events depicted are supposed to have taken place in the Ninth and Tenth dynasties, putting the work's origins back before 2025 BCE. To the contrary, others have claimed dates of composition in the Thirteenth Dynasty—well into the 1700s BCE.
The story, as we have it today, is actually pieced together from four incomplete manuscripts, preserved on papyrus from the Middle Kingdom. (Picture shows a portion of the tattered manuscript, known as the Butler papyrus, stored in the British Museum.)
But the copies do not always agree in their overlapping sections. Proper names for people and places in the story often differ among the versions.
One thing we can guess with some assurance is that the author—if there was a single author—was a member of the affluent, educated class. Not only would someone from the poor classes be too illiterate to set the story down in hieroglyphics, but he would be ignorant of the fine intellectual points discussed by the "eloquent peasant" of the story.
In the Middle Kingdom the Egytian ruling classes and their functionaries revelled in literature and rhetoric (the art of persuasive speaking). "The Eloquent Peasant" would have been a great entertainment for them, as well as would have expressed the ideals that were meant to guide their lives.
— Eric
