A CRITICAL STUDY OF THE 'ELOQUENT PEASANT' (ANCIENT EGYPT, LITERATURE)

The Eloquent Peasant is one of the two longest literary texts preserved from ancient Egypt. It is also one of the most difficult to interpret. Perhaps for this reason no comprehensive study of the text has been undertaken since Vogelsang's text edition, Kommentar zu den Klagen des Bauern, and Gardiner's improved translation and reading notes, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 9, 5-25, were published in 1913 and 1923 respectively. The present study is an attempt to fill that gap.;Finally, in the Introduction the difficult problems of style, date, provenance, and authorship for this unsigned, undated text are taken up. A Heracleopolitan date of composition for the work is rejected in favor of a Twelfth Dynasty date. Khety, well-known as the creator of other Twelfth Dynasty literary works, is proposed as author of the Eloquent Peasant. The introduction concludes with observations on the author's literary style and, in particular, his approach to verse-writing.;Although many translations of the Eloquent Peasant have appeared in print, none has departed from the first translations developed by Vogelsang and Gardiner. My first task in working on the Peasant, therefore, was to establish a fresh transcription and translation of the hieratic text, based on a study of the four extant versions of the work preserved on papyri now housed in Berlin and London. Thus the dissertation includes a new translation of the text as well as a line-by-line commentary on the grammatical, philological, and epigraphic problems presented by the text and discussed in the secondary literature.