The enchanted prince
The enchanted prince is the modern name of an incompletely preserved work of ancient Egyptian literature from the New Kingdom . The text, written in prose , tells the life story of a prince who was prophesied of an unnatural death . The name The Cursed Prince was first used by Georg Ebers and is now widely used in Egyptology , so the story is called The Doomed Prince in English and Le prince prédestiné in French .
Tradition and literary classification
The story is preserved on the back of the Harris 500 papyrus along with the taking of Joppe and written in hieratic script . Your end is missing. The papyrus comes from the reign of Seti I or Ramses II. The time of history is not likely to be much earlier. According to Wolfgang Helck , it can be assigned to the 18th dynasty , since the subject of the chariot driver was widespread throughout the eastern Mediterranean at this time.
The problem is which genre the story should be assigned to. While some Egyptologists , such as Emma Brunner-Traut , clearly recognize a fairy tale in the story , others doubt this. Wolfgang Helck counters this point of view that everything that was written in ancient Egypt had to have a purpose and that “folk poetry” was therefore never written down. Henrike Simon classifies the story as a courtly novel , comparable to the medieval Arthurian epic .
content
A king who is not named by name suffers from the fact that no son is born to him for a long time. Only after he invokes the gods is his wish granted. When the prince is born, the seven Hathors appear and prophesy his fate to him. The prince is said to die by a dog, a crocodile or a snake. The worried king then had a stone house built in the desert for his son, in which he spent his entire childhood.
When the prince got older, one day he saw a hunting dog and wanted to own one too. The king gives him a harmless puppy . When the prince finally reaches adulthood, he decides to travel, believing that he would not be able to escape his fate anyway. With the chariot he now goes out into the world and finally arrives at Naharina , a country on the upper Euphrates . There he pretends to be the son of a chariot driver who is on the run from his stepmother, for reasons that are not explained in detail.
The prince of Naharina had all the prince's sons of Syria called in to give his daughter to one of them. The daughter lives in a tower, the window of which is 70 cubits high . The one who manages to climb up to the window should marry her. The princely sons receive the newcomer in a friendly manner. When after three months still none of them have reached the window, the Egyptian prince finally tries and manages. The prince of Naharina is strictly against giving his daughter to a refugee as wife, but she has fallen in love with the Egyptian and can finally persuade her father to agree to the wedding.
The prince tells his wife about his three fates and she keeps an eye on him. She suggests that he kill his dog, but the prince refuses. Once when he was sound asleep, a snake came to bite him. But his wife notices her and kills her. Some time later he is suddenly threatened by his dog and flees to a nearby lake. But a crocodile that had followed him from Egypt has taken up residence there. It is held in the lake by a giant and fights with him every day.
The crocodile tells the prince to fight the giant the next time he appears. Apparently the crocodile wants to give him his life for it, the corresponding passage has not been preserved. The end of the story is missing.
expenditure
- The story of the enchanted prince . In: Bernd Janowski, Daniel Schwemer (ed.): Texts from the environment of the Old Testament. New episode. tape 8 , wisdom texts. Myths and Epics. Gütersloher Verlagshaus, Gütersloh 2015, ISBN 978-3-579-05281-6 , p. 305-312 .
literature
- Emma Brunner-Traut : Ancient Egyptian Fairy Tales . Eugen Diederichs Verlag, 10th edition, Munich 1991, pp. 55-60
- Emma Brunner-Traut: Prince's Tales . In: Lexikon der Ägyptologie, Vol. 4, Wiesbaden 1982, Col. 1107–1112
- Günter Burkard , Heinz J. Thissen: Introduction to the ancient Egyptian literary history II. New Kingdom . LIT Verlag, Berlin 2008, pp. 7-17
- Adolf Erman : The literature of the Egyptians. Poems, stories and textbooks from the 3rd and 2nd millennium BC Chr. JC Hinrichs'sche Buchhandlung, Leipzig 1923, pp. 209–214
- Wolfgang Helck : The story of the enchanted prince. In: Jürgen Osing, Günter Dreyer (Hrsg.): Form und Maß. Contributions to the literature, language and art of ancient Egypt. Festschrift for Gerhard Fecht. Egypt and Old Testament, Vol. 12, Wiesbaden 1987, pp. 218-225
- Miriam Lichtheim : Ancient Egyptian Literature. Volume II: The New Kingdom. Berkeley 1976, pp. 200-203 (Eng.)
- Peter Hubai: A Literary Source for the Egyptian Philosophy of Religion? The fairy tale of the prince who had to endure three dangers. Intellectual Heritage of Egypt (FS. L. Kakosy), Studia Aegyptiaca XIV., Budapest 1992, pp. 277-300
- Henrike Simon: The story of the Cursed Prince. Genre-theoretical investigations on the literature of the New Kingdom . Master's thesis, Göttingen 2003 (unpublished)
Individual evidence
- ↑ The verb pwj means “to climb”, but also “to jump”; Rainer Hannig: The language of the pharaohs. Large hand-held Egyptian-German dictionary . Verlag Philipp von Zabern, Mainz 1995. ISBN 3-8053-1771-9 , p. 275