Rhampsinitos
Rhampsinitos ( Greek Ῥαμψίνιτος ), also called Rhampsinit , is the Graecized name of a fictional ancient Egyptian ruler ( Pharaoh ), who is mentioned for the first time in the Historiae of the Greek historian Herodotus and plays the main role in two fables . The first story is about two thieves who steal from the king until one of them dies. The bereaved brother does everything possible to recover the body of the other. In the second story, Rhampsinit travels to Hades .
stories
The stories of King Rhampsinit can be found in chapters 121 to 124 and are known under the titles "Rhampsinite and the Master Thief" and "Rhampsinit's Journey to Hades". Herodotus, the story begins with a short introduction of the king: "After Proteus now, so they told me it was rhampsinit , who ascended to the throne and he left a memorial to himself, that gate to the Temple of Hephaestus , which towards the West has . ”Herodotus then begins with the actual legends .
Rhampsinite and the master thief
It is said of King Rhampsinite that, because he was an able and resourceful businessman, he owned treasures of gold , silver, and precious stones in abundance that neither before him nor after him had any other king possessed. In order to be able to protect and manage all these valuables, he asked his treasurer to build a treasury, which should consist of massive masonry and be closely guarded. The treasurer, however, was greedy and devised a ruse: he left one of the large stones loose so that the stone could be removed at any time without anyone noticing. Lying on his death bed , he informed his two sons about the secret access to the treasury. The two didn't hesitate long and so they regularly snuck into the treasure magazines to enrich themselves.
After a while, Rhampsinit noticed that his treasures were running out and he became upset. After the third break-in , he decided to catch the culprits and so he had snares laid out and hidden between the gold jugs and chests. When the two thieves came in again one night to fill their pockets, one of them tapped into a snare and couldn't get away. Desperate, the captured man begged his brother to chop off his head so that he could not be identified and the family would be spared the shame. With a heavy heart one beheaded the other and with the dead man's head under his arm the thief fled home. In the meantime, Rhampsinit had a fit of rage when he found the headless corpse in the treasury. He ordered his palace guards to have the body hanged in public in front of the palace wall in the city, and anyone who stopped mourning the body should be arrested immediately. But the mother of the thieves was immeasurably horrified at the death of her son and she bitterly reproached the brother. She told him to bring the brother's body home immediately, otherwise she would go to the king and tell everything. So the thief had to come up with something.
One day the thief loaded his two donkeys with bulging wineskins and led them to the palace wall, exactly where the brother's corpse was on display. When the guards arrived at the point, the thief deliberately tore the hoses unnoticed. Then he pretended to be angry and moaned until the guards could no longer ignore him and rushed over. They caught the escaping wine with vessels they had brought with them and tried to appease the supposedly inconsolable thief. The thief took advantage of the opportunity by appearing to be comforted and inviting the guards to drink in apparent gratitude. Soon after, it was now night, the soldiers were lying on the grass, snoring loudly, as full as the howitzers. The thief shaved off the right cheek of each sleeping person, hurriedly got the body from the hanger and hurried home with the donkey. Rhampsinit was completely amazed when he found out about it and devised a new trick: he asked his daughter to pretend to be a prostitute in a house of joy and to ask every lover what his most wicked act he had ever committed have. Should the interviewee tell of the stolen treasures, she would grab him and call the palace guards. The master thief also found out about the supposedly permissive princess and wanted to have fun with her. But something told him to be careful, so he took his deceased brother's right arm with him and went to see the king's daughter. When he told her about the treasure, she wanted to grab him and hold him tight, but when the guards rushed in with torches, the princess noticed that she was holding the arm of a corpse. The thief escaped again.
After all, Rhampsinit was so impressed by the cunning and skill of the thief that he praised him in the highest tones in front of all Egyptians and promised that whoever revealed himself to be the master thief could marry the daughter. The thief finally went to the king and told him everything. And indeed Rhampsinit kept his word: he appointed the master thief as his daughter's husband and future heir to the throne.
Rhampsinit's visit to Hades
According to the story of the master thief, Rhampsinit is said to have traveled alive to the underworld, called Hades by the Hellenes , to play against the goddess Demeter in a game of dice. The king was finally able to beat the goddess and as a reward he received a golden towel from her and he was allowed to return to the world of the living. On his return home, the king's priests celebrated a festival that Herodotus claims was held in his day.
Herodotus closes the story of Rhampsinite in chapter 124 with the takeover of the throne by King Cheops , whom he describes as a cruel and heretical tyrant .
The figure of the rhampsinite in other sources
Rhampsinite is also mentioned in the works of the ancient historian and bishop Johannes von Nikiu (around 696 AD), who in places refers to Herodotus. However, he seems to have mixed the figures of Rhampsinite and Cheops partially, because he says Rhampsinite had three temples built (based on the three pyramids of Giza ) and then closed all the temples of the gods.
Modern considerations
The story of rhampsinite is now valued as a kind of satire in which a king is fooled by a humble citizen. The story is very similar to other demotic fairy tales in which Egyptian kings are portrayed as fools and their deeds as negligent to cruel. It was also typical of those fables to portray mere servants or citizens as superior to the king. Herodotus' stories also fit perfectly into this scheme: in all of his anecdotes he somehow manages to draw a negative or at least sinister character image of an Egyptian ruler. Morris Silver points out similarities between Herodotus' story and the legend “Trophonios and Agamedes and the treasury of Hyreus” , which was written by Pausanias around 200 AD . He sees the story of Rhampsinit playing dice with Demeter in Hades as an allusion to the old tradition of throwing dice when economically and / or politically important decisions had to be made, such as: B. the division of the conquered countries or the allocation of goods.
literature
- Mohamed Abourahma: Treasury of King Rhampsinite. In: Fairy tales from ancient Egypt. Hapi, Cairo 2006, pp. 15-21
- Gerhard Baudy : The Thesaurus of Rhampsinite. In: Christian Mueller-Goldingen, Kurt Sier (Hrsg.): Lenaika: Festschrift for Carl Werner Müller. Teubner, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-519-07638-1 , pp. 1–20 ( digitized version , accessed on April 11, 2016)
- William F. Hansen: Ariadne's Thread: A Guide to International Tales Found in Classical Literature . Cornell University Press, Ithaca 2002, ISBN 0-8014-3670-2 , pp. 358-262.
- James Howard-Johnston : Witnesses to a World Crisis. Historians and Histories of the Middle East in the Seventh Century . University Press, Oxford 2010, ISBN 0-19-969499-0 .
- Alexandra von Lieven : Fictional and historical Egypt (The Odysee's image of Egypt from an Egyptological perspective) In: Andreas Luther: History and fiction in the Homeric Odyssey (interdisciplinary conference, October 2003 at the Free University in Berlin) . Beck, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-406-54192-5 , pp. 61-76.
- Morris Silver: Taking Ancient Mythology Economically . Brill, Leiden 1992, ISBN 90-04-09706-6 , pp. 33-35.
- Katharina Wesselmann: Mythical narrative structures in Herodotus "Histories" . de Gruyter, Berlin 2011, ISBN 3-11-023966-3 , pp. 282-286.
Web links
- The stories of Herodotus about Rhampsinite (German and Greek)