Ancient Egyptian Literature - Legacy, Translation and Interpretation

Legacy, Translation and Interpretation

After the Copts converted to Christianity in the first centuries AD, their Coptic Christian literature became separated from the pharaonic and Hellenistic literary traditions. Nevertheless, scholars speculate that ancient Egyptian literature, perhaps in oral form, had an impact on Greek and Arabic literature. Parallels are drawn between the Egyptian soldiers sneaking into Jaffa hidden in baskets to capture the city in the story Taking of Joppa and the Mycenaean Greeks sneaking into Troy inside the Trojan Horse. The Taking of Joppa has also been compared to the Arabic story of Ali Baba in One Thousand and One Nights. It has been conjectured that Sinbad the Sailor may have been inspired by the pharaonic Tale of the shipwrecked sailor. Some Egyptian literature was commented on by scholars of the ancient world. For example, the Jewish Roman historian Josephus (37 –c. 100 AD) quoted and provided commentary on Manetho's historical texts.

The most recently carved hieroglyphic inscription of ancient Egypt known today is found in a temple of Philae, dated precisely to 394 AD during the reign of Theodosius I (r. 379–395 AD). In the 4th century AD, the Hellenized Egyptian Horapollo compiled a survey of almost two hundred Egyptian hieroglyphs and provided his interpretation of their meanings, although his understanding was limited and he was unaware of the phonetic uses of each hieroglyph. This survey was apparently lost until 1415, when the Italian Cristoforo Buondelmonti acquired it at the island of Andros. Athanasius Kircher (1601–1680) was the first in Europe to realize that Coptic was a direct linguistic descendant of ancient Egyptian. In his Oedipus Aegyptiacus, he made the first concerted European effort to interpret the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphs, albeit based on symbolic inferences.

It was not until 1799, with the Napoleonic discovery of a trilingual (i.e. hieroglyphic, Demotic, Greek) stela inscription on the Rosetta Stone, that modern scholars were able to decipher ancient Egyptian literature. The first major effort to translate the hieroglyphs of the Rosetta Stone was made by Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) in 1822. The earliest translation efforts of Egyptian literature during the 19th century were attempts to confirm Biblical events.

Before the 1970s, scholarly consensus was that ancient Egyptian literature—although sharing similarities with modern literary categories—was not an independent discourse, uninfluenced by the ancient sociopolitical order. However, from the 1970s onwards, a growing number of historians and literary scholars have questioned this theory. While scholars before the 1970s treated ancient Egyptian literary works as viable historical sources that accurately reflected the conditions of this ancient society, scholars now caution against this approach. Scholars are increasingly using a multifaceted hermeneutic approach to the study of individual literary works, in which not only the style and content, but also the cultural, social and historical context of the work are taken into account. Individual works can then be used as case studies for reconstructing the main features of ancient Egyptian literary discourse.