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Book Review: Actor and Event: Military Activity in Ancient Egyptian Narrative Texts from Tuthmosis II to Merenptah.

From the monomachy of Sinuhe and the hero of Retchenu, to the massive naval battle of Ramesses III and the Sea Peoples, egyptian texts and representations revel in the details of combat and its literary possibilities. Actor and Event, the author’s doctoral dissertation, chooses a slice of this tradition of egyptian military history — the mid-eighteenth Dynasty to the late Nineteenth Dynasty — and seeks a ‘thematic analysis’ of the overtly narrative accounts. Using the methodological framework, but not the terminology, of H. Roeder’s analysis of the Pyramid Texts, Lundh reduces the military narratives to ‘Actors’ (Roeder’s ‘Motiven’) and ‘events’ (Roeder’s ‘Themen’). The choice of Roeder’s binary classification and its application to the military texts appears arbitrary, as does Lundh’s division of the texts into two over-arching categories: his only actors are the king and the enemy, while the events are setting, reaction, journey, attack, and return, which are focused on the king; and rebellion, gathering, defeat, and submission, which concentrate on the enemy. These categories and their subdivisions fail to capture the complexity of the military texts themselves, and the events that they relate. The active participation of divinity in all stages of military activity — at its inception, during the battle, and as benefactors of the victory’s spoils — should be acknowledged in any classification. Other texts, such as the Nubian war Stelae of Akhenaten, portray the army and not the king as the main ‘actor’, further limiting the usefulness of Lundh’s categories. At the same time, the simplicity of Lundh’s clearly defined categories (pp. 21–6) does have the benefit of creating a framework in which he can compare the diverse military records. For example, Lundh insightfully observes that the First Hittite Marriage Stela of Ramesses II, although lacking the iw=tw formula, describes a ‘rebellion’ in much the same way as the other ‘Dominion Records’. In the Introduction, Lundh also briefly summarizes the Königsnovelle genre, and his list of events — setting, reaction, journey, attack, and return — owes much to the features of the Königsnovelle. while the Königsnovelle, particularly as defined by Jansen-winkeln, identifies a framework for the textual presentation of royal activity, particularly military campaigns, the broad definition of the genre also allows room for the peculiarities of each text. Lundh’s combination of events for the king and events for his enemies does not always accomplish this, since his classification system forces him to see all military actions as a select list of ‘events’, but such a framework can possess certain benefits. The potential advantages of Lundh’s classification are evident in his straightforward and interesting