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Sinuhe: The Ancient Egyptian Genre of Narrative Verse

THE Tale of Sinuhe is widely esteemed as the finest piece of literature to survive from ancient Egypt-an epitome of craftsmanship, style, and sophistication; that culture's finest story; its classic piece of prose fiction. Graduate students sharpen their teeth on this tale, using Blackman's transcription or photocopies of the Berlin Hieratische Papyrus; veteran scholars like Gardiner and Grapow have produced extended studies; and others regularly offer new readings, reconstructions, emendations, clarifications, and reinterpretations. The Tale of Sinuhe has a very central and visible place in ancient Egyptian literature. I would like to pursue a thesis that will, if true, offer a different perspective on Sinuhe and, I hope, further our understanding of this literary classic: The Tale of Sinuhe is not a piece of prose fiction; it is not prose at all; it is an example of the ancient Egyptian genre of narrative verse. To illustrate this thesis I shall give examples of ancient Egyptian lyric/hymnic verse (The Hymn to the Nile) and of didactic/proverbial verse (The Maxims of Ptahhotep) and then show that the structuring of Sinuhe is fundamentally like these two other verse genres, using four verse-pointed passages from the tale for the demonstration. Once the basic likeness is clear, I shall discuss the differences among verse genres (lyric, didactic, and narrative); for that is the distinction to be made here, rather than a distinction between hymnic or didactic verse, on the one hand, and prose fiction, on the other. This discussion will include the phenomenon of the "odd line" (or "triplet") in Sinuhe, a patterning which breaks that couplet structure so fundamental to ancient Egyptian verse and misleads one into thinking the tale is written in prose. Finally, I shall try to define the difference between ancient Egyptian verse and prose by comparing Sinuhe (narrative verse) with an almost contemporary example of commemorative (i.e., probably "literary") inscriptional prose (the Tomb Biography of Khnumhotep), showing the differences in patterning, both clausal and rhetorical.