Commentary

The use of editorial marks in the transliteration and translation of The Dialogue of Ipuwer and the Lord of All broadly follows Paul Maas (1958 [1927]), and in part the Leiden papyrological conventions. In the transliteration, words that belong together in a prosodic colon as defined by Gerhard Fecht are connected with hyphens. Specifically, the stative generally does not form a separate colon except when there is a chain of statives, or when the grammatical subject itself consists of several cola, or when the stative forms an adjunct clause. In ambiguous cases, where two prosodic analyses are possible, the alternative is given where it significantly alters the interpretation of the strophe. The transliteration ignores unetymological features of Ramessid orthography. The theme of insubordination and unruliness among subordinate workers recurs in the poem. This chapter also analyses the poem's strophes, audience, structure and laments.

Continuous transliteration and translation of Ipuwer

This chapter presents a continuous transliteration and translation of The Dialogue of Ipuwer and the Lord of All, approaching the poem through hermeneutic methods.

Introduction

This book presents a commentary on and an analysis of P. Leiden I 344 recto, which contains the poem variously called The Dialogue of Ipuwer and the Lord of All or The Admonitions (Mahnworte), from the Middle Kingdom of ancient Egypt. The first part of the book comprises an analysis of several literary aspects of the poem, including its unity, compositional date, reception, possible setting, genre, literary style and meaning. It also offers a literary reading of the poem within the context of the cultural and intellectual milieu that produced it. The second part of the book provides a detailed translation, commentary to, and literary reading of, the poem, subdivided into sections that largely follow the divisions within the manuscript. A metrical transliteration is given, broadly following the prosodic principles of Gerhard Fecht, which provide a pragmatic formal mode of analysis. The degree to which these are relevant to the compositional structure of the poem is discussed.

Literary aspects of Ipuwer

The sole surviving manuscript of The Dialogue of Ipuwer and the Lord of All is the Ramessid P. Leiden I 344 recto. The papyrus is damaged, and it is unclear how much has been lost at both the beginning and end. As currently preserved, the papyrus is divided into seventeen columns, and would originally have contained at least 236 lines of text. Following Gerhard Fecht's metrical analytical principles, this amounts to some 660+ verses. The content of the text may be divided into two literary formats: strophes and more discursive sections of dialogue. The majority of the text consists of strophes (poetic stanzas) of varying lengths, where each strophe is introduced by a repeated refrain (termed an ‘anaphor’). These anaphora are repeatedly written in red ink in the first nine columns of the text, whereas in the later columns rubrics are only used for the first occurrence of each new refrain. The poem has been the subject of considerable debate, including its unity of the text, its compositional date, and the identity of the speakers mentioned in it.