Liverpool Egyptology Seminar: 'The herdsman, the goddess, and the princess: a re-examination of the origins of the Egyptian love poetry tradition, and the place of the Tale of the Herdsman in Egyptian literature' (Dr. Marina Escolano-Poveda, University of Liverpool – Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen)
5:00pm - 6:00pm /
Thursday 21st November 2019
/ Venue: Seminar room 10, Rendall Building
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In 2017 I published my discovery of new fragments of P. Berlin 3024, corresponding to the lost beginning of the Debate Between a Man and his Ba (P. Mallorca II) and to the Tale of the Herdsman (P. Mallorca I). There I briefly mentioned the attestation of the section of the Herdsman describing the appearance of the goddess (P. Mallorca I, Fr. 2–4) in the Third Intermediate Period stela of princess Mutirdis (Louvre C100). In this lecture I will first present a new edition of both texts and a reconstruction of what a hypothetical Urtext of the description of the goddess would have looked like. Then I will examine the implications of the attestation of this poetical description in both a Middle Kingdom literary text and a stela carved a millennium later, and what this discovery adds to our understanding of Ramesside love poetry and the oral and written transmission of Egyptian literature. I will conclude with a proposal for the reconstruction of the missing ending of the Tale of the Herdsman and its historical contextualisation in the early Middle Kingdom.