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The Egyptian Instructions

The Egyptian instructions (sbꜣyt, “teaching”) are a genre of advice handed from a father, often a vizier or a king, to his son. The Instruction of Ptahhotep is attributed to a vizier of the Old Kingdom and was composed in the Middle Kingdom; the Instruction for Merikare is set in the First Intermediate Period and composed in the Middle Kingdom (2025–1700 BCE); the Instruction of Amenemope dates from the Ramesside period (c. 1300–1075 BCE).

Ptahhotep calls his book “the proverbs of fair speech … when instructing the ignorant in the knowledge of exactness in fair-speaking” (tr. Gunn). Its standard is maat, which Gunn renders “Truth”: “Great is Truth, appointing a straight path; never hath it been overthrown since the reign of Osiris … it is that which a man repeateth from his father” (maxim 5). Learning is never complete: “Be not proud because thou art learned; but discourse with the ignorant man, as with the sage. For no limit can be set to skill, neither is there any craftsman that possesseth full advantages” (maxim 1). It is done by hearing, and the closing maxims play on a root that, in Gunn’s note, “includes our hear (listen) and obey”: “A son that hearkeneth is as a Follower of Horus … He repeateth in like manner to his sons and daughters, so renewing the instruction of his father” (41).

Merikare’s father, a king, gives speech its place: “Be a craftsman in speech, so that thou mayest prevail, for the power of (a man) is the tongue, and speech is mightier than any fighting.” The knowledge is already there, in the writings of the ancestors: “Truth cometh to him fully kneaded, after the manner of that which the forefathers spake. Copy thy fathers, them that have gone before thee. Behold, their words endure in writing. Open (the book) and read, and copy the knowledge” (tr. Blackman from Erman).

Amenemope’s teaching is “concerning life (i.e., of how to live)”, to “make him to follow a straight course on the roads of life”, and it asks the hearer to “lend me thine ears … to give thy mind … to the difficult matters which will be unravelled”, for “the setting of them in thy heart will be advantageous”. Its thirty chapters “will give knowledge to (i.e., make to be wise) the ignorant man”; the reader is to “make thyself to be the man who has unravelled their contents, thinking out and understanding [their] teaching” (tr. Budge, whose brackets these are).

A Middle Kingdom text takes another form. In the Dispute between a Man and his Ba, a man weary of life argues with his ba, a part of the person that translators render “soul”, “before certain judges, whose tongue is not biased” (in Erman’s summary). The ba’s counsel echoes Ptahhotep’s hearing: “Hearken thou unto me, lo, it is good for a man when he hearkeneth” (tr. Blackman from Erman).

In the twentieth century Cheikh Anta Diop made Egypt the classical antiquity of Africa (Négritude and the nationalists).