The Secret of Sinuhe

In a recent article in Bibliotheca Orientalis} I suggested that the Lebensmude, the Dispute of a Man with his Ba, might best be understood as a dramatic monologue intended to be recited or even performed by an individual speaker who would thus give a personal interpretation to a text which, I believe, is basically a portrait of the developing psychological situation of an internal and spiritual struggle. This suggestion contains two significant implications, the first being that the oral and dramatic element was a highly important one in Egyptian literary tradition. This oral/ dramatic aspect provided a means of permitting a wider and more liberal interpretation of any specific text, and the interpretation in turn was to a certain extent dependent upon the dramatic abilities and sensitivity of the performer. A second implication of this suggestion is that Egyptian didactic texts, at least texts which were written with a view to a performance situation, were intended not as dogmatic statements of emphatic and inflexible precepts, but as a catalyst for stimulating an intellectual and/ or emotional reaction on the part of an audience. The readers or hearers who were the objects of a specific text were thus not passive recipients of that text but active participants in an intellectual process of interpretation and creativity. The basis of such a view is the highly reasonable assumption that the Egyptian mentality had progressed to the stage where intellectual discourse was a significant element in the internal life of at least certain

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