Review of Stephen Quirke, Egyptian Literature 1800 BC: Questions and Readings (London, 2004), in Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 93 (2007), 271-274 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Gillen, Todd (ed.), (Re)productive traditions in ancient Egypt: proceedings of the conference held at the University of Liège, 6th-8th February 2013, 95-126. Liège: Presses universitaires de Liège, 2017
When it comes to literature, tradition is often expressed in terms of a binary system comprised of those who are exclusively authors or exclusively copyists, or, to put it in the terms of this volume, those who practice either dynamic productivity or static re-productivity. In the world of Egyptologists this binary vision posits unfathomable writers versus a multitude of sloppy school pupils. This paper is about the material and human processes of textual transmission in the New Kingdom, from a vantage point as close as possible to that of the writing hand. I develop the hypothesis that ‘variation’, which straddles the boundary between the two benchmarks ‘reproduction’ and ‘production’, is a central and defining aspect of Egyptian textual practices.
REMARKS ON CONTINUITY IN EGYPTIAN LITERARY TRADITION
Egyptian literature is not the least important among the many fields in which Professor Wente has distin guished himself. It is a pleasure to contribute the following comments on that subject to a volume in his honor. In recent years, new texts and studies have enriched our knowledge of Late Period Egyptian literature.1 P. Vandier (Posener 1985) and the Brooklyn Wisdom Text (P. Brooklyn 47.218.135; Jasnow 1992) have appeared. There are, moreover, strong indications that these are not isolated examples of late hieratic literary composi tions.2 The specialty of Demotic has also been very productive in texts and insights.3 Certainly one of the chal lenging questions for those interested in Egyptian literature is the relationship between this Late Period material and the earlier works of the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms. How many classical4 works survived, and what was the nature of their influence on the later compositions? The state of the evidence precludes a definitive an swer, but I believe such important questions should still be asked. A few scholars have already profitably occu pied themselves with this subject. Lichtheim (1983) and Tait (1992, 1994, 1995), for example, have contributed significant remarks on the problem. I would like here to collect and comment on the evidence, being fully aware of the speculative nature of the discussion.5 There are obvious differences between the corpus of classical texts and that of the Late Period. We have no direct Late Period evidence for such typically New Kingdom creations as love poetry, satiric letters, or the Late Period Egyptian Miscellanies.6 The Demotic scribes in their turn certainly developed new genres and structures. Perhaps in part as a response to the troubled history of the first millennium, these scribes composed lengthy military narrative tales with more enthusiasm than their ancestors.7 * * The Demotic Satire of the Harper is unique enough that Thissen can plausibly argue for its owing more to the Greek than the Egyptian tradition (Thissen 1992, pp. 13-15). So, too, the predominantly single-line structure of the wisdom texts is a Late Period character istic that is much less common in older works (Lichtheim 1983, pp. 1-12). The absence of earlier genres, the ap pearance of new ones, and the structural differences between the classical and Late Period compositions have
2014
“This book, written with the non-Italian reader in mind, addresses a central problem in textual criticism, and one that it is currently fashionable to regard as insoluble, namely, how to reconstruct a text of the past so that it is as close as possible to the lost original, starting from a number of copies more or less full of mistakes. The idea of writing this book – which I left to age, as one does with wine and cured meats – first occurred to me in 2006-2007, when I had the privilege of being a visiting professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. As the students felt the need to explain to me: ‘Nobody had ever talked to us about these things.’ For decades, very few, if any, Biblical, Germanic and Slavonic philologists, or French Romanists, or German editors of Anglo-American or Medieval Latin texts, have been talking about many of the things this book is about” (from the author’s preface). “My first essay on editorial methodology concerned the number of branches in family trees, and my latest concerned editing with the aid of computer programmes. On these topics and many another, Paolo Trovato’s combative and richly instructive book leaves me far behind, and it is a privilege to have the opportunity of commending it” (from M.D. Reeve’s foreword). Table of contents Foreword, by Michael D. Reeve Preface Acknowledgements How to use this book General bibliography Introduction 1. Philology or textual criticism 2. We are all philologists 3. Why do we need textual criticism? 4. Who’s afraid of philology? Part 1. Theories 1. “Lachmann’s method” 2. Bédier’s schism 3. A more in-depth look at some essential concepts 4. Highs and lows of computer-assisted stemmatics 5. The criticism of linguistic features in multiple-witness traditions 6. The ineluctability of critical judgment (choice out of variants, conjecture) Part 2. Practical applications 7. A simple tradition. The Tractatus de locis et statu sancte terre jerosolimitane 8. A tradition of average difficulty. Jean Renart’s Lai de l’ombre 9. A very complicated tradition. Dante’s Commedia Conclusion General index List of passages discussed The Author Paolo Trovato is a scholarly editor and book historian in the field of medieval and Renaissance Italian literature. Professor of the history of the Italian language at the University of Ferrara since 1994, he was a Fellow at the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (VIT) and at the Newberry Library, Chicago, as well as visiting professor in Aix-en-Provence and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Among his books: Dante in Petrarca. Per un inventario dei dantismi nei “Rerum vulgarium fragmenta” (Olschki 1979); Con ogni diligenza corretto. La stampa e le revisoni editoriali dei testi letterari italiani, 1470-1570 (il Mulino 1991; repr. UnifePress 2009); Storia della lingua italiana. Il primo Cinquecento (il Mulino, 1994; repr. libreriauniversitaria.it 2012); Il testo della Vita Nuova e altra filologia dantesca (Salerno ed. 2000) and the editions of Machiavell’s Discorso intorno alla nostra lingua (Antenore 1982) and Aretino’s Cortigiana (Salerno ed. 2009). Since 2002 he has been leading a small team on a critical edition of Dante's Commedia.