Dispute between a man and his Ba
The Dispute between a man and his Ba or The Debate Between a Man and his Soul[1] is an ancient Egyptian text dating to the Middle Kingdom. The text is considered to fall into the genre of Sebayt, a form of Egyptian wisdom literature. The text takes the form of a dialogue between a man struggling to come to terms with the hardship of life, and his ba soul. The beginning of the text is missing, there are a number of lacunae, and translation of the remainder is difficult. The only copy to survive, consisting of 155 columns of hieratic writing, is on the recto of Papyrus Berlin 3024.[2] Further fragments were published in 2017.[3]
The Ba Soul
The Ancient Egyptian concept of the soul consisted of nine separate parts. Among these is the Ba, which is commonly translated into English as "soul". The Ba soul was thought to represent ones psyche or personality and was thought to live on after one's death and had the ability to traverse between the physical and spiritual planes. The ba soul is traditionally depicted in Ancient Egyptian art as a saddle-billed stork with the head of a human[4].
Synopsis (following the translation of M. Lichtheim)
The man accuses his ba of wanting to desert him, of dragging him towards death before his time. He says that life is too heavy for him to bear, that his heart would come to rest in the West (i.e. the afterlife), his name would survive and his body would be protected. He urges his ba to be patient and wait for a son to be born to make the offerings the deceased need in the afterlife. His ba describes the sadness death brings and retorts to the man's complaints about his lack of worth, his being cut off from humanity and the attractiveness of death by exhorting him to embrace life and promises to stay with him.
Interpretations
The text has traditionally been interpreted as a commentary on suicide and the Egyptian funerary cult, the man yearns for the promises of an afterlife in the face of his earthly suffering. While his ba attempts to convince the man of the value of life on the mortal plane[5].
More recent translations and scholarly works have disputed this. Many modern interpretations instead view the work as the psychological struggle of a man to come to terms with the sorrow that life brings and accept its innate goodness[6].
Other scholars believe that the psychological turmoil of the man in this text is a metaphor for the unstable political the text was authored in during the 12th Dynasty Egypt following the upheaval of First Intermediate Period[7].
Form
In the translation of Miriam Lichtheim the text is presented as a mixture of styles: prose, symmetrically structured speech, and lyric poetry.
History
The original papyrus copy was bought by the German Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius in Egypt in 1843[8] and is now in the Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung belonging to the Berlin State Museums.[9]
The first edition was published during 1859,[10] and subsequently numerously translated, with sometimes widely differing interpretation.[11]
This original papyrus manuscript was missing the initial section of the work, beginning in the middle of the man's monologue. In 2017 Papyrus Mallorca II was identified as belonging to Berlin papyrus 3024. This new addition to the is an introduction of the characters in third person which was common to literature of the time. The introduction identifies the primary speaker of the text as "the sick man" and a woman named Ankhet who is now thought to be an audience for the debate that would follow.[12]
References
Literature
- Allen, James P. (2011). The Debate between a Man and His Soul: A Masterpiece of Ancient Egyptian Literature. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-19303-1
- M. Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol.1, University of California Press 1973
- James B. Pritchard ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, Princeton University Press 1950
Footnotes
- ^ Allen, 2011, p.1
- ^ Lichtheim, 1973, p.163
- ^ Marina Escolano-Poveda: New Fragments of Papyrus Berlin 3024, in: ZÄS 2017, 144(1), p. 16–54
- ^ Tradition and Transformation in Ancient Egypt: Proceedings of the Fifth International Congress for Young Egyptologists 15 - 19 September, 2015, Vienna (1 ed.). Austrian Academy of Sciences Press. 2018. ISBN 978-3-7001-8005-0.
- ^ Vittori, Stefano (2018). "Two Direct Speeches in the Last Two Poems of the 'Dialogue between a Man and His Ba' (pBerlin 3024, cc. 138-140 and cc. 144-145): A Note of Translation" (PDF). Department of Civilization and Forms of Knowledge, the University of Pisa, Italy: 183–187 – via http://www.hrpub.org.
{{cite journal}}: External link in|via= - ^ Ritner, Robert K.; Simpson, William Kelly; Tobin, Vincent A.; Wente, Edward F. (2003). The Literature of Ancient Egypt: An Anthology of Stories, Instructions, and Poetry. Yale University Press. p. 178.
- ^ Mower, Allyson (2015-05-08). "EGYPTIAN DIDACTIC TALE(c. 1937-1759 B.C.)from Dialogue of a Man with His Soul". The Ethics of Suicide Digital Archive. Retrieved 2020-11-19.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ^ Winfried Barta, Das Gespräch eines Mannes mit seinem BA: (papyrus Berlin 3024), 1969, p.9
- ^ Bulletin no. 24, Spring 2006, Association des diplômées et des diplômés en théologie et en sciences des religions de l'Université de Montréal
- ^ James P. Allen, The Debate between a Man and His Soul: A Masterpiece of Ancient Egyptian Literature Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-19303-1
- ^ Roland Edmund Murphy, The Tree of Life: An Exploration of Biblical Wisdom Literature, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing 2002, ISBN 0-8028-3965-7, p.170
- ^ Escolano-Poveda, Marina (2017). "New Fragments of Papyrus Berlin 3024" (PDF). De Gruyter: 16–54 – via Liverpool Repository.
 | This article about a papyrus or papyrology is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |