Foreword to the 2006Edition

Foreword to the 2006Edition It is now twenty-five years since the publication of the third volume of Ancient Egyptian Literature: A Book of Readings (AEL), and that this remains a prime source for Egyptian literature and history in the first millennium BCE is a fine testament to the scholar who produced it.1 Each of the three volumes of AEL is a remarkable achievement in its own right; as a whole they are among the most famous volumes in English-speaking Egyptol- ogy, and they are still in regular use in courses on Egyptian history and civilization. Miriam Lichtheim received her Ph.D. in Egyptology from the Univer- sity of Chicago in 1944.2 It was not an auspicious time to begin an academic career in Egyptology, and she quickly decided to devote herself to library science. It was as an academic librarian that she spent most of her adult life, first at Yale University, and then for thirty years at UCLA. While at UCLA teaching Egyptian history, she decided to produce a sources-in-translation volume that would ultimately became the three volumes of AEL. She retired from UCLA in 1974 at the age of sixty, hav- ing produced the first volume, and the second two followed in quick suc- cession. After some years in Los Angeles, Lichtheim moved to Jerusalem, where she taught at the Hebrew University for several years before her retirement. She passed away in Israel in March 2004. Without question, the three volumes of AEL are Miriam Lichtheim's most famous and enduring contribution to the field, but her most important work is probably the publication in 1957 of a very difficult group of Demotic ostraca dating from the Ptolemaic and Roman periods found at Medinet Habu, the mortuary temple of Ramses III on the west bank of ancient Thebes. The book is little known outside of the small world of documentary Demotic specialists, but reading through it will quickly demonstrate not only her masterful philological and paleographical skills, but also an acute understanding of the economic and monetary history of Greco-Roman Egypt. Together with her previous study of the Coptic ostraca from the same site, the two books are a breathtaking tes- timony to the breadth of Miriam Lichtheim's knowledge of ancient Egypt. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO AEL III The millennium of history that the texts of Volume III cover was a mo- mentous one for the eastern Mediterranean, and Egypt was an important factor in political, social, economic, and legal developments. After the xv xvi FOREWORD TO THE 2OO6 EDITION collapse of the New Kingdom empire, Egypt became a fighting ground between powerful marcher states that emerged in the Near East and in the Sudan. Libyans, who had been part of the New Kingdom army, were also a major political force in the earlier part of the first millennium BCE. Egyptian stones of the first millennium BCE could hardly have ignored contemporary events, and a good sense of the Zeitgeist of early first millennium BCE Egypt, including perhaps Homeric influence, may be gar- nered from "Prince Pedikhons and Queen Serpot," a tale from the Petubastis cycle of stories AEL III: 151-56). Volume III, despite the sub tide "The Late Period," treats texts from the so-called Third Intermediate Period3 to the Late Period and down to the Roman. The volume, like the two before it, has two main audiences—Egyptologists and more general readers—and one can see that Lichtheim, like anyone else who attempts to serve more than one audi- ence, had difficulty at times with the level and the type of comment— general identification, philological or semantic note, and so on. And of course, there is more to be said on divine names, historical geography, and historical content, let alone the underdeveloped study of Egyptian literature's contribution to ancient comparative literature, one of Lichtheim's principal interests. Nevertheless, Volume III provides both general audiences and more specialized readers with a good sense of the literary traditions of first millennium BCE Egypt. What is traditionally called the Late Period was something of a step- child in Egyptology until not long ago. The French term for the period, "la Basse Epoque," seems to convey the traditionally held view, so poeti- cally captured by James Henry Breasted in the concluding paragraph to his A History of Egypt, that Egypt was in a state of decline culturally, mili- tarily, politically, and economically by the time of the Persian conquest: The Persian conquest in 525 BCE, which deprived Psamtik III, the son of Amasis of his throne and kingdom, was but a change of rulers, a purely external fact. And if a feeble burst of national feeling enabled this or that Egyptian to thrust off the Persian yoke for a brief period, the movement may be likened to the convulsive contractions which sometimes lend momentary motion to limbs from which conscious life has long departed. With the fall of Psamtik III, Egypt belonged to a new world, toward the development of which she contributed much, but in which she could no longer play an active part. Her great work was done, and unable, like Nineveh or Babylon, to disap- pear from the scene, she lived on her artificial life for a time under the Persians and the Ptolemies, ever sinking, till she became merely the granary of Rome, to be visited as a land of ancient marvels by wealthy Greeks and Romans who have left their names scratched here and there upon her hoary monuments, just as modern tourists, FOREWORD TO THE 2Oo6 EDITION XVii admiring the same marvels, still continue to do. But her unwarlike people, still making Egypt a garden of the world, show no signs of an awakening and the words of the Hebrew seer, "There shall be no more a prince out of the land of Egypt (Ezek. 30:13)," have been lit- erally fulfilled. Lichtheim was right to reject "cultural decline" as a label for the Egypt of the first millennium BCE (AEL III: 3). It is better to see the period, as she did, as one of transformation, although Breasted's attitude to Egypt- ian history, particularly after the Saite renaissance, still prevails today in some circles, despite the century that separates us from his History. Until recently, indeed, Egyptian history after the decline of the New Kingdom empire has usually been dismissed by Egyptologists as uninteresting, confusing, and ultimately unimportant compared to the high culture of the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms, felt to be untainted by contact with other cultures (hardly true, of course). Twenty-five years ago, it would indeed have been fair to suggest that there was very little interesting work going on in the study of the Egypt of the first millennium BCE. Of course, there have always been exceptions, Lichtheim was certainly one, but most Egyptologists have focused on the periods when an apparently strong central state was ruled by an Egyptian king. Considerable scholarly energy has now been devoted to the first millennium, although good historical method is still a major desidera- tum in Egyptology. There are several reasons for the increased interest in the first millennium BCE. The period is the most richly documented period of ancient Egypt, and the reinvigoration in the publication and study of Demotic, Hieratic, and hieroglyphic texts has driven renewed philological inquiry. Another reason has been the intensive archaeological investigation of the Delta.4 If the Egyptian state was oriented toward the south and out to the Red Sea in the first two millennia of its history (3000-1000 BCE), the last millennium BCE saw an important shift—the political and social ori- entation of Egypt was for the most part clearly oriented northward, in the Delta and out into the Mediterranean. There had always been interest in the Near East, of course, but the political center was now in the Delta. This shift began with the Ramessides ca. 1300 BCE, and their trans- feral of political power to the Delta was later reinforced with Egypt's involvement in the wars between Greece and Persia. This shift in the political center is increasingly understood by scholars as simply that, a shift in political geography and in the ruling family. But there were other shifts as well. The first millennium BCE was a time when Egyptian culture was transformed and utilized to great effect by rulers from the outside. That is shown in texts such as the Piye Stela. Changes in the law of con- tracts seen in the documentary papyri beginning in the seventh century XViii FOREWORD TO THE 2OO6 EDITION BCE, the rise in the importance of animal cults, and new settlements of foreigners, notably Greeks at Naukratis, but there were other settlements too, all mark important institutional changes. At times, political power was more centralized, at other times less so, but it is the vibrancy of Egyptian institutions, the symbols of political power, the beauty of the art, particularly the private portraiture, and the longevity of Egyptian re- ligion, among other things, that make the study of this period important not only for Egyptologists, but for all scholars who are interested in so- cioeconomic interconnections in this pivotal period in Mediterranean history. LICHTHEIM'S EGYPTIAN LITERATURE Lichtheim's treatment of "literature" in this volume includes belles-lettres, commemorative inscriptions, instructions, and religious hymns and the like, following her broad definition.5 Many of the texts are important for our historical understanding of the period, and most of the texts included in the volume belong firmly in the Egyptian cultural sphere, although the persons producing them were not unaware of the shifts in political, economic, and military power.

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