![]() I asked the kids to watch for how the different characters looked and behaved, and to notice whether justice was eventually given to “The Eloquent Peasant.” I also asked them to listen for the sounds in Arabic we don’t have in English. Pharaoh had heard of the perfect speeches of the peasant, and scribes wrote each down for his enjoyment, adding another level of injustice and insensitivity.Įven with my mistakes, the relative societal positions were clear. I also thought the pharaoh was the one who listened to the peasant’s nine calls for justice (it was the high steward who judged). I thought the man who stole from the peasant was a soldier (he was a vassal of the high steward Rensi). He spoke beautifully, and the authority made him return again and again to hear his fine speeches. Ancient Egypt valued justice and equality under the law, and the wronged peasant went to the Pharaoh’s local authority to ask for justice. But first, I summarized the story:Ī peasant is taking his goods to market with his two donkeys, when he is accosted by a soldier who robs him of everything. We watched the final five minutes of “The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant,” made in 1970 by Egyptian filmmaker Shadi Abdel Salam and recently remastered. His ideas are good, though, and he retranslated “The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant.” I used the document of his process, from hieroglyph to language sound to English, for our writing time. ![]() He made a YouTube video entitled, “The Queen Shrieks: The Shock of Ancient Egyptian Poetry,” which was, sadly, tedious. The finder was Richard Parkinson, British Egyptologist and academic who teaches at Queens College, Oxford, and curated the Department of Egypt and Sudan at the British Museum up until 2013. Years ago, I bought a book of stodgy translations of ancient Egyptian poems, but recently I spent some time on Google looking for livelier revisitings, and I found “The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant,” a long-form poem from the Middle Kingdom, around 4,000 years ago. Richard Parkinson reading a papyrus in context.
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