Reading Ancient Egyptian Poetry among Other Histories (review)

Books of or about Egyptian poetry usually leave a Western reader confused and unimpressed, since its social and intellectual contexts are almost always unfamiliar, and its protocols alien to Western thought. Parkinson's innovative approach is to consign the actual translations of three famous Egyptian poems, the Tale of Sinuhe, the Eloquent Peasant, and the Dialogue of a Man with his Soul, to an appendix. In the body of the text, he writes about his own attempts to understand these poems within their Egyptian landscapes, sketching out the details of the places where they were discovered, what we know about the writing and transmission of the texts, and finally their modern, Western, reception. At times, the book reads more like a work of fiction than a historical study, as the writing moves between personal experiences recalled, history, landscape, and technical philology. This narrative strategy, however, is surprisingly effective. Books by Egyptologists tend toward the exotic—mummies and pyramids—or the hopelessly obscure. Parkinson's thickly textured readings are an interesting example of how to make this material more accessible to nontechnical readers without sacrificing accuracy or detail.