The Interior of Amenemope's Instruction

May 25, 2008

I like to imagine the study of literature as a sub-field of anthropology. This sub-field would proceed with a close analysis of literary texts as a means to understand the cultural frame by which people in the past gave meaning and value to their world. In other words the reading of literature would cease to be dominated by the present enjoyment of a text and become instead focused on teasing out the interior world that could produce such a text.

Wisdom literature would make for an interesting place to start on this project since it deals so forthrightly with categories of thought. The Maxims of Ptahhotep, a wisdom work from the Middle Kingdom or possibly earlier, is caught up with the niceties of social position. A succession of the maxims are introduced with a situation that is socially defined:

2. If you come up against an aggressive adversary (in court),
One who has influence and is more excellent than you...

3. If you come up against an aggressive adversary,
Your equal, one who is of your own social standing...

4. If you come up against an aggressive adversary,
A man of low standing, one who is not your equal...

Ethical action is thus presented as largely a matter of knowledge of how to respond within certain social settings. Everything depends on a correct reading of the situation.. and then the personal response can be calibrated.

In the New Kingdom we find another famous book of wisdom, the Instruction of Amenemope. Although by the setup of this work we can guess that the author understood himself as working within the line of traditional wisdom literature, he introduces some new structures to his traditional wisdom formulations. Most notably a reliance on ethical types:

The hot-headed man in the temple
    Is like a tree grown in an enclosed space;
In a moment is its loss of foliage.
    It reaches its end in the carpentry shop;
It is floated away far from its place,
    Or fire is its funeral pyre.
The truly temperate man sets himself apart,
    He is like a tree grown in a sunlit field,
But it becomes verdant, it doubles its yield,
    It stands before its owner;
Its fruit is something sweet, its shade is pleasant,
    And it reaches its end in a grove.

This is obviously an antecedent of Psalm 1, with its images of two trees with two destinations—although that biblical version has its own distinct emphases. For our purposes what is interesting is the elevation of moral types: the "hot-headed man" and the "truly temperate man." (These terms are repeated in surrounding sections of the Instruction, confirming the impression given by this one.) The earlier emphasis on moral situations has given way to a sense of ideal ethical types. Between the Middle Kingdom and the New Kingdom, then, we can begin to measure a real change in ethical point of view.. which is not announced by bells and whistles within the text, but by subtle matters of emphasis. And when we discover these changes we are beginning to trace the changes in the way people experienced and understood their world. Literature, in other words, can be a ticket into the private world of experience (not necessarily that of the author, but of the society that accepted and valued this text).

If we want to know more about the interior world of the New Kingdom as reflected in the Instruction of Amenemope, we can look further to passages that emphasize a new commitment to interior truth:

Do not converse falsely with a man,
    For it is the abomination of God.
Do not separate your mind from your tongue...

The concern is with matching up the inner and the outer. This and other such passages allow us to glimpse a growing respect for interior truth..

The history of humanity, one would think, should include something of this internal journey.. not just the political and institutional remains. We can add to these concerns an interest in the identity commitments of historical peoples, commonly used conceptual metaphors, and popular life- narratives. Putting this information together (and supplementing it with physical remains) we would begin to preserve a unique cultural frame.. and finally a library of such human points of view. The only path I know to this kind of knowledge is the study of texts through the tools of literary analysis.