The Eloquent Peasant

Egypt's Twelfth Dynasty had, for well over a century, been the reunified successor to a civil war in which a line of kings ruling from Herakleopolis in the north had fought Theban rivals for the throne. The Herakleopolitans lost, and their reigns became the discredited past against which the reunified Middle Kingdom defined itself. It is that discredited past the story chooses for its setting: it names its king as Nebkaure, almost certainly Nebkaure Khety of the losing dynasty, a ruler so thinly attested outside this text that a small jasper weight found at Tell el-Retabah is nearly his only other trace in the archaeological record. Into that court comes Khun-Anup, a peasant of the Wadi Natrun, the salt marsh northwest of the delta, travelling down to the Nile valley to trade grain, natron, and hides. A minor landholder named Nemtinakht blocks the narrow towpath with his own cloth, forces the peasant's donkeys onto his barley, then seizes the animals and goods as invented compensation. Denied any hearing by the very man who robbed him, Khun-Anup appeals instead to the high steward Rensi, son of Meru, and delivers nine petitions of such ornamented, punning eloquence that Rensi refers the case to the king rather than ruling on it himself. The king orders something stranger than a verdict: say nothing back to the peasant, feed his family in secret, and write down every speech in full, because the king wants the performance transcribed before he wants the case resolved. Justice, when it finally arrives, arrives only once the eloquence has been fully collected. The nine petitions are formal Middle Egyptian rhetoric, dense with wordplay on names and occupations, set inside a plain prose frame, and the gap between the two registers is the entire argument: the era's highest literary style is put in a powerless man's mouth, to make the case that the powerless are owed exactly that quality of attention.

The question of who

Nothing in the four surviving copies names a composer, and the story itself never claims Khun-Anup as its author rather than its subject: he is presented throughout as a wronged man, not a writer. Egyptologists read the tale as the work of one trained scribe of the Twelfth Dynasty court, who used a defeated dynasty's king as cover for material a living king might not have welcomed hearing recited about himself. That scribe's name did not survive the centuries of copying.

How it nearly did not

Unlike Sinuhe, copied for seven centuries into the New Kingdom, the Eloquent Peasant seems to have stopped being copied once the Middle Kingdom ended: no later ostracon or papyrus of it has ever surfaced. Its only route to survival was four accidental Middle Kingdom copies, one of them sealed inside a magician's box in a plundered tomb beneath the Ramesseum until 1896.

Almost four thousand years

• c. 1850 BCE Composed in the Twelfth Dynasty, set two centuries earlier, in the court of a defeated Herakleopolitan king
• c. 1800 BCE The four surviving copies are made, no later copy of the tale has ever been found
• c. 1700 BCE One copy is sealed into a lector priest's tool chest, buried in a tomb beneath the Ramesseum
• 1844 The Prussian expedition buys two Berlin papyri at Thebes, acquired on the same trip as the Tale of Sinuhe
• 1896 James Quibell opens the sealed tool chest, a third of its papyri already rotted away
• 1908 Vogelsang and Gardiner publish the first full edition, Die Klagen des Bauern, with photographs of the Berlin papyri
• 1923 Alan Gardiner publishes the first full English translation
• Now Still being read