“Good is my house, spacious my dwelling place, and memory of me is in the palace. Whatever God fated this flight—be gracious, and bring me home! Surely you will let me see the place where my heart still stays! What matters more than my being buried in the land where I was born?” (Parkinson, p. 34)
In 1898, the British Egyptologist James Quibell was at work excavating a site at the ancient city of Thebes known as the Ramesseum. This immense temple complex, covering 35,000 square feet (or 10,600 square meters) had been built to house the tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses the Great, who’d died in 1213 BCE. The ground around it was littered with broken statues—one of which was a tumbledown colossus that had inspired Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1818 poem Ozymandias, with its famous exhortation to “look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
However, what interested Quibell wasn’t the statue or any royal treasures. He and his team were more interested in some older chambers that had been discovered toward the back of the Ramesseum—long, shallow tombs that were about 600 years older than the great pharaoh’s temple. These dated back to the site’s earlier use as a religious center, and, in Quibell’s words, “the chance of finding some library of the priests made the site attractive.” (Quibell 1) Working with a team of about a dozen diggers—and a troop of 40 or more guards, to prevent theft of artefacts from the site—Quibell began to unearth many interesting finds, including devotional figurines called ushabtis, partial coffins, wine and oil jars, and more.
Then he found a wooden box, about 12 inches by 18 inches. In his book The Ramesseum, he describes the box like this:
“It was covered with white plaster, and on the lid was roughly drawn in black ink the figure of a jackal. The box was about one third full of papyri which were in extremely bad condition, three quarters of their substance having decayed away; if a fragment of the material were pressed slightly between the finger and thumb it disappeared in a mere dust.” (Quibell 3)
This was a scribe’s pen-case, and the papyri inside it—paper documents made from pressed reeds—were the largest such find of papyrus to that date. When these papyri were eventually translated, they were found to include medicinal texts and a poem. It wasn’t the first copy of this poem that had been discovered—an agent of the British Consul acquired one in 1830—and it wouldn’t be the last. Egyptologists have found versions of this story again and again—and they continue to find it. They find it on papyrus fragments or on ostracons, large flattish pieces of limestone that were used was writing surfaces when paper was scarce. They’ve found it on large stones and engraved on walls. It’s written by skilled writers in beautiful hieratic characters—cursive hieroglyphics, basically—or in wobbly ones by trainee scribes.
For at least 750 years, from about 1850 BCE until 1100 BCE, the Egyptians continued to share and copy this poem. In just 600 lines, it offered them—and us—so much: adventure, mystery, and a meditation on what it meant to be an exile. What it meant to be an Egyptian out of Egypt.
I’m Rose Judson. Welcome to Books of All Time. This is episode three, “The Tale of Sinuhe: The Traveler in an Antique Land.”
[Theme music]
The Tale of Sinuhe is considered the masterpiece of Ancient Egyptian poetry. It’s among the oldest writing we have from the Egyptians that isn’t an administrative document, a religious text, or a monumental inscription. Ancient Egypt’s history is generally divided into three chunks: the Old Kingdom, from about 2700 BCE to 2200 BCE, is when the pyramids and the sphinxes were constructed. The Middle Kingdom, from roughly 2150 to 1700 BCE, is when Egyptian art and literature flourished—Sinuhe was written in this period. The New Kingdom, from 1550 to 1070 BCE, is when Tutankhamun and Ramesses ruled. There’s also a late period, from 653 to 332 BCE, but since that mostly involves the Egyptians being invaded by various waves of conquerors, ending with Alexander the Great, we’ll set that to one side for now.
The oldest known copy of Sinuhe dates to 1875 BCE, or about 3,900 years ago, but it could have been written anywhere from 30-50 years before that. Part of the reason we can guess when it was written is because it mentions very specific historical details. The Tale of Sinuhe begins on the last day of the reign of Amenemhet I. Amenemhet reigned sometime during the 20th century BCE. He was probably born in a noble family, not a royal one. He may have overthrown his pharaoh, though this isn’t clear from the sources available.
What is clear that Amenemhet seems to have felt a touch insecure on his throne—one of his main projects was bringing back the building of Old Kingdom-style pyramids in an early attempt to Make Egypt Great Again, apparently. But this wasn’t terribly effective: his pyramid at El-Lisht wasn’t all that well constructed, and is just a mound in the sand today.
Sinuhe, however, survives him. Like last month’s story, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Sinuhe isn’t the work of any one known author. But it’s very different to that story. While Gilgamesh is about a larger-than-life king who ultimately learns to accept the uncertainty of death, Sinuhe focuses on a servant of the king who longs for the right kind of death. Here’s how it goes.
The story begins like a typical funeral autobiography—the kind of thing a well-to-do Egyptian would have had carved or painted on the wall of their tomb. These autobiographies were like a resume of the dead person’s achievements: the role they held, the lands they owned, the charity they gave others, and—most importantly—how close they were to the pharaoh. In Ancient Egypt, the king wasn’t just a powerful lord. He was an actual God incarnate. If you worked for the pharaoh, you were in it for life, unless he dismissed you. If you were dismissed or if you left, you would not only lose your job and possibly your life; you would also be denied a proper burial, and shut out of the afterlife.
The Tale of Sinuhe apes this style of funerary biography so well that some early Egyptologists actually took it as a real person’s autobiography. And you can kind of understand it as you read the opening lines, which have a majestic flourish:
“The Patrician and Count, Governor of the Sovereign’s Domains in the Syrian lands,
The True Acquaintance of the King, whom he loves,
the Follower, Sinuhe says,
I was a Follower who followed his lord . . .” (Parkinson 27)
The Egyptologist Richard Parkinson, whose 2009 translation for Oxford World Classics I’ll be quoting from throughout this episode, pointed out in a 2014 episode of BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time that funerary autobiographies are usually written in the third person, so when the narrator of Sinuhe addresses us as “I”, switching into the first person, he’s swerving out of that form and into a different genre: the adventure tale. And we know precisely when Sinuhe’s adventure begins, because he tells us: regnal year 30, month 3 of the inundation season, day 7. Unfortunately, the vagaries of the Egyptian calendar and the lack of clear sources for Amenemhet’s reign mean we can only get a rough idea of when exactly that date would have been using our calendars.
The historical sources available to us confirm that Amenemhet died in the 30th year of his reign, but that could have been anywhere from 1964 BCE to 1908 BCE. The month is also tough to work out—Egypt’s calendar had 365 days but no leap year, so it was constantly sliding relative to our dating. What is known is that the inundation season, when the Nile floods, ran from roughly September to January, so “month 3 of the inundation season” might indicate a date sometime in November.
Anyway, whenever this fated day fell, Sinuhe says it was the day that “the God ascended to his horizon”, which is the appropriately formal and circumspect way to say that “the pharaoh died.” There’s a lot of this kind of indirect talk in Sinuhe. In his introduction to the poem, Richard Parkinson says that “the Egyptian world view was fundamentally pessimistic; chaos was thought to be ever present and waiting to overwhelm the ordered cosmos.” (Parkinson 22) This fear of chaos seems to extend to discussing chaotic events within Egyptian society in any kind of clarity. You’re constantly having to read between the lines, or flip to the footnotes.
Anyway, back to Sinuhe. He tells how the palace fell into silence, how its great doors shut, and how the courtiers were bent double with mourning for the pharaoh. Then he zooms over to Libya, where Amenemhet’s son Senwosret is on his way back from a successful military expedition. Sinuhe is traveling with him in his entourage.
Senwosret is shocked when officials from the palace arrive to tell him that due to “the affair which had happened in the Audience Hall”, (Parkinson 27) he is now king of Egypt and a new God. This “affair” seems to be yet more polite code, this time for an assassination—based on evidence from the events of Sinuhe and other sources from the period, it’s plausible to conclude that Amenemhet was murdered by his own guards.
Senwosret wastes no time—he races off with his immediate bodyguard to secure his throne. The rest of his entourage is thrown into turmoil. Gossip begins to circulate. Sinuhe, standing on duty with the other royal children—probably teenage princes, sent to support their brother and learn a bit of the art of war—overhears a conversation that scares the living daylights out of him. He panics and races out into the night, looking for a place to hide. He’s now on the run.
Here we come to one of the major mysteries of the tale: what exactly did Sinuhe overhear in this conversation? He is very vague about it. In Parkinson’s text, he says:
“Now, when the royal children
accompanying him on this expedition were sent to,
one of them was summoned.
Now, when I was standing on duty,
I heard his voice as he spoke,
as I was a little way off.
My heart staggered; my arms spread out;
trembling fell in every limb.” (Parkinson 28)
The poet doesn’t give you much there, right? In a 2000 paper called “What Made Sinuhe Run”, the scholar Scott Morschauser attempts to pick apart some of this. He recounts the theories of other scholars. There’s the “blind panic” idea, which is the most common reading—the king being murdered was basically an Egyptian’s worst nightmare, and even today political assassination can be shocking. I’m sure there are at least some people listening to this show who can remember people weeping or fainting when they heard that John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.
Morschauser also describes an intriguing theory that Sinuhe actually overheard people plotting against the new king, and that he fled because he knew that kind of knowledge would get him killed. (Morschauer 187–188). Morschauser’s own theory is that Sinuhe probably left because the nature of his bond with the king was with Amenemhat specifically, not with the office of pharaoh. So, with his personal patron dead, he set out to find a new lord to serve, like a knight-errant spurred on by grief.
I’m not sure I buy this reason—Sinuhe flails about too much, and is too consumed by angst about his desertion, to make this seem plausible. I like the idea of Sinuhe overhearing a plot and having to run for his life, but that’s probably because I’ve read too many screenwriting guides over the years, and that scenario fits the qualifications for a strong inciting incident. I’m inclined to agree with another scholar, John Baines, who wrote that getting hung up on a motivation for Sinuhe’s flight “is irrelevant in terms of the plot, which simply requires that Sinuhe go abroad.” (Baines 42)
So away Sinuhe goes: abroad. “I did not think to live after him,” he says, “him” meaning Amenemhat. (Parkinson 27) He’s convinced there will be a violent interregnum period in which he’ll be targeted for assassination, too, so he tries to avoid any contact with people. Heading south first, Sinuhe slinks along the edges of fields and runs from a stranger he meets in the road. Coming to a lake, he hops onto a rudderless raft and is blown east. Once off the raft he goes north to the border, lying in underbrush until nightfall so he can pass the watchtowers unnoticed. He crosses into Syria.
The problem, of course, is that Syria is partially desert, and Sinuhe hasn’t got anything with him other than his clothes. He is soon lost in the sand and in grave danger.
“Thirst’s attack overtook me, and
I was scorched, my throat parched.
I said, ‘This is the taste of death.’” (Parkinson 29)
He has resigned himself to dying under the hot sun when suddenly he hears cattle lowing a little way off. There’s a band of Syrian nomads passing by—“sand-farers”, as he calls them. By happy coincidence, the leader of this band knows Sinuhe, having met him at court when he was visiting Egypt in the past. The leader of the nomads rescues Sinuhe from his predicament, nursing him back to health first with water and then with boiled milk. “Country gave me to country,” says Sinuhe.
For six months he travels with the Syrians, heading north through Lebanon and into a land then called Retjenu, which today would encompass parts of Syria, Israel, and Palestine. There he meets the ruler of Retjenu, a minor king called Amunenshi. Sinuhe says that Amunenshi “carried me off”, but whether this is because Amunenshi defeated the Syrian tribe in battle, or because the Syrians sold Sinuhe to him isn’t clear.
At any rate, Amunenshi is interested to know why Sinuhe is so far from Egypt. Wandering around the world is not something Egyptians did at this point—not unless commanded to by someone higher up the social ladder than them. Doing so would go against the Egyptian code of ma’at, or maintaining order through correct behavior in accordance with one’s social status. Deserting the king and leaving Egypt did not comport with ma’at. “Has anything happened with the king?” Amunenshi asks—a little disingenuously, I’d say. Given that it’s been six months since the pharaoh was assassinated, he would surely have had all the details by now, especially since he tells Sinuhe there are other Egyptians visiting his court.
Sinuhe admits, sheepishly, that he fled out of fear when he heard the king had died. He’s full of remorse and self-reproach because, as he admits, he didn’t actually have a concrete reason to believe he was in trouble. “I had not been talked of,” he tells Amunenshi. “My face had not been spat upon; I had heard no reproaches . . . I do not know what brought me to this country—it is like a plan of God.” (Parkinson 29)
“And what’s it like in Egypt now?” Amunenshi wants to know. “Is it total chaos, or what?”
“Oh no,” Sinuhe replies, and he launches into four and a half stanzas of fawning praise for the new pharaoh—this is a lot of real estate in a poem that’s only 40 stanzas long. According to Sinuhe the new king is “vengeful, a smasher of foreheads” (Parkinson 30) but also kind and sweet, capable of conquering by love alone. He adds tactfully that Senwosret’s hostile intentions are focused on the lands to the south of Egypt, like Nubia, not northern countries like Retjenu. He recommends that Amunenshi send a delegation to the pharaoh to seek an alliance. He wraps up with this:
“Men and women pass by, exulting at him.
He is a king who conquered in the egg,
His eyes on it from birth.
He makes those born with him plentiful.
He is unique, God-given.
How joyful this land since he has ruled!” (Parkinson 31)
“Well, that’s very nice for you,” Amunenshi says. And then he offers Sinuhe a position at his court. This could be due to the high quality of Sinuhe’s pre-freakout resume—having someone conversant with the ways of your large, belligerent neighbor to the south always comes in handy (just ask the Scots or the Canadians). Or it could be down to the fact that Amunenshi is a king who can spot a world-class suck-up, and what king can’t use a few more of those in his entourage?
Sinuhe accepts Amunenshi’s offer and is richly rewarded for it. He’s given one of Amunenshi’s own daughters as a bride, and he is endowed with land that is fertile and rich:
“Figs were in it, and grapes;
its wine was more copious than its water;
great its honey, plentiful its moringa-oil,
with all kinds of fruit on its trees.” (Parkinson 31)
Sinuhe quickly becomes rich in Amunenshi’s service. He and his wife have several children. He becomes known as a generous lord and also as a fierce defender of Retjenu’s borders. He develops into a skilled military commander, conducting raids and fending off attacks by bands of Syrians—this seems a touch ungrateful, given that Syrians saved him from a grim death in the desert, but you do as your lord commands if you want to uphold ma’at, I guess.
Sinuhe, in short, is a successful immigrant, and his success attracts the envy of other lords in Retjenu. One of these warlords, citing some imaginary slight or other, challenges Sinuhe to single combat. If he won’t accept, this warlord will attack Sinuhe’s home and plunder it.
Sinuhe grumbles about this—he knows this threat is driven by xenophobic resentment, not any actual injustice he’s committed—but he has clearly got his nerve back after years of effectively prosecuting various military operations. Instead of running off into the night, the way he did after hearing the pharaoh had been murdered, he declares that he will fight, and that he’s confident God knows the outcome.
He spends a night preparing his weapons—stringing his bow, sharpening his sword, and so on—and at dawn he steps out onto the field of combat.
All Retjenu has come to watch, he says. And although he is an outsider, he attests that among the spectators, “every breast burned for me . . . every heart was sore for me.” (Parkinson 33).
Sinuhe and the warrior go to it. Sinuhe compares his opponent to a bull, but quickly disarms him of his axe and his javelins. He fires an arrow at the warrior, striking him through the neck. When the warrior topples over screaming, Sinuhe picks up the man’s own axe and finishes him off with it. “[I] gave my war cry on his back, while every Asiatic was bellowing.” (Parkinson 33)
After accepting congratulations from the crowd and from Amunenshi, Sinuhe goes to the dead warrior’s camp and strips it of everything valuable—fixtures, fittings, and cattle alike. He has reached the pinnacle of what he can achieve in Retjenu. He thanks God for his triumph in the face of a deadly foe. He acknowledges that he has now become even more wealthy and powerful—and yet he despises all of it, because ultimately it’s hollow. It’s not who he is. It’s not Egyptian. After decades in exile, he admits that what he yearns for most is home.
In a long, anguished petition to the gods—and to the pharaoh, who is a god—Sinuhe pours out his pent-up homesickness. I wandered in the desert, and I nearly died, he says, but now I can give bread to the hungry and clothe the naked, I have lands and servants to spare—but all I want most is to return to Egypt. He claims that if he can return to the pharaoh’s palace, he will feel as if he has grown young again. “What matters more than my being buried/ in the land where I was born?” he wails. (Parkinson 34)
Sinuhe seems to break again in this section of the poem, but instead of running, he collapses with weariness. Old age is setting in, he claims; death is stalking him. He begs, again, to be forgiven and brought home.
Somehow, Senwosret gets to hear of Sinuhe’s survival and of his desperate wish to return to favor at the court. It’s not clear how this happens—maybe one of the envoys from Amunenshi’s court visits him, or maybe the story of Sinuhe’s battle with the warrior becomes famous. Regardless, a letter soon arrives for Sinuhe. It’s a decree from the pharaoh himself. “Nobody here ever had a bad thought against you,” the king writes (obviously I’m paraphrasing), “and you running off like that was really not ma’at, you know. But I’m glad to hear you’re alive, and of course you can come home to die.”
The pharaoh then describes in detail the delights that await Sinuhe’s dead body, delights that will sound familiar to anyone who’s ever spent time in the Ancient Egyptian section of a museum. There will be a vigil and a team of attendants to mummify him. They’ll remove his innards—just as an aside: I don’t know about you, but when I was a child, I always used to imagine mummies being scraped out like Halloween pumpkins. Anyway, once he’s hollowed out, they’ll anoint him with oil and wrap him in linen. There will be a gold mummy case, a lavishly decorated mask, dancers to escort his casket to the tomb, offering jars placed inside. He’ll even be buried among the royal children. “This is too long to be roaming the earth!” the decree concludes. “Think of your corpse—and return!” (Parkinson 37)
Sinuhe, upon reading this, is overwhelmed with grateful disbelief. He goes shouting through his camp about it. “How can this be done for a servant/ whose heart led him astray to strange countries? So good is the kindness which saves me from death!” (Parkinson 37) Sinuhe then dictates a reply to the pharaoh’s decree which is . . . honestly, it’s a bit much. It’s even more fawning than Sinuhe’s earlier monologue to Amunenshi, if you can believe that, and it includes a very long list of the gods—Hathor, Horus, Ra and all that gang—and how much they love the pharaoh, too. The main point of interest in it is how Sinuhe feels compelled, yet again, to try to explain his motivation for running off all those years ago. He really can’t.
“I know not what parted me from my place,” he says. “It was like the nature of a dream.” (Parkinson 38) What he does know is that “it is you who veils this horizon of mine. The sun shines for love of you, the water of the river is drunk when you wish—“and oh, honestly, that’s enough of that. Wipe up the slobber, Sinuhe. (Parkinson 39)
So, Sinuhe must now retrace the steps of his flight. He leaves everything he has built in Retjenu—his riches, his herds, his orchards—even his wife, children, and grandchildren—and returns to the Egyptian border, where he’s escorted back to the palace by one of Senwosret’s officials. Once in the presence of the pharaoh, Sinuhe is overwhelmed with emotion. He tells the king that there “is a terror which is in my body like that which created the fated flight.” (Parkinson 40)
Senwosret reassures him that he is in no danger. He summons the queen and his children to come see their visitor. The royal family cry out upon seeing Sinuhe—it’s not clear whether this is because they recognize him from before, or because he is dressed in foreign clothes as “an offspring of the Syrians,” or both. (Parkinson 41) But once they’ve all been reunited, the pharaoh orders Sinuhe taken to the robing chamber, where he’s to receive his new uniform of office. The last stanzas of the poem tell how Sinuhe strips himself of all the paraphernalia and habits he learned when in exile:
“The years were made to pass from my limbs;
I became clean-shaven, and my hair was combed.
A load was given back to the foreign country,
and clothes back to the sand-farers.” (Parkinson 42)
The poem ends by coming full circle, with a description of Sinuhe’s funeral and death. “I was in the favors of the king’s giving, until the day of landing came,” he concludes. “So it ends, from start to finish, as found in writing.” (Parkinson 43)
That’s The Tale of Sinuhe—brief but multi-layered and subtle. I have to admit I don’t feel as warmly toward this story as I did toward Gilgamesh. It’s a little neurotic if that makes sense. Sinuhe’s incessant agonizing about his social status overshadows everything he does. Constantly waiting for him to get another round of “why did I leave Egypt, when will I ever go back to Egypt, have I told you how marvelous our Egyptian king is, in Egypt?” out of his system detracts from the main action of the story. The human element is detached—Sinuhe seems almost glad to be rid of his foreign wife and family at the end of the story—and even the divine element is kept at one remove. We just have a list of characterless gods. They aren’t personified; they don’t obviously intervene in what happens.
The human element in Gilgamesh, by contrast, is anchored by the friendship at the heart of the story, and the lively descriptions of city life around it. The divine aspect is far more fun, too, because the gods are distinct characters who interact with the protagonists—think of Enkidu throwing bull testicles at Ishtar, or Gilgamesh telling Shamash to mind his own business as he goes stomping through the wilderness.
Where I can relate to this story is as an immigrant. I’m going to try not to talk too much about myself in this show—I find most personal essays, or, as someone I know calls them, “first person blah-blahs” pretty tedious. But I have lived outside my own country for most of my adult life, and while I’m nowhere near as preoccupied as Sinuhe is with getting home—it may happen in a few years, it may not—I do know that feeling of struggling to understand who you are when you’re the foreigner in the room. There are times when I suddenly realize my ideas or actions aren’t taken by the people around me as belonging to me, Rose, but as belonging to “the American” or even “all Americans”. It’s like disassociation by proxy.
And I know what it’s like to live happily in a country that’s not your own and occasionally just feel fed up with how differently they do things. Every summer I come within a whisker of yelling “Just put some bloody ice in the drinks, guys, you know?” Every few years I reach a tipping point where I suddenly find that the local accent is grating on my last nerve. I haven’t shot any of the English through the neck with an arrow yet, but there’s still time.
There’s also another aspect of being an immigrant that I recognized in Sinuhe, one that I think was very well expressed, funnily enough, by Queen Victoria’s husband Albert, the Prince Consort. He was painfully, obviously German in an English court that painfully, obviously resented Germans. When his own daughter, Vicky, married and moved to Germany, Albert replied to a letter she’d sent him complaining of her homesickness and isolation by saying that when you are an immigrant:
“The identity of one’s personality is, so to say, interrupted; and there is a kind of Dualism, in which the earlier ‘I’, with all its impressions, memories, feelings, etc. which were simultaneously bound up with the years of one’s youth . . . is coexistent with the new ‘I’. It is as if the self has lost its covering, and yet the new ‘I’ cannot be separated from the old, which as a matter of actual fact always remains there, unchanged.” (Albert, quoted in Wilson 132)
I know that when I go home I half-expect to meet an earlier version of myself walking out of the woods near my parents’ house in Pennsylvania; to catch a glimpse of myself stepping off the El in Chicago. But I know that if I do go home someday, I won’t revert to that person, and that there’s no shedding England from myself. Science tells us—and my soul tells me—that living in my version of exile has changed me on a molecular level. When I die, wherever I die, this country will have marked my bones.
On that cheerful note, here are my tips for where to read Sinuhe if you want to. Because it isn’t very long and it’s obviously well into the public domain, you can find versions of it online quite easily. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, has a page with most of the text. You can buy both a paperback and an e-reader version of The Tale of Sinuhe and Other Ancient Egyptian Poems, 1940-1640 BC, translated by R.B. Parkinson, Professor of Egyptology at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford. His introductions and footnotes can be somewhat dry, but they do provide lots of helpful context for characterization, plot, and place. Aside from Sinuhe, the short Teaching of Amenemhet is also worth reading—in it, the pharaoh’s ghost speaks to his son about his murder, how to memorialize him, and how to rule rightly as he comes into his own.
You can also hear Professor Parkinson read from Sinuhe in Egyptian in that 2014 episode of In Our Time I mentioned earlier in the episode—I’ve put a link to that in the transcript of this episode on our website at booksofalltime.co.uk. He mentions the fact that we can really only make very educated guesses as to what Egyptian words sounded like, because Egyptian hieroglyphics only tell us about the consonant sounds in the words, not the vowels.
Cracking the hieroglyphic code will be the focus of our next episode, when we go back to the smash-and-grab imperialist era of archaeology to catch up with the genius Jean-François Champollion, and also with some of the amazing chancers of that era, including a 6-foot-7-inch Italian carnival strongman named Giovanni Belzoni who managed to stumble into a fantastically successful career as an excavator. Episode four, Out of the Sands, a Voice comes out Thursday, April 11th.
Books of All Time is written and produced by me, Rose Judson. Lluvia Arras designed our cover art and logo. Special thanks to Yelena Shapiro, Cathy Merli, Matt Brough and the Books of All Time Advisory Council: Ed Brown, Beck Collins, Neil Dowling, Caitlin McMullin, Hugh Parker, and Jonathan Skipp. You can support the show by subscribing and leaving a rating or review at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening! I’ll be back in two weeks.
Reading List:
- Baines, John. “Interpreting Sinuhe.” The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, vol. 68, 1982, pp. 31–44, doi:10.2307/3821620.
- Bragg, Melvyn. “The Tale of Sinuhe.” In Our Time, BBC Radio 4, 1 May 2014, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b041ybj3.
- Morschauser, Scott. “What Made Sinuhe Run: Sinuhe’s Reasoned Flight.” Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt, vol. 37, 2000, pp. 187–198, doi:10.2307/40000530.
- Parkinson, R. B. The Tale of Sinuhe and Other Ancient Egyptian Poems, 1940-1640 BC. Oxford University Press, 2009.
- Quibell, James Edward, et al. The Ramesseum. Yare Egyptology, 2006. https://ia804705.us.archive.org/9/items/publications02brituoft/publications02brituoft.pdf
- Wilson, A. N. Prince Albert: The Man Who Saved the Monarchy. Atlantic Books, 2019.
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