Episode Details

KacheliTV opens a new shelf: the tales of ancient Egypt, in Egyptian Tales, Translated from the Papyri — the stories the Egyptians themselves wrote down on papyrus more than three thousand years ago, in W. M. Flinders Petrie's translation of 1895, and read here in our own telling. Part 1 begins with the two cleanest tales in his collection.

"The Shipwrecked Sailor" is the oldest sea-story of wonder that survives: a sailor of Pharaoh's fleet, wrecked alone on an island that is on no chart, where the figs and grapes hang ripe and nothing is lacking — and where a great serpent, thirty cubits long, his body overlaid with gold and his colour the blue of lazuli, comes shaking the earth to ask what has brought him there. The losses the tale carries — the ship's crew in the storm, and the serpent's own lost child — are told as the sailor and the serpent recount them, each in its own sentence, as the papyrus tells them.

"Baufra's Tale" is a wonder told at the court of King Khufu, of his father Seneferu's day: a pleasure-boat on the palace lake, a rowing girl's malachite jewel slipped into the water, and the chief reciter Zazamankh, who speaks his magic speech and folds one half of the lake upon the other to find it again. In the book, this tale stands among the "Tales of the Magicians" told before Khufu; it is read here with only its court opening and the king's answer. Of the tales that stand beside it there, the one told before it is excluded at this shelf's gate — its matter is an adultery and a killing — and the one told after it, of the aged magician Dedi, stands held for a ruling; neither is read here, and no completeness is claimed for the group.

Chapters:

00:11 — The Shipwrecked Sailor

09:11 — Baufra's Tale

Source: W. M. Flinders Petrie (ed. and trans.), Egyptian Tales, Translated from the Papyri, First Series (London: Methuen, 1895), from the public-domain 1895 edition (Project Gutenberg eBook #7386). Petrie translated these tales from the ancient papyri; our telling is a fresh in-house rendering of his 1895 text. Music: gentle instrumental bed under the narration.

Thank you for listening — Part 2 of the Egyptian tales follows on this shelf.

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