Episode Details

Part 2 of the Egyptian tales is a single story, and one of the most famous the papyri have kept: "The Doomed Prince," from the second series of Petrie's Egyptian Tales. A king's long-awaited son is born under a decree of the Hathors: his death is to be by the crocodile, or by the serpent, or by the dog. Raised in a house upon the desert to keep him from his fates, the boy wins a dog for his companion; and grown, he will not be kept — he goes out to meet his life, wins a chief's daughter by climbing to her window seventy cubits from the ground, and tells her his three dooms. His wife keeps watch over his sleep, and one of the three fates comes for him in the night and is given into his hand. The second meets him at the river — and there the tale stops.

The papyrus that carries this story breaks off in the middle of the crocodile's speech, and its ending was already lost when the papyrus came down to us; the tale is read here exactly as far as it survives, and no ending is invented for it. One beat is carried exactly at the weight the papyrus gives it: the serpent that comes to bite the sleeping prince is struck down by his wife's hand, in the single clause the tale gives it, as the register of this shelf prescribes. The rest stands as the papyrus tells it — the threats spoken in the story are spoken, and pass unenacted, and nothing has been softened or added.

Source: W. M. Flinders Petrie (ed. and trans.), Egyptian Tales, Translated from the Papyri, Second Series (London: Methuen, 1895), from the public-domain 1895 edition (Project Gutenberg eBook #7413). 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 3 of the Egyptian tales follows on this shelf.

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