A World Upturned: Commentary on and Analysis of The Dialogue of Ipuwer and the Lord of All
Roland Enmarch
Abstract
The Dialogue of Ipuwer and the Lord of All is one of the major works from the golden age of Egyptian literature, the Middle Kingdom (c. 1980–1630 bc). The poem provides one of the most searching explorations of human motivation and divine justice to survive from ancient Egypt, and its stark pessimism questions many of the core ideologies that underpinned the Egyptian state and monarchy. It begins with a series of laments portraying an Egypt overwhelmed by chaos and destruction, and develops into an examination of why these disasters should happen, and who bears responsibility for them: the god ... More
The Dialogue of Ipuwer and the Lord of All is one of the major works from the golden age of Egyptian literature, the Middle Kingdom (c. 1980–1630 bc). The poem provides one of the most searching explorations of human motivation and divine justice to survive from ancient Egypt, and its stark pessimism questions many of the core ideologies that underpinned the Egyptian state and monarchy. It begins with a series of laments portraying an Egypt overwhelmed by chaos and destruction, and develops into an examination of why these disasters should happen, and who bears responsibility for them: the gods, the king, or humanity. This volume provides the first full literary analysis of this poem for a century. It provides a detailed study of questions such as: its date of composition; its historicity; the identity of its protagonists and setting; its reception history within Egyptian culture; and whether it really is a unified literary composition, or a redacted collection of texts of heterogenous origin.
Keywords:
Egyptian literature,
Middle Kingdom,
poem,
motivation,
divine justice,
history,
Egyptian culture,
gods,
ancient Egypt,
king
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2009 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780197264331 |
| Published to British Academy Scholarship Online: January 2012 |
DOI:10.5871/bacad/9780197264331.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Roland Enmarch, author
Lecturer in Egyptology, School of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology, University of Liverpool
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