LITERARY DEVICES IN THE STORY OF THE SHIPWRECKED SAILOR.

• Author: RENDSBURG, GARY A.

This article presents a detailed study of a variety of literary devices in the Egyptian story of the Shipwrecked Sailor. Special attention is paid to the role of repetition and to the presence of wordplay, particularly alliteration. Other devices are discussed also, such as the use of an inclusio to mark the completed cycle of the narrative, the employment of altered syntax to mark the end of a list of items, and the use of confused syntax to highlight the confusion of the moment at the point of the shipwreck.

THE STUDY OF ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN texts has undergone a quiet revolution in the last few decades. After more than a century of strict philology, with the search for answers to questions raised by that traditional discipline, scholars have begun to utilize a more literary approach, asking new questions and reading the texts with new eyes. This can be seen most prominently in the study of the Hebrew Bible, but it extends to the cognate disciplines of Assyriology and Egyptology as well. [1] In the present article, I wish to advance the discussion further with a detailed treatment of the Egyptian story of the Shipwrecked Sailor (hereinafter: ShS). [2] If I approach the text at times from the discipline of biblical studies, it is because it is my primary area of research and because many of the devices treated below are studied more comprehensively by biblical scholars than by Egyptologists. The main discussion will focus on two specific techniques, repetition and wordplay (and the interrelationship between them) , but other devices will be explored as well. [3]

Repetition is especially germane when discussing the ShS because of the very essence of the narrative. [4] It is, I believe, the earliest surviving example of the story-within-a-story technique in world literature (indeed, it has a story within a story within a story [5]), and this structure permits portions of the story to be told more than once. As the study of repetition in biblical texts has shown, seldom is the repetition verbatim. It may be nearly verbatim, but there are always differences. These differences from one telling to the next are crucial, and as attentive readers notice them, they can grasp their significance. Most of these contrasts, as we shall see, work at an oral/aural level, that is, they are intended for both the speaker that reads the text aloud and the audience that hears it. But there are occasional distinctions that are primarily visual/scribal, that is, only a scribe wielding a pen and a reader holding the papyrus could perceive them.

The story begins with the Sailor (the designation is conventional, as he is never designated as such) relating to his Commanding Officer an event that once happened to him. He had been on a naval mission to the king's mines when an unexpected storm wrecked the ship. As the sole survivor, he found himself on a deserted island-- void of human life, that is, but inhabited by a large snake. Pressed by the Snake to explain his presence on the island, the Sailor rehearses how he got there. A comparison of the two tellings, the Sailor's accounts to his Commanding Officer and then to the Snake (the latter, of course, incorporated into the former), allows us to see how repetition works in the tale.

It should be noted that the Egyptian tale provides a setting for repetition that is different from those in the biblical corpus. In the latter, typically an episode is described (often dispassionately) by an omniscient narrator, after which a particular character relates the episode to another character. For example, after the narrator describes the dramatic scene between Joseph and Potiphar's wife in Gen 39:11-12, the reader is treated to two retellings by the latter: first her report to the servants of the house in vv. 14-15 and then her report to her husband in vv. 17-18. Similarly, Pharaoh has his dreams (Gen 41:1-7) which he then relates to Joseph (vv. 17-24). In a variation of the technique, the narrator describes the death of Saul (1 Samuel 31), after which the reader hears a very different report from a character who may or may not have been present at the event, namely, the Amalekite who informs David of Saul's death in 2 Samuel 1. By contrast, in ShS, the entire story is told by the Sailor to the C ommanding Officer, who hears the Sailor's "first" version as well as the "second" as told to the Snake. [6] This repeated retelling influences the way the audience will hear the story. [7]

In addressing the Officer, the Sailor states [check{s}]m[cdotp]kwi r bi[[contains].sup.[contains]] n ity h[[contains].sup.[contains]]i[cdotp]kwi r w[[contains].sup.[contains]]d wr m dpt... skdw 120 im[cdotp]s m stpw n kmt "I was going to the mine of the sovereign, I was going down to the Great Green (Sea) in a boat... 120 sailors were in it from the best of Egypt" (lines 23-28). But when the Sailor speaks to the Snake, he says ink pw h[[contains].sup.[contains]]i[cdotp]kwi r bi[[contains].sup.[contains]] m wpwt ity m dpt ... skdw 120 im[cdotp]s m stpw n kmt "I am he who went down to the mine on a mission of the sovereign in a boat ... 120 sailors were in it from the best of Egypt" (lines 89-94). The most obvious difference between these two versions is the inclusion of the word wpwt "mission" in line 90. By utilizing this word when addressing the Snake, the Sailor may be elevating his position. He could not use this wording when speaking to his Commanding Officer, because the latter would know that the Sailor was merely one of one hundred and twenty sailors sailing to the mines and that he was not "on a mission of the sovereign," holding some position of authority. Moreover, the Sailor begins this description of the event with the expression ink pw h[[contains].sup.[contains]]i[cdotp]kwi "I am he who went down." While ink pw is not uncommon at the beginnings of narratives and in answers to questions, [8] both of which are the case here, the phrase allows the Sailor to begin his story to the Snake by fronting the independent personal pronoun ink "I," thus placing himself in a position of prominence. By contrast, in speaking to the Officer, the Sailor began with [check{s}]m[cdotp]kwi "I was going," a verbal form with pronominal indicator in second position.

The use of the word wpwt "mission" in line 89 has a second function as well. Both this and the previous section of the story are introduced by the words iw wpi[cdotp]n[cdotp]f r[cdotp]f r[cdotp]i "he [the Snake] opened his mouth to me" (lines 67, 81), in both instances highlighted by red ink. The two words wpi "open" and wpwt "mission" thus form an alliteration, and furthermore are written with the same sign (Gardiner F13). An additional alliteration is achieved when the reader reaches line 94, for here one encounters stpw "the best." [9] Also of interest is the variation in the writing of the word stpw "the best" in lines 28 and 94. When (earlier in the narrative) the Sailor tells the story to his Commanding Officer, the scribe uses only the triliteral stp sign (Gardiner U21) followed by the papyrus roll determinative (Gardiner Y1) to indicate an abstract noun. When the Sailor tells the story to the Snake, the scribe places four phonetic alphabetic signs before th e U21 and Y1 signs: s-t-p-w. The holder of the papyrus would see three of the same signs shared in the writing of wpwt "mission" and stpw, namely, p-w-t in wpwt "mission" and t-p-w in stpw "best." All of this focuses attention on the word wpwt "mission in the Sailor's account to the Snake, a word not heard previously in the story.

As a second example of repetition, we may compare the Sailor's two descriptions of the crew members and their skills. To his Commanding Officer he had stated, "they look at the sky, they look at the earth, their hearts are fiercer than lions, they could foretell a storm before (it) came, a gale before it happened" (lines 28-32). To the Snake he repeats these words verbatim (lines 95-98), but then adds the following: "each one of them, his heart was fiercer, his arm was stronger than his companion's; there was not a fool in their midst [lit., heart]" (lines 99-101). These additional phrases said to the Snake are intended to demonstrate the courage that the Sailor, like his mates, possesses (or possessed). Another alliteration brings this point out. The combination nn wh[[contains].sup.[contains]] m[cdotp]hr ib[cdotp]sn "not a fool in their midst" (lines 100-101) includes the same consonantal string as the word h[[contains].sup.[contains]]m "folded" [10] that appears in the expression "my arms folded befo re him" in the preceding scene (line 87). The expression "my arms folded before him" indicates the curtsy of the Sailor before the Snake, apparently while still on his belly (line 82). Because the Sailor's posture and his inability to speak could betray his fear, for balance the Sailor paraded the courage of the ship's crew. The link is solidified by the words wh[[contains].sup.[contains]] (+ m) "fool" and h[[contains].sup.[contains]]m "folded," both of which appear only here in the entire narrative. This nexus, incidentally, works not only orally but also visually, since the same signs are used in both words.

To the Commanding Officer the Sailor had said, sr.sn [d.sup.[subset]] n iit n[check{s}]ny n hprt[cdotp]f "they could foretell a storm before (it) came, a gale before it happened" (lines 31-32). Note that in the first phrase the suffix pronoun [cdotp] f "it" is lacking after iit, and thus I have placed "(it)" in parentheses in the translation. But when he repeats this phrase to the Snake, the Sailor adds this morpheme: sr[cdotp]sn [d.sup.[subset]] n iit[cdotp]f n[checks{s}]ny n hprt.f "they could foretell a storm before it came, a gale before it happened" (lines 97-98). While it may be minor, with no apparent effect on the meaning, the change nevertheless has consequences. Robert Ratner has explained the very common morphological variation in both verb and...