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Featured Book:
Egypt is where literature begins. Many know about the riches of ancient Egypt and of her great monuments, but not many realize that Egypt’s literature gives us our first stories for entertainment. The Shipwrecked Sailor is a good example of this. As you enjoy the tale, it makes a point dear to the heart of Egyptian storytellers: The value of good speech and the persuasiveness of thoughtful words. This bit of wisdom is the theme of yet an earlier story, The Eloquent Peasant. These works are at least 3800 years old, and skilled scribes copied them again and again. Such Egyptian stories are forerunners of the great stories of Homer. Cyrus Gordon has said, “Indeed, the whole Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor is to be compared with the episode of the wondrous land of the Phaeacians on which Odysseus was shipwrecked” (The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations, New York: Norton, 1965, p 111).
In The Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor, a prince has just returned from a mission for the Pharaoh. Apparently he did not accomplish this mission with any great success, so the prince was frightened about his reception by the Pharaoh and the royal court. The chief mate of the ship gives the prince some advice and tries to cheer him up; he even tells him a story from his own experience. The chief mate survived a shipwreck and saved his life by finally speaking up in the presence of the ruler of a fantasy island. Thus he was able to return to his city where he could live, eventually die, and be buried in the land of his birth. Unfortunately the prince takes little comfort in the chief mate’s story. He does not get the point.
C. S. Lewis says in The Allegory of Love, “The probable, the marvelous-taken-as-fact, the marvelous-known-to-fiction—such is the triple equipment of the post-Renaissance poet. Such were the three worlds which Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton were born to.” Later he says, “But this triple heritage is a late conquest." This is Lewis’s great book, but he does not know that the “marvelous that knows itself as myth” was alive and well by 1800 B. C. E.
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