Ep. 379: Egyptian Philosophy with Chike Jeffers (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by Some guys were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our Questions for episode 379 might include how does tradition fit in with ethics? Or how should we react to injustice? And we read several selections from ancient Egypt ranging from probably 2200 BC to 1400 BCE including two dialogues, dispute between a man and his BA and the eloquent peasant, plus two works where a king gives instructions on how to be a good king or just a good person, plus a hymn to the Sun God.

We were guided in these selections by treading the ground of a history of Africana Philosophy podcast and read a few chapters from their latest book, bringing together the essays that are read on that show. Africana Philosophy from Ancient Egypt to the 19th Century, written by our past guest, Peter Adamson and today's guest, Chike Jeffers. More information about the text and the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, feeling cool bellied in Madison, Wisconsin.

This is Seth Paskin, anxious to recede into the west in Austin, Texas.

1:14 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, sustained by my car in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1:19 Chike: And this is Chike Jeffers, ready to talk about some of the earliest recorded philosophy there is in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

1:26 Mark: Well, thanks so much for coming on here. Yeah, we knew Dylan was going to be out doing some traveling. We had reached out to Peter again in light of this book had been thrust upon us by Oxford. Hey, you should cover it. And he said, actually chike would be better. So I'm really glad you were available here. And then you and I discussed in that entire book, what is the thing that sort of best fills a gap in our coverage? And we have never done philosophy this old before, ever.

1:52 Chike: So.

1:54 Mark: And one of the first things you discuss on your show is like, is it actually philosophy?

1:58 Chike: Right.

1:58 Mark: I have a question comment about that. Various topics that I would like Chike to so it's not uncommon for Mark just said cover a gap. Like, we're not the history of philosophy without any gaps podcast.

We have many gaps.

That's not what we do.

2:13 Chike: Right, understood.

2:14 Mark: But it's very common for people to be like, you should do more X philosophy, Eastern philosophy. Right. Or feminist philosophy or something like that. So in my mind, what I heard somebody saying was you should do some African philosophy, but in reality this is Egyptian. Right. So can you kind of tell me at least and maybe the listeners like, this is specifically Egyptian, but of course a particular not modern Egypt, some other kind of Egyptian, like the, you know, the old, old, old kingdom. And how does that kind of fit in the context of what we might call African philosophy? What distinguishes it in some way, it

2:51 Chike: is African philosophy precisely because Egypt is of course, part of Africa. And it is part of the thing that I think is quite interesting about African philosophy, namely that when you think about what philosophy is and you think about the history of the human species as best as we can reconstruct it at present, and I think you see, Africa is the birthplace of philosophy in a way twice over. That is to say, it is first of all the birthplace of philosophical thinking, right? However, whatever interesting definition the philosophy we give, unless we define it in a way that stipulates that it only starts in ancient Greece when people use the word, right?

We don't stipulate that there's no such thing. Like, for example, if we don't stipulate that there's no dancing before the word dancing exists, right? Like, if we don't attach the word only to where we, the cultural context from which we get the word, then to me, any useful definition of what is done philosophically is going to, you know, ultimately show us that. Well, okay, so, you know, we have people raising and seeking to answer fundamental questions about the nature of things and how we can know what we can know and how we ought to live our lives, you know, that's like part of human life in general.

And so if we're tracing the history of humanity as best as we construct it, that's going to take us back to Africa in terms of gaining the linguistic and cognitive habits that we associate with being human. But then, then I would say not birthplace alone, but one of two birthplaces, one of two birthplaces of recorded philosophy. So I believe that in that sense, humans have been engaging in philosophical thinking for tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of years. At least tens of thousands of years. And then I believe that a really special thing happens by the last few thousand years before the common Era in both Mesopotamia and Egypt, we have the birth of writing.

And we have not just the birth of writing, but the use of writing for literary texts, right? Not just sort of practical, everyday things like, you know, settling accounts. And so the growth of literature in these two places, Egypt and Mesopotamia, gives us philosophical texts. I mean, like, regardless of whether some texts are going to be more like, how do I relate this to philosophy than others? But then I think, as Peter would say, you know, some of these are just slam dunk cases, right? In other words, that for him, you know, he himself, who would have started his podcast.

Right. Initially with Thales in ancient Greece. Right. By the time that he's working with me, is saying, well, sort of obvious that at least some of these texts are philosophical texts. So that's what I feel like we're doing here. We are entering into the African side of the birth of recorded philosophy by looking at ancient Egypt.

5:52 Mark: Cool, right?

So just as the overview of these were things that were highlighted on those very brief episodes on Peter's podcast, he had two distinct topics which were these instructional texts which are like Machiavelli. And I sort of had the same. You know, I've revisited Machiavelli recently. Is it really philosophy? Here's how to be a good king. Of course, what is startling about Machiavelli is that he just doesn't tell you what it's not just be good, being a good person makes you a good king. That it's something diverging from that. This is more in the before category, the ones that we get, because they are.

And this will get into this ethical concept of maat, of be straight with people, make your words, match your deeds, have integrity, treat people well, they'll treat you well. Sort of what you would expect. But it does tell us, you know, I think that this is sort of getting a baseline of. Even if it's not ethical argumentation exactly, it's still like, what did these people so long ago? You know, it's just like, what is the Homeric ethic? You know, there's no argument in Homer in the Odyssey and the Iliad about maybe you could probably find a few specific things about honor or whatnot.

But just in terms of the depiction of what is bravery or something here. So the depiction of what constitutes justice, what constitutes good rule, I think is a legitimate thing. You know, we. We talked about at some point doing an early, you know, Old Testament biblical ethics episode. I don't know if we'll ever do that, but it would be similarly just like, what is the thread, the philosophy that goes through this time period? And actually, I already had our artist work on a picture of Kety K E T Y as potentially somebody who wrote three of the texts that we're reading today.

7:33 Chike: Right.

7:34 Mark: I mean, probably not, but, you know.

7:36 Chike: Right, right. Yeah. There is an Egyptologist who speculated as much and, you know, doesn't seem impossible, but it's also something that we can't assume. I wonder if imagining that one person wrote it. Well, you know, I wonder what it does or doesn't do. For us. One thing I will say is that in terms of the instruction texts, I do believe that you do find argument in those. So that can be one of the. Are topics of discussion. I don't. I think that they're not actually hard cases, because I do think you find argumentation within those. And part of what's interesting and talking about Machiavelli.

Right. Is sometimes the ways in which he's right, as you said, not telling you to be good. But then that sort of makes texts where people are saying to be good often easier to recognize as philosophy. Because if it's just like, do this and that will result, and if you just happen to have that selfish aim, then you might want to do this so that that may result, then that becomes to me very much less philosophical than how do we uphold goodness as a standard.

8:38 Mark: And the idea that, you know, as with Confucius, there's some harmony with the world, that if you do good things, then good things are going to happen to you and everybody's going to respect you. And so there's, you know, substantial claims about metaphysics and about society. Just how do we know the good? Is it something hidden? Is it something recognizable by everything? If it's recognizable by everyone, why is this instruction even necessary, this kind of thing? Then just to continue with those sort of an overview, we're doing these two dialogues, which one of them, the eloquent peasant, you could see, actually is just another.

Because it's a peasant complaining about an injustice that's being done at great length. And so it's in fact, another instructional text. Hey, you, magistrate, who I'm appealing to redress this crime that has been done against me. You should again be straight. You are the person, and with great power comes great responsibility. That the Spider man things coming. This is, you know, 2000 BC crazy. And then I'm sure we want to go really slowly, maybe in our second half, on the man and his dispute between the man and his BA which is maybe there's some ethics in there, but it's specifically an ethics about is it okay to commit suicide or what is the proper approach toward death.

I know there's a lot of different interpretations of this. Very interesting, but less internally redundant. You know, it's a pretty short text, so it's a nice cipher to kind of like, well, what are we even doing here? What is it? What is being talked about? Wes, did you have any opening thoughts?

10:04 Wes: Yeah, I think if I had to put this, you know, if I were a publisher and I were trying to Categorize this. I might put it in self help section.

10:15 Chike: Interesting.

10:16 Wes: Especially if you're a prince or king, self help for princes or kings. But yeah, I think in a way it's hard to categorize. I don't think you would just want to call it literature because it's got.

10:27 Chike: Right.

10:28 Wes: It's so focused on the ethical precepts and advice. But I think, yeah, Mark is right. If you look at Homer, I mean that's something that's self consciously crafted with a literary or musical intent in mind, obviously. And then it was very influential in Greek culture is sort of like the Bible. And in many ways philosophy arises as a ancient Greek philosophy is a reaction against that. At least for Plato and Socrates. The influence of that and the kinds of, whether related or not, sort of common ethical precepts that were floating around in Athens, for instance, at the time of Socrates.

So the Sophists, for instance, were all about giving ethical and advice and even rhetorical advice. There's some, there's a lot here about the value of rhetorical restraint, for instance. And so yeah, it's a seed, at the very least it's a seed of something. You know, you could say it's the seeds of philosophical engagement because it's the type of thing that I think you have to. Well, let's put it this way, you have to at the point where you're doing philosophy, you're confronting common ethical precepts of the time. Maybe. But I see it in Socrates, I see it as a reaction, kind of a reaction against prevalent cultural norms.

11:52 Chike: Right.

11:52 Mark: There was one more thing, this hymn to Aten, which I think is our. Aten is our latest. So that's about 1400 BC and we know specifically who wrote that, that it was King Tut's dad.

12:06 Chike: That's true.

12:07 Mark: King Tut, much more famous, but the husband of Nefertiti.

12:10 Chike: That's right.

12:10 Mark: And it seemed like this was sort of the least philosophical of them, but interesting in that he's maybe the first monotheist that, you know, there are all the different gods and he was like, you know what actually the sun God, but not Ra. Right. Ra was the one he was rejecting. But Aten is the only God. Let's scribble out everything on all the pyramids referring to the other gods. Oh, and by the way, I'm also his son, so I'm the divine right of specifically me. But that, you know, this was a very short lived thing that when King Tut then took over then.

Well, let's reverse all that stuff. But it, you know, an interesting. The main philosophical thing was. Was raised in your podcast, which is that it's not as snobby about the Egypt being the center of the universe as you would expect. If the sun is the God and the sun shines on all alike, and the sun shines on people with different skin colors and different langu, and that's all. We're all basically equal before God, which is of course, historically, I think it's uncontroversial to say this was the. Where the notion of political equality that we now have it came from.

But we see that, you know, most directly in the Judeo Christian tradition, but that this idea was around way beforehand. I mean, I don't know that it actually had any implications for the social life, you know, the peasants of their time. Given how the other things that we read here, the instructional do, you know, affirm a very hierarchical society, more or less.

So I would hesitate to go so far as to say that this is, you know, talking about equality or, you know, universal human dignity or anything like that. But in a number of the things we read, what I think is striking is that. And I thought about this. Let's. So chike, you were saying like this is like first. Call it like first philosophy. No, no Aristotelian pun intended. That when we talk about. You've got the whole difference between writing and speech that we see, for example, in Plato, but also what comes first, is it metaphysics or is it ethics or whatever.

And pretty much justice is a pretty constant theme through what we read and I assume many of the other things. And to think that the origins of philosophy, if you will, or the origins of philosophical thought, let's call it the use of writing, was to concern ourselves with justice and right action, so to speak, I think is really interesting. And that's definitely something. Whether it's for the king or for the common man, or for the justice of magistrate or the peasant is a common theme through everything we read.

14:43 Chike: I think that's a really interesting point. I also wanted to raise the question of, you know, what it means to see Akhenaten is least philosophical. I would, for example, say that earlier I said that there's argument in the instructions. I would agree that there would be less argument. Yeah, I'm not sure I would tease out arguments right in the great hymn to the Aten. And yet west talked about seeing philosophy, especially as a reaction to the things that have shaped the culture and the culture's ideas thus far. And so Akhenaten is Of course, a huge iconoclast in that regard.

Right. He is initiating this revolution in thinking within the society in which he was the ruler. And as you said, Mark, I think that the ways that, if you don't want to call it egalitarian, at least, you know, markedly less ethnocentric ideas somehow come out of this shift in how to understand the divine that he proposes and, you know, institutes. I think that's fascinating.

15:47 Mark: Yes. Just to spell out so. Right. Akhenaten, that literally means son of Aten. And his original name was something else.

15:56 Chike: Well, I've heard it translated, he who is effective for the.

15:59 Mark: Oh, okay, there you go. And it. Our translation pointed out that it's quite similar to Psalm 104. So this is maybe a evidence. I mean, given the location of Egypt and what we know about Pythagoras, potentially, you know, having come from Egypt, mathematics being invented in Egypt, that is sort of. We could see this as a very distant chronologically branch of the pre Socratics that definitely Egyptian influence was getting into Greece and the rest of the Middle east, you know, so biblical sources and things like that. You should not be surprised if there are some similarities in some of the myths and things.

16:37 Chike: Thales as well. Thales also.

16:40 Mark: Yep.

16:41 Wes: So in this. In this hymn. Yes. Chike was mentioning there's this pluralistic, cosmopolitan impulse. Maybe. Anyway, the movement of monotheism is very fascinating. Yeah. It's very interesting, this idea that everything has something in common because everything is under the sun in some way or everything is nourished by the sun. So your rays nurse all the fields you made the seasons to foster all that you made. You're in my heart. There's no other who knows you. Well, we'd have to talk about what that means, but I was looking for a different line here.

17:14 Mark: Are you looking at the Lichtheim or are you looking at the other one that I pointed out when I did?

17:17 Wes: No, I'm looking at the Lichtheim.

17:18 Mark: Okay. Yeah.

17:19 Wes: Makes seed grow in women. Anyway.

17:22 Chike: Well, I was wondering whether you were trying to get down to the stuff on page 98.

17:25 Wes: Such a short text, you would think wouldn't have this problem. I was just looking at this. Oh, yes, of course. Right. Their tongues differ in speech. Their characters likewise, their skins are distinct for you distinguish the peoples.

17:38 Chike: Yeah, Yeah. I have to say that as a person who. In my job as a philosopher, I also do philosophy of race, I have thought a lot about what should or shouldn't be said about. When he says their skins are distinct Right. And whether. Here's where I would want to be more careful and not just say, and so this is why Akhenaten is the first philosopher of race. I mean, really, the question that I want to ask first is, you know, ought we to see him as referring to what we would call racial distinctions? Which is an interesting question for philosophers of race, because many philosophers of race treat race as a modern thing, and that's not something that an ancient king could be referring to. But, yeah, I mean, it is yet another example of how. I think there are lots of interesting philosophical implications digging into these texts.

18:25 Mark: I think reading that quote is also. Yeah. Interesting in that certainly the thing about egalitarianism doesn't necessarily come out of what you just read. It's the footnote. So Miriam Lichtheim here, she says the hymn to Aten expresses the cosmopolitan and humanist outlook of the New Kingdom at its purest and most sympathetic. All peoples are seen as the creatures of the sun God who's made them diverse in skin color, speech, and character. Their diversity is described objectively without a claim of Egyptian superiority. And she's referring to an article that is Made this thesis at more length. Yeah, but if you were just.

18:57 Chike: I had not read that footnote. And I took exactly what she took.

19:00 Mark: Okay. All right.

19:01 Chike: I don't know why you feel like it's hidden.

19:04 Wes: All peoples, herds and flocks, all upon earth, that walk on legs, all on high, that fly on wings. The lands of Khor and Kush, the

19:12 Chike: land of Egypt, I think, is supposed to be Palestine. Kush is south of Egypt. Right. So these are the two areas that Egypt thinks about a lot. And they do. Generally, if you read a lot of Egyptian texts, think like, you know, a lot of inscriptions and so on are about conquering in these places. Right. And so this. You set every man in his place, you supply their needs. Everyone has his food, his lifetime is counted. Their tongues differ in speech, their characters, likewise, their skins are distinct, for you distinguish the peoples. So there is this sense of unity underneath the one sun God.

And yet, as you finish the paragraph, that stanza, as it's been divided for us now, there's also an emphasis on the Creator as the source, not only of unity, but diversity. And it seems then to suggest that diversity itself is therefore sort of like a divine thing, not a kind of difference to be used as the pretext for Egyptian conquering, but rather as just part of the beauty of the world as the Creator has constructed it.

20:15 Mark: Yes, that's very much in line with the rest of what Is said, which is just as you would expect in a hymn. How great you are, O Aten you fulfill all our needs. Just skimming through, if there's any. Well, let's hear when you set in western lightland. Yeah, so it's the actual sun.

20:31 Chike: I also see villages. Villages is on page 99.

20:35 Mark: Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

20:36 Chike: And the thing that I will say about the passage down there, this is the passage, the stanza that begins your race nurse all fields when you shine they live, they grow for you. Here is another important aspect of what I think is interesting about Akhenaten. The emphasis on, you know, what is like visible. It brings this naturalism, if we could put it that way, to Egyptian religious thought. That of course, I mean, again, as we've said, his son is going to like, bring things back to the way they used to be. It's a very short lived revolution, but it's a revolution in thought that places an emphasis on sort of nature as we can see it with our own eyes.

And the extreme of sort of like reading Akhenaten this way that I have encountered is to treat him as almost atheistic. Right. That he is swept away any traditional notion of divinity and replace it with like a worship of the natural order with the sun, the visible sun, right at the center of this order. I think that calling him an atheist is definitely going too far. But that aspect of how, like, we can literally see how you relate to us as divinity through, for example, the nourishment of the fields by the rays and so on. That's another really interesting part of the text.

21:59 Mark: This makes me want to. Mark had pointed to one of the readings, secondary kind of optional readings we had was on the concept of maat

by Maulana Karenga, the creator of Kwanzaa. Yes, that was just mentioned in the podcast that you and Peter had done.

Yeah, so I'm going to make a connection here, but it's like, you know, give me a little leeway to just ramp up to it. So this ethical construct, or ethical social construct of maat, without getting too much into it, does have the premise, according to the secondary literature, that the structuring of the universe, if you will, or the structuring of the world, is divine, held together, ordered with deity and so forth, and that the structure on earth should mirror that. And so the king, presumably the queen, I don't know, but the king at least is divine, you know, plays the role of God on Earth and helps order the society in the same way that the universe is ordered.

Wouldn't if you bought into a concept like that, wouldn't some form of monotheism in a certain way make more sense or at least be more simple? Like, it would be difficult to maintain, you know, and say, well, I guess there's always a chief God. And you could say that the pharaoh or the king is the representation of that chief God. But if you had other gods in the pantheon, wouldn't that complicate the ability to replicate that structure on earth? So doesn't this kind of make some sense in the context of Maat?

What you were saying sounds like Plato's taking by his time sort of an effective monotheism that it was. Sometimes we'll call it Zeus, but what we really mean is the form of the good. We mean the ordering principle, the logos that flows through all things and determines the proper ethical comportment of individual souls and the proper structure of society, if society actually were structured well. But yet there was still sort of, you know, he didn't explicitly say there's only one God or anything like that. It wasn't necessary to do that, to set that up. But I see where you're going with that.

Yeah, you get it.

24:08 Chike: I understand Seth is asking whether we can see Akhenaten as like, making what. Like just ordering things in a way that best does the thing. Is that the idea?

24:18 Mark: I think the idea would be, if you take it, doesn't the whole idea of Maat, the idea of mirroring a divine order in a human. In the human society and human order, doesn't it lend itself to a monotheistic approach? In other words, is it super outrageous that we see him writing this hymn or this ode, even though it's out of character and out of with what had been going on? In a certain sense, it makes. It makes more sense to me, given the ethical context that I captured from that.

24:52 Chike: The interesting thing to say is, first of all, the traditional polytheism includes the divinity that is Ma', at, that is to say, Ma' at also names a goddess. And when people think, for example, about the Book of the Dead, then they may know about the weighing of the heart on a scale in order to see whether one can pass through to the afterlife. And the heart was weighed on the scale. The thing on the other side of the scale was the feather of Ma'.

25:22 Wes: At.

25:22 Chike: And so there's also this feather that in and of itself is a symbol of this goddess. Right. And so I feel like it's sort of hard to say, like, when we look at a polytheistic system of belief. Like, won't it just be easier if you have just the one? I mean, like, I don't know if I have the impulse to ask that myself. But what I would say about how we should understand Ma' at as a concept and not simply as a reference to a deity among other deities. This is something that I wrote about in a publication on the Tale of the Eloquent Peasant, namely that if you were to be told that Ma' at is a goddess, and then you were to look for the term Ma' at in the petitions, the speeches by the peasant, you know, and look for what could, like, be potentially reasonably be assumed to be a reference to God.

There's like something in the first speech that I was like, okay, sure, that I can imagine you're talking about a God. But everywhere else, it's very clear that the two terms that make sense in terms of how we translate this thing, and this is what makes Ma' at as a concept fascinating. Sometimes it's really clear that truth, right, it's being opposed to falsehood. Truth is going to be a good way to translate this, right? The other times, it's going to be justice. It's going to seem so far away from where we would normally talk of truth or falsehood that justice is going to seem to be the natural way of translating it.

And so by the 8th petition or speech in the Tale of the Eloquent Peasant, there's a part where the peasant says, speak Ma'. At. Do Ma'. At. And that is where, you know, the translation issues come to a head. Because if you say truth, then the first part comes out normal. And then do truth is weird. If you say justice, then of course, do justice works fine, but speak justice is a bit weird. And so to me, like nowhere else, that one piece of the Tale of the Eloquent Peasant really forces that issue. Somehow what we treat as distinct when we talk about justice and when we talk about truth, that.

That is fused in a way that I remember Peter saying, Peter making the point that, like, we might want to say, why are you confusing the things? And they might want to say, why are you artificially taking part that which is clearly one thing?

27:43 Wes: So maybe the question that Seth was asking and Chike you started to answer there was. Had something to do with what is it about the impulse towards monotheism that is a philosophical impulse. So that lends itself to the ethical, lends itself through these sorts of reflections. And you said, well, it's simpler. Which I was thinking too, but I think there's something important about that, right? Because our scientific impulses are run towards say, a grand unified theory or some arche. Some underlying principle of things, right? Like the good. We don't want everything reducible to a bunch of different unrelated things.

Which is not to say whatever the pantheon in ancient Egypt is unrelated. I'm sure it's part of a big system, but the more complex the system, I think, the less satisfying the explanation. So it helps to have, say, a sun God, even if you don't get rid of all the other gods. It helps to have a master principle or a fundamental principle. And there's less potential, I think, for conflicting ethical or political precepts if you try to harmonize everything under a super principle.

28:55 Chike: I'm imagining all the ancient polytheistic Egyptians saying, well, you want life to be simple, but it's not

29:03 Wes: true. It's richer and it's funner. If one of the aspects of the soul is a bird with a human head.

29:09 Chike: Exactly.

29:11 Wes: Who would want to get rid of that?

29:13 Chike: There you go.

29:14 Mark: I was trying to look up what was the recent Marvel property. So it was Moon Knight that came out a couple years ago with all the different Egyptian gods running around influencing mortals and fighting. So it's the internal struggle, the fighting that if you want to see nature as something that has fundamental conflict in it, that there are these. And this is your explanation for the problem of evil. Because if you have a monotheistic system like, well, how did, where did evil come from in this, this idea of maat? Well, it's, it's deviations from maat.

You know, the maat is the orderliness. And it is always not. Not that there's a big debate about free will or whatever that we saw, but things can twist from their correct path. They can, they can disobey the telos. They can get out of order. And so that, you know, you could ask, so how does that compare as a fundamental explanation of evil as opposed to. There are just fundamental. There's no overall good capital G. There's per divine command theory, there are just these locuses of power, different deities that each of them say, I'm a creator of values.

And so you as a human could sort of go toward one deity or go toward another deity and you would have a different, you know, ethical framework. But it seems like if insofar as we're right, that, that the overall Egyptian tradition is of maat, of orderliness, then we can't say that we, you know, if there multiple gods, it's that just like There are multiple parts of nature. Each of them is playing their role. Yes, it's a time to be born, a time for death. The death God is not the bad guy is not trying to just ruin the world. It's just death is a natural thing that has to happen.

And so if you need a divine, you know, as part of your scientific explanation, you need a divinity who's the divinity of death that summons us and judges us or whatever, then, yeah, you're

30:54 Chike: going to have that.

30:55 Mark: But it's still part of the overall coherent, harmonious whole.

30:58 Wes: And also, I think there's something important here about. Although Chike can tell us, but the sun God being benevolent. So the sun is a natural cause that makes seeds grow and leads to flourishing and nurses things and give things breath and all that. It's the ultimate energy source, as we know. But it sounds here like it. Right. And this is part of the cosmopolitan, pluralistic urge. It sounds like it's. Well, I think the hymn says, athens created everything for himself. But in any case, yeah, the benevolence of the God, I think, is important, the sentience of the God and benevolence as well.

And I don't know if that's there in the larger pantheon as well, or if it's conflicting. Right. Because in ancient Greek gods, for instance, as Mark pointed out, you have different systems of values, in a way, coming into conflict. The martial values of the war God or Wisdom and Athena, and how you reconcile them is a bit unclear. And then sometimes they're selfish and sometimes they're looking out for human beings. Yeah. I don't know how it was working for Aten.

32:03 Chike: The kinds of things that we see in the Republic, the censorship that is because of the fact that the stories of the gods include things that you might want to consider bad behavior. I mean, I do think that some of the stories of, you know, Osiris and Horus and Seth and, you know, some of these things. Like, it seems to me that one could make, you know, some complaints about the traditional stories of the Egyptians that way. And so that may be once again, part of what is striking about Akhenaten, concentrating divinity and benevolence right. In this single authority. But, you know, it's interesting because if we sort of say, well, like, isn't that obviously simpler? Then it is interesting to note how much it was straying from the normal path. And then quickly, the normal path resumed after he was gone.

32:54 Wes: And his. His own son.

32:55 Chike: His own son, the one who is famous because we discovered his grave not because he did that much. Where is his dad? Well, he died.

33:02 Wes: He died as a teenager. Right.

33:04 Chike: Died as a teenager. Right. And so somehow the son becomes the big name, and the dad is like, I think, an important figure in the history of philosophy and philosophical thought.

33:15 Mark: Let's go all the way back to our oldest source. So the instruction of Ptahhotep, which I think Google is telling me now that this is somewhere between 2375 and 2350 BCE. So even further back than the 2200 that I. That I quoted at the beginning.

33:32 Wes: Right.

33:32 Mark: So we have this instruction of Ptahhotep, and then we can see the one that maybe was written by Ketty, or more likely was written by somebody named Kety. The instruction addressed to King Merikare, which is.

Right.

21st or 22nd century BCE. So we see the evolution. Did I get these wrong?

33:52 Chike: This is Richard Parkinson, who is an Egyptologist that we actually interviewed for the podcast, and he has this great collection that I also shared some of the translations with you, all from the Tale of Sinuhe and other Ancient Egyptian Poems, 1940-1640 B.C. right. And that's an Oxford World Classics book. He would say that both of those. He includes translations of both of the texts that you mentioned. He would say that they come from the 12th Dynasty. The 12th Dynasty, which is part of what is known as the Middle Kingdom era of ancient Egyptian history.

Parkinson and others. But he probably best of all Egyptologists that I know of, has led us to see the 12th Dynasty as a literary golden age, where a whole lot of the stuff that we value best in ancient Egyptian literature comes from. Now, why would we need to start that late? The idea would be that Ptahotep, for example, is thought to have been a real person, a real vizier to, you know, a king during the Old Kingdom. The Old Kingdom, which is the part of Ancient Egyptian history that gives us the pyramids, for example. So further back. Right. It does seem, from what I've heard, that if we are going to imagine that the historical Ptahhotep wrote the instruction of Ptah Hotep, then we probably at least need to imagine maybe some shifts that make for the text to be in what we call Middle Egyptian rather than Old Egyptian.

Right. So in other words, I think that Parkinson and others would be saying, partly on linguistic grounds, this is probably not from the oldest writings. And then the instruction addressed to King Merikare. Also, just for historical purposes, when we say that there's the Old Kingdom and we say that there's the Middle Kingdom, well, in between the two, there's the First Intermediate Period, known as the first, because after the Middle Kingdom, there's the Second Intermediate Period. Then after the New Kingdom, which is where Akhenaten is, there's the Third Intermediate Period.

And then I think after that is maybe late anyway. Eventually we get the Ptolemaic Egypt after the conquering by Alexander the Great. And then after that, Roman Egypt as a province. And now we don't even call it Ancient Egypt anymore. After that, having sort of laid that out a little bit, if we can imagine that those two instructional texts, Ptahotep and the instruction addressed to King Merikare, come from when they seem to be depicting that Ptahotep is from the Old Kingdom. And that's definitely the oldest of what we're looking at. And the instruction addressed to King Merikare is from the First Intermediate Period.

That's also when the tale of the eloquent peasant is set in that time of division in between the more unified times of the Old Kingdom and the Middle Kingdom.

36:40 Mark: All right, I will try to link folks to, like, a wiki page that just lays that all out.

36:44 Chike: Well, I don't know if it's on Wikipedia, but that's the thing, right? Like, it would be easy, so much easier if we could just, you know, date all these things more clearly and know all the authors. But, you know, I do, actually, also, because we are going to talk about these instructional texts. Want to make a point about how I think these came to embody works of moral philosophy, moral and political philosophy. Because, you know, even if, like Parkinson, you don't believe that these instruction texts come from the Old Kingdom, what is certainly true is that tomb inscriptions and tomb inscriptions, they gradually say more about the biography of the person entombed.

That definitely does develop in the Old Kingdom. And sometimes these autobiographical texts do say interesting things about the life of the person. But then, on the other hand, you have tomb inscriptions from the Old Kingdom, where rather than really telling us something very clearly distinguishing about this person as an individual, rather we're seeing sometimes trends of what get referred to as catalogs of virtues. So these funerary autobiographies sometimes are formulaically saying things like, I gave food to the people with no food. I brought the boatless to land.

You know, I took care of the widow and so on. Right. So. And this, like, the person I'm quoting there is like an official. He's not a king, but, yeah, he's saying about how he tried to live this upright life. And so it is my Sense that the instruction texts, I think, as a genre, ultimately piggyback on this earlier practice of, you know, using writing. Well, you know, I think we can say that the way that writing is so associated with tombs in ancient Egypt, there's clearly this idea of writing somehow having a form of power over death. And one of the forms of power over death that developed through this tradition of the catalog of virtues is saying, like, this is why I'm a great guy.

You know, I did this. I did that. And it seems to me that the instruction texts sort of draw on that. They depict, like, a father talking to a son, and usually with the idea that the son will replace the father in the social role. But they become, because of that setup, the idea of, like, you know, I'm going to tell you, you know, how to take over my role. Well, they become this space within which we can reflect on what is fundamental to living a good life, you know, and in the case of Ptah Hotep, you know, it even begins with actually an exchange between Ptah Hotep and the king.

And he's saying, you know, I'm getting old. Being old sucks. Let me appoint my son as a successor, and let me teach him. And if you were then to try and read the rest of the text as being about, like, what does the son need to know to inhabit the specific role of. Of vizier or chief minister, then you'd be like, wow, you know, you weren't really focused in terms of the practical implications of doing that job. Right. Like, I think it really does become, like, just a staging ground for, like, I'm gonna jump into, like, the fundamental questions of how you show up in the world as a good person.

40:04 Wes: Yeah. It begins with. Well, in the preamble, it's talks about instructing the ignorant in knowledge and in the standard of excellent discourse. And what's interesting about that is a lot of the advice early on is about how to just shut up and not say anything.

40:20 Chike: That's true.

40:21 Wes: And the very first section suggests the opposite of what we might think. Well, maybe it's about the difference between natural talent and the idea that the rhetorical is an art or that. So don't be proud of your knowledge. Consult the ignorant and the wise. The limits of art are not reached. No artist's skills are perfect. Good speech is more hidden than greenstone, yet may be found among maids at the grindstones. So it may be found among maids, it may be found in places you least suspect. And it's not just about class difference there, but it's also about people who are not necessarily practiced in rhetoric for the purposes, you know, for court purposes, for instance, but have a certain kind of skill that I think maybe involves some sort of natural talent.

So he's going to be teaching here, but what he's teaching, what he's saying here is you should respect the aspects of these things which are not really teachable.

41:19 Mark: Yeah, the first part felt very strongly. It was like a mashup of Confucius and Ecclesiastes.

Well, with that characterization, let's wrap up our first half here. We're gonna start. We're gonna just take a break and talk in a few minutes. If you were a Partially Examined Life supporter, partiallyexaminedlife.com support, you would get that second half right in your feed, probably immediately. If you are a just a regular person listening for free, not giving us money, then you'll have to wait till next week, but it'll be just as good. It's okay. Thanks, Chike. Thanks, listeners.

41:55 Wes: All right, bye.

41:55 Chike: Thank