Eloquent Peasant

The longest and most stylistically ambitious surviving work of classical Middle Egyptian, preserved on four Twelfth Dynasty papyri though set in the reign of the earlier Herakleopolitan king Nebkaure Khety. A peasant named Khun-Anup, traveling to sell goods, is robbed on a pretext by a corrupt landowner's retainer. When his appeal to the local magistrate Rensi produces no immediate remedy, the peasant delivers nine increasingly elaborate petitions demanding justice.

Each petition builds in rhetorical intensity, comparing a failed magistrate to a rudderless boat or a false set of scales, and casting maat, cosmic justice, as a principle a judge either upholds or personally betrays. The reader eventually learns that Rensi has been quietly reporting each speech to the king, who orders the petitions recorded for their eloquence and instructs Rensi to prolong the case so the peasant will keep speaking, an ambiguity the text never resolves: admiration for eloquence, or exploitation of one man's suffering as entertainment.

The tale's true subject is less the crime than the rhetoric it provokes, making it as much a showcase of formal Middle Egyptian oratory, dense with metaphor and parallel structure, as a narrative of wronged innocence eventually vindicated. Only after the ninth petition is the peasant's property restored, with the whole of his tormentor's property and offices handed over to him as well.

Copied for centuries in scribal schools as a model of eloquent composition, the tale shares the Middle Kingdom's preoccupation, visible also in the Instruction of Merikare and the Prophecy of Neferti, with justice, the ideal king, and the possibility that even the humblest subject might hold power to account through words alone.