Ipuwer Papyrus

Papyrus Leiden I 344

The papyrus came out of Egypt through the antiquities trade and was bought for the Leiden museum at the 1828 sale of the collection of G. d'Anastasi, the Swedish-Norwegian consul in Egypt. Anastasi's own indication of its origin was Memphis, by which A. H. Gardiner understood Saqqara. There is no excavation and no findspot; the sale is the whole of its provenance.

In its present condition it is 378 centimetres long and 18 high. The recto carries seventeen pages of a literary text, mostly of fourteen lines each. Of the first page only the last third of eleven lines survives; pages two to seven are, in Gardiner's words, comparatively free from lacunae, though badly rubbed; from page eight onward the middle of every page is largely or entirely destroyed. The verso carries hymns to a solar god in a different and larger hand. It was mounted in book form and varnished by earlier hands, a treatment which darkened it so severely that in places the ink can only be made out with great difficulty.

Gardiner's edition of 1909 is still the foundation of all work on the text, and R. Enmarch's Oxford edition of 2005 is the modern standard. The dating has two halves and they must be kept apart. Gardiner concluded from the palaeography and the orthography that the writing of the recto cannot be placed earlier than the Nineteenth Dynasty, but that there are indications the scribe was copying a manuscript a few centuries older, and that the language of the text itself is Middle Egyptian; the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae puts the hand in the late Nineteenth Dynasty. The manuscript is a late copy; the composition is Middle Kingdom.

What kind of text it is has also moved. Gardiner himself read it as a portrait of real conditions in the First Intermediate Period, and that reading did not hold. M. Lichtheim classed it instead as didactic literature referring to no historical period at all, the fullest working-out of a standing Egyptian topos of national distress, and Enmarch reads its setting as deliberately vague and ahistorical. That is now the standard view, and it is worth saying plainly that the scholar whose translations are quoted throughout this article is the one it displaced.

What The Text Actually Says

Ipuwer speaks before a figure called the Lord of All, and what he describes is a society inverted. Gardiner's translation, with his own query marks kept, since they mark readings he was not sure of: "The plague is throughout the land. Blood is everywhere. Death is not lacking(?)." Tombs are plundered and the king's own burial desecrated; there is no respect for law; cattle stray with nobody to gather them; corn has perished on every side; gold and lapis lazuli hang about the necks of slave-girls; and, again and again, the poor of the land have become rich while the man who owned property has become one who has nothing.

There are foreigners in it too, and it is worth keeping the papyrus's words and its editor's apart. Gardiner's own summarising sentences are that "Egypt has also to face the aggression of foreign invaders from the North" and that "The Delta is overrun by Asiatics", and that "So deep a root have these barbarians taken in the land, that they are no longer distinguishable from true Egyptians". The lines he is summarising are Ipuwer's: at 3,1, "The Desert is throughout the Land. The nomes are laid waste. A foreign tribe from abroad has come to Egypt"; at 4,8, "The Asiatics are skilled in the crafts of the Marshlands". The complaint is that Egypt has stopped being Egypt - that order, the thing an Egyptian text exists to celebrate, has given way to chaos, and that the man who ought to be holding it together is not.

Why This Is Not The Plagues

The identification of this text with Exodus was made popular by I. Velikovsky in 1952, and it circulates now mostly as a two-column table with Ipuwer's lines on the left and Exodus verses on the right. Velikovsky's own case was more coherent than the tables descended from it, and it deserves to be stated as he made it rather than as the tables leave it. He held that Ipuwer describes the plagues; that the Asiatics arriving in its ruined Egypt are the Hyksos; and that the Hyksos are the Amalekites, moving into the vacuum Israel's departure left behind. On his reading the incoming foreigners are not an awkwardness to be explained away - they are load-bearing. So the objection that Ipuwer's foreigners are arriving while Exodus is about a people leaving, which is the first thing most rebuttals reach for, does not touch him at all.

What his whole structure needs is his other proposal: moving Egyptian chronology by roughly five centuries so that the collapse of the Middle Kingdom lands on the exodus. That is where the argument actually has to be met, and it is where it fails. No Egyptologist accepts the redating. The conventional chronology is held in place by king lists, astronomical observations and a dense web of synchronisms with Assyria, Babylonia and the Hittites, and Velikovsky had to discard all of it at once. Without the redating there is no chronology for the identification to stand on at either end: the manuscript is a Nineteenth Dynasty copy, the composition is Middle Kingdom on the evidence of its own language, and evangelicals themselves differ over the exodus date - an early date of about 1446 BC and a late date of about 1260 BC both have serious defenders - with Ipuwer's composition sitting well before both.

The famous line is also quoted short. Gardiner's 2,10 runs in full: "Forsooth, the river is blood, and (yet) men drink of it. Men shrink from(?) [tasting(?)] human beings, and thirst after water." The tables normally stop at "men drink of it" and set it beside Exodus 7:20, where the waters of the river are turned to blood, and there it fits. Quoted whole it is more interesting and less useful to them: Exodus 7:21 has the Egyptians unable to drink the river and Exodus 7:24 has them digging beside it for water, so one clause of Gardiner's sentence agrees with Exodus and the clause before it contradicts the same passage. Egyptologists read the image itself either as the red silt of a catastrophic Nile flood or as a poetic figure for turmoil. That is what a generic picture of disaster looks like when it is asked to do the work of a report.

The wider list of parallels is thinner than it looks, and its best-known item is worth following to the page. Proponents point to darkness over Egypt at Ipuwer 9,11, and the clause is really there: Gardiner prints it whole and translates it, as the last line of his block 9,8-9,11 — "The land is not light because of it." What has gone is everything around it that would tell a reader what "it" is. Gardiner opens that block by recording about fourteen squares lost, and what he can translate of it runs "Destroyed is (?) his ... in that time. [Every] man looks upon ... [as] his adversary (?). The infirm man brings coolness [to that which is hot] ... fear ... Poor men ... The land is not light because of it" — broken sentences about enmity, the infirm, fear and the poor, and then the line the tables lift out of them. The block immediately after it, 9,11 to 10,2, is in worse shape still: Gardiner records nine squares lost in one line and about six in another, calls part of it wholly obscure and another part quite untranslateable, and takes the subject of its opening to be the deprivations of the poor. Whether a line surviving in that company can be set against three days of darkness in Exodus 10 is now a question a reader can weigh, which is more than the tables allow. The other items - straying cattle, ruined grain, the great stripped of their wealth - are all really there, and they are cheap: any text describing a country in total collapse will produce them, and in Ipuwer each one is embedded in a complaint about the poor becoming rich and the rich being ruined, which is not what Exodus is about.

The text also names nobody. No Israel, no Hebrews, no Moses, no sea, no death of firstborn sons, and no king who let anyone go. Set beside a document like the Merneptah Stele, which names Israel in one line and settles a real question, that silence is the measure of the difference between evidence and resemblance.

None of this is a concession, and none of it is archaeology disagreeing with Scripture. Exodus is not made more or less likely by a papyrus that is not about it. What is at stake is smaller and more practical: a reader who is handed a bad argument will meet somebody who takes it apart, and will reasonably wonder what else they were told. The honest sentence is short. The Ipuwer Papyrus is a Middle Kingdom Egyptian lament, copied out centuries later by a scribe who found it worth copying, and it is not evidence for the exodus.

Scripture references

• Exodus 7:20-24 — The Nile turned to blood - and the Egyptians unable to drink it
• Exodus 10:21-23 — Three days of darkness over Egypt
• Exodus 12:29-30 — The death of the firstborn, and the great cry in Egypt
• Exodus 3:7-9 — The affliction the plagues are said to answer

Sources

• Primary textA. H. Gardiner, The Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage from a Hieratic Papyrus in Leiden — Alan H. Gardiner, 1909 · Public domain, full text at the Internet Archive. The physical description is on the opening pages of the introduction. The translations of 2,5-6, 2,10, 3,1 and 4,8 are in the commentary; the three sentences given here as Gardiner's own — the invaders from the North, the Delta overrun, the barbarians rooted deep — are from his survey of the book's contents, where he sets his prose against Ipuwer's in italic, and this article keeps that division. So is the darkness line: Gardiner splits line 9,11 between two blocks, and "The land is not light because of it" closes the earlier one, 9,8-9,11, where he prints it whole. His note on 9,8 is what establishes the division — the paragraphs each begin with hd, at 9,8, 9,11, [9,14] and 10,2 — and his note on the later block, 9,11-10,2, is where the losses and the untranslateable stretches are described. The phrase occurs once in the volumeSupports: The Anastasi provenance and the 1828 purchase, the dimensions and condition, the seventeen recto pages and the solar hymns on the verso, the Nineteenth Dynasty floor for the writing with an older exemplar behind it, the Middle Kingdom language, every line quoted in the article including the query marks and the lacunae, and the text and setting of the line the darkness parallel is drawn from
• Holding institutionThesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae: pLeiden I 344 = AMS 27 — Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften · The object record: inventory numbers I 344 and AMS 27, Rijksmuseum van Oudheden Leiden, acquired 1828 from the Anastasi collection, findspot unknown but probably Saqqara, manuscript dated to the late Nineteenth Dynasty on palaeographic grounds, classed as a literary dialogueSupports: The inventory numbers, the holding museum, the acquisition and probable findspot, the late Nineteenth Dynasty dating of the hand, and the classification of the text as a dialogue rather than a record
• ScholarshipR. Enmarch, The Dialogue of Ipuwer and the Lord of All — Roland Enmarch · Oxford: Griffith Institute, 2005; with his commentary volume published by Oxford University Press in 2008. The modern standard edition. Print onlySupports: The modern edition of the text and the reading of its setting as deliberately vague and ahistorical
• ReferenceM. Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Volume I: The Old and Middle Kingdoms — Miriam Lichtheim · University of California Press, 1973. Classes the text as didactic literature and reads it as the fullest working out of the topos of national distress rather than as a record of any historical period. Print onlySupports: The genre classification that displaced Gardiner's historical reading
• ReferenceI. Velikovsky, Ages in Chaos — Immanuel Velikovsky · Doubleday, 1952. The book that put the Ipuwer-Exodus identification into circulation, together with the identification of the Hyksos with the Amalekites and the wholesale redating of Egyptian chronology the whole reconstruction depends on. Cited here so the position the article rejects is available to the reader in its author's own words. Print onlySupports: The origin of the exodus identification, the Hyksos-Amalekite equation, and the redating that the reconstruction requires
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Ipuwer Papyrus — Used for the survey of scholarly positions on genre and dating and for the standing of the exodus identification in the fieldSupports: That the exodus identification is a popular rather than a scholarly claim and that the field rejects it

Reflect

Somebody wanted this papyrus to be proof so badly that they built a table out of it. What are you hoping is true badly enough that you would rather not check?