Instructions of Ptahhotep

Ptahhotep is all over the internet. I'm amazed. Portions of it are. Nobody seems comprehensively interested. At least there is apparent insufficient interest to tackle the whole thing. Bits and pieces spread all around, and the utter nonsense is ridiculous. Care to see some ridiculous crap? Who wouldn't?   YouTube [ptahhotep].  Any of those will do. They make me barf. Some are good. They actually study the language. I've read PDFs that start out interpreting but then give up after the introduction, and others that don't include all the parts. Nearly all don't include all the parts.

The translations are interesting because they have the same intermediary transliteration as if they're copying each other and not writing what they see for themselves, but with differing translations. For example "ib" means heart. The picture looks like a vase with two handles.

It's actually the heart of an animal. It's in the category of "Parts of Animals" and not in the the category for "Parts of Human Body" and not in the category for "vessels of stone and pottery." In each instance of "ib" my book translates "mind." I suppose this comes from the comprehension that Egyptians didn't know what the brain does. It was discarded at mummification where other internal organs were mummified separately. To Egyptians then all thinking occurred in the heart. While some online interpretations have "heart." And that's what I see. But the author of the book that I'm using is smarter than all the rest of us and his translations are on a whole different plane. And when you think about it, mind and heart are nearly interchangeable in modern language.

Most material online doesn't recognize the fictitious elements. Titles for the king's son, for example. Much of the material is fiction but it's treated online as real. Many online sources believe that Ptahhotep, the actual vizier, there were a few with that name, actually taught students how to behave.

But none of them go the distance. This thing is outrageous. This goes on for 59 pages. There are three introductions. Then a prologue. Then the maxims. Then seven conclusions. Apparently, it takes f-o-r-e-v-e-r to wrap things up.

The maxims are the main interest. It's very Confucius-like, as they're discussions of how to deal with your place in society. They're about how to speak. They're things like; how to deal with an argumentative superior, an argumentative equal, an argumentative subordinate, Maat, trust in god, table manners, slander, behavior when successful, behavior toward someone successful and so on. You'll see as I get to them.

Here are the three introductions crammed together, and the prologue.

I know the presumed sounds of these signs like the 100-year old wrinkles on the back of my hands. (This is so distressing. I used to have artistic hands and now I have cadaver hands.) So I stopped writing them. I sound them as we do in English and other languages, and that makes the prologue run a lot faster without bothering with what I see and how Allen transliterates what he sees. These transliterations are really annoying. I include them to show the differences.  So far, they're nearly useless to me. Often, they don't even match. It's like they pull things out of their butt to force fit what is written into something that's sensible.

Then another possibility is, my dictionaries are what is known about hieroglyphics, and their language evolved over two millennia. My book is specific to Middle Egyptian so resources don't match up completely any more than Old English matches nicely to modern English. It continued to change, quite a lot actually, after the period I'm studying.