Ptahhotep Maxims, Conclusion 3 of 7

Like all the other segments, the first line is written in red. These rubrics mark the separation of segments. It's why there are seven short conclusions instead of one huge conclusion. This third segment continues talking about the benefits of obedience.

There are only 10 lines and that makes it possible to delve into each sign, and when you see all the possibilities then discerning the intended meaning becomes like turning a combination lock tumbling the various meanings until you hear a click for each sign. Most the times you can go straight to it while other times you have to keep tumbling various meaning. Prepositions especially. They can mean almost anything. Each Egyptian preposition means separate English prepositions, and each one overlaps with others in English. Best to leave them alone and come back to them later and allow them to mean whatever is needed for the sentence to work out.

For each line the author's transliteration is shown first in black text. It's the code used for mapping texts. And it has some serious shortcomings. It leaves out quite a lot of what is actually written. And it adds things that are not in the original. Because the original contains so much redundancies and abbreviations, omissions and substitutions.

Then how that transliteration divides the original line is shown in red boxes.

This gives us a good start with our own translation.

Then the author's English translation is shown in black text. That's far as most readers will go with this book.

But we want to know how the author arrived at that translation (beyond discussions with other translators) so that we can do it ourselves. Each line we're asking, "how did you guys get there from this? How many assumptions are made? How much knowledge outside the text is used to arrive at translations?" Turns out, a very great deal. Because we see the originals are a real mess. We see that translators take a huge sloppy mess and disentangle it to make sense of it. So as budding translators we go, "Oh. So that's what our job is. Take this pile of crap and make sense of it."

Fine! Challenge accepted.

But I don't want to hear any argument when I come up with different translations than experts since it's so much opinion as anything.

* When a man of standing accepts his father's speaking,
* no plan of his can err.
* You will make of your son a hearer,
* who will be accomplished in the opinion of officials,
* who guides his mouth according to what has been said to him,
* who is seen as a hearer.
* A son who is, accomplished, his steps are distinguished,
* while the interference of him who does not hear errs.
* The knowledgeable rises early to establish himself,
* while the fool struggles.