Dispute between a man and his Ba (soul)

“Dispute between a man and his Ba” (by -1795) is one of the best lyric poems written in Ancient Egyptian that we have. It comes down to us on a single piece of papyrus (pictured above), discoverd in 1843. In it a sick man weary of the world longs for death but his ba or soul tries to talk him out of it. Soaring poetry ensues – from the man, not his soul. Its themes are universal – you do not have to understand Egyptian religion to get something out of it.

Date: The single copy that we have, written on the front side of Papyrus Berlin 3024, probably dates to the second half of the 12th Dynasty, or roughly -1890 to -1795. The original, judging from the language in the copy, was probably written just a few decades before.

Language: Middle Egyptian in a hieratic script, a cursive form of hieroglyphic writing. It is one of the finest pieces of Middle Egyptian literature that we have. It was writings like this from this period that made Middle Egyptian the literary dialect of Egypt for the next 2,000 some years.

Excerpt:

To whom can I speak now?
Minds have become greedy,
there is no man’s mind to depend on.

To whom can I speak now?
There are no righteous,
the land left over to those who make disorder.

A huge theme in Egyptian writing is the balance between Maat (truth, justice, righteousness) and Isfet (chaos, disorder). It hung over not just the land of Egypt but even the gods themselves.

And even though the 12th Dynasty was a period of peace and prosperity for Egypt, its writers still lamented the sad state society had fallen into, as shown above.

Ba: According to Ancient Egyptians, a human being was made up of these five important parts:

1. body – at the centre of which was the heart, the seat of both feeling and thought (so much so that “heart” is often translated into English as “mind”).
2. shadow 
3. name 
4. ba – often translated as “soul” in English. Contains one’s personality. Released from the body at the funeral. Pictured as a bird with the head of a man.
5. ka – often translated as “spirit” in English. What gives you life. You die when your ka leaves your body. It is fed by extracting energy from food and drink, by way of the body during life, from offerings made at your tomb after death. (In a pinch, pictures of offerings will do.)

In the afterlife your heart is weighed against the feather of Maat (truth, justice, order, righteousness). If your good deeds in this life outweigh the bad, your ba and ka are reunited and can live on, with the help of nightly visits to your tomb and your mummified body.

In the “Dispute”, the man has faith and hope in these well-developed ideas about the afterlife.  But despite such beliefs, Egyptians still feared death. The ba preys on that. They are forced to come to an agreement because they need each other for there to be any sort of afterlife.

– Abagond, +2023.

See also:

• century readings
• Egypt: a brief history
• Egyptian language
• Egyptian afterlife
• maat
• papyrus

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