Voices from the Other World by Naguib Mahfouz

Translator’s Introduction
    The five little-known stories that make up this volume— drawn from the vast output of Egypt’s (and the Arab world’s) greatest modern writer—are all in some way inspired by his country’s ancient past. Written in the 1930s and 1940s, in the early phase of Naguib Mahfouz’s novelistic career—which he began by publishing three books of fiction set in pharaonic times—they may well have been intended as the bases for longer works. Some are in a kind of fable form, as though adapted from folk literature or ancient texts—which, in part, they were. Yet he utterly remade them into his own, and placed them in the cutting-edge literary journals of the day, including three of them (“Evil Adored,” “The Mummy Awakens,” and “A Voice from the Other World”) in his first collection of short stories,
The Whisper of Madness
(
Hams aljunun
, the date of whose appearance is still debated). The other two—“King Userkaf’s Forgiveness” and “The Return of Sinuhe”—have languished in the crumbling pages of aging magazines, uncollected and largely ignored.
    Critics have occasionally discussed the stories (with the apparent exception of “Sinuhe”), yet they remained untranslated (but for “The Mummy Awakens,” published in English in Pakistan in 1986 1 —and so they moldered unknown to those whose who do not read Arabic. That is, until now, when, like Sinuhe himself, and the born-again warrior unhappy with the changes since antiquity in Mahfouz’s mummy adventure, they have come back to remind us of our more than half-century neglect of their undeniable charms.
    In his pharaonic stories as in his others, Mahfouz combines historical observation with a timeless imagination. The story here with the least direct connection to any known events or legends is the first one, “Evil Adored.” Set in still little-understood Predynastic Egypt, after the first few sentences—which explain that the country had at one time been divided into autonomous districts—it bears little resemblance to any confirmed ancient source or reality. Yet this hardly diminishes its allegorical appeal.
    Likewise, the second tale, “King Userkaf’s Forgiveness,” while featuring the true founder of the Fifth Dynasty as its title character, and liberally marbled with allusions to real places and people (including Userkaf’s son and successor, Sahura), is not based upon any known incident. Indeed, the real Userkaf’s scarcely documented reign (2513–2506 BC) offered a nearly clean slate for Mahfouz’s fictional agenda. An avid reader of ancient Egyptian literature, Mahfouz may well have taken Userkaf’s final state of mind from
The Teaching of Amenemhat
, a renowned poem from Egypt’s Middle Kingdom. In this poem, Amenemhat I, founder of the Twelfth Dynasty (r. 1991–1962 BC), appears in a dream—after his assassination in an intrigue hatched by his chief vizier and women from his harem—to his son, Senwosret I, confirming his succession to the throne. Amenemhat sadly warns (as translated by Richard B. Parkinson): “Trust no brother! Know no friend! Make for yourself no intimates—this is of no avail!”
    The next story, “The Mummy Awakens,” is perhaps the only one that Mahfouz has published that features an outright political tirade—though delivered in the 1930s by a mummy from the Eighteenth Dynasty. A tongue-in-cheek adaptation of the standard plots of Hollywood mummy movies then in vogue (as they are again today), the mummy’s character is perhaps loosely based on Horemheb, the general who served under the “heretic king” Akhenaten (r. ca. 1372–1355 BC), who later became pharaoh himself (r. 1343–1315 BC).
    Further testifying to Mahfouz’s lifelong fascination with the literary heritage of the pharaonic age, the