Translatorâs Introduction
The five little-known stories that make up this volumeâ drawn from the vast output of Egyptâs (and the Arab worldâs) greatest modern writerâare all in some way inspired by his countryâs ancient past. Written in the 1930s and 1940s, in the early phase of Naguib Mahfouzâs novelistic careerâwhich he began by publishing three books of fiction set in pharaonic timesâthey 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 textsâwhich, 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 (âEvil Adored,â âThe Mummy Awakens,â and âA Voice from the Other Worldâ) in his first collection of short stories,
The Whisper of Madness
(
Hams aljunun
, the date of whose appearance is still debated). The other twoââKing Userkafâs Forgivenessâ and âThe Return of Sinuheââhave languished in the crumbling pages of aging magazines, uncollected and largely ignored.
Critics have occasionally discussed the stories (with the apparent exception of âSinuheâ), yet they remained untranslated (but for âThe Mummy Awakens,â published in English in Pakistan in 1986 1 âand 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 Mahfouzâs 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, âEvil Adored.â Set in still little-understood Predynastic Egypt, after the first few sentencesâwhich explain that the country had at one time been divided into autonomous districtsâit bears little resemblance to any confirmed ancient source or reality. Yet this hardly diminishes its allegorical appeal.
Likewise, the second tale, âKing Userkafâs Forgiveness,â while featuring the true founder of the Fifth Dynasty as its title character, and liberally marbled with allusions to real places and people (including Userkafâs son and successor, Sahura), is not based upon any known incident. Indeed, the real Userkafâs scarcely documented reign (2513â2506 BC) offered a nearly clean slate for Mahfouzâs fictional agenda. An avid reader of ancient Egyptian literature, Mahfouz may well have taken Userkafâs final state of mind from
The Teaching of Amenemhat
, a renowned poem from Egyptâs Middle Kingdom. In this poem, Amenemhat I, founder of the Twelfth Dynasty (r. 1991â1962 BC), appears in a dreamâafter his assassination in an intrigue hatched by his chief vizier and women from his haremâto his son, Senwosret I, confirming his succession to the throne. Amenemhat sadly warns (as translated by Richard B. Parkinson): âTrust no brother! Know no friend! Make for yourself no intimatesâthis is of no avail!â
The next story, âThe Mummy Awakens,â is perhaps the only one that Mahfouz has published that features an outright political tiradeâthough 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 mummyâs character is perhaps loosely based on Horemheb, the general who served under the âheretic kingâ Akhenaten (r. ca. 1372â1355 BC), who later became pharaoh himself (r. 1343â1315 BC).
Further testifying to Mahfouzâs lifelong fascination with the literary heritage of the pharaonic age, the
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