Defying Fate.
Sometime in the late 18th Dynasty, maybe around 1350 BCE, a scribe of Egypt put brush to papyrus and composed (or recorded) a story. This tale has endured for more than 3000 years and is one of the first known “fairy tales” to survive from ancient Egypt. It is called “The Doomed Prince,” and like the classic fairy tales, it features monsters (real and imagined), prophecy, a person’s struggle against fate, and (of course) a great deal of uncertainty.
The Doomed Prince is a relatively short story, for one unfortunate reason: the ending is lost. We have the first two-thirds, maybe three-quarters, but the papyrus on which it is preserved breaks off just before the ending. I know, why am I sharing this tale if it doesn’t have an ending? Well, it’s a good journey all the same; and it’s an interesting example of how the Egyptians may have told their stories, around the hearth in the dark of the night.
The tale shares a number of motifs which you can find in fairy stories more generally. There’s a nice prophecy, when the child is born; there are talking animals and a case of “secret identity” which is revealed at just the right moment; and there is a princess in a tower, whom the protagonist must reach by a feat of great endurance and skill. Some classic elements, which we might know so well we don’t even think about them, show up, more than 3000 years ago; simple proof that the stories we take for granted have an exceptionally long history.
Bibliography
Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Volume II: The New Kingdom, 1976.
George Posener, “On the Tale of the Doomed Prince,” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 39 (1953). JSTOR.
William Kelly Simpson (ed.), The Literature of Ancient Egypt, 2003.
