David Gould

Can someone give me some info on this particular document?

Is there a consensus as to the approximate date of it?

http://www.ohr.edu/yhiy/article.php/838

(take the web site with a grain of salt - I am just looking for a date.)


Thanks.

Toto

Someone brings up the Ipuwer papyrus every six months or so.

Here's one old thread:

Ipuwer

Quoting my post there:

I did a Google search, and the papyrus appears to be real, but implications drawn from it may not be. E.g., it was a favorite of Velikovsky.

The most reasonable item I found was a reprint of an article about a medical doctor analysing the papyrus for evidence of early diseases, with this comment:

http://www.toxicmold.org/documents/0104.html
also this:

http://pages.ancientsites.com/~plagu..._Inca/who.html

spin

The Admonitions of I-pu-wer, as the document is called, is a text found from the New Kingdom in Egypt, which would ostensibly place it around 1500BCE, but the text has a number of indications that such a date is not indicative, that it was originally written long before and that what we have is a New Kingdom copy of that text. It is a political tract like others written either before or at the beginning of the Middle Kingdom, such as the Teaching of King Amenemhat I, with which it shares a phrase in common. The text must be seen in the context of other such Egyptian documents, before one can start making comparisons with non-Egyptian literature. Beware of such comparisons.


spin

Amlodhi

As spin has pointed out, the dating of this copy may be c. 1500 (though J.B. Pritchard in ANET cites a date of 1350 - 1100 B.C.). Because the language and orthography are "Middle Egyptian", the original is thought to date c. 2300 - 2050 B.C. [ibid.]

For anyone following this, David Gould is correct in that the website he linked to should be taken with a (huge) grain of salt. Not only with regard to the implied dating, but also because they seem to have taken great liberties with translation and selective quoting. For example:
The translation I have doesn't say "plague". It says "dirt" and the surrounding context (conveniently omitted from the link quote) supports that reading:

This has been hacked to the point of deliberate deception. The actual passages (as translated by John A. Wilson) indicate that Egypt is being torn by war and civil insurrection with many casualties:

Thus, far from any water being "turned to blood", the author is simply indicating that the Nile is being polluted by corpses.



This quote is misplaced and selectively quoted/translated so as to imply that the author is here referring strictly to the "water being blood". Yet, in actual fact, this passage comes later as a summation of several dilemmas that have been listed:



This is selectively quoted so as to imply that the crops of Egypt were smitten by God in a plague. However, another passage which was conveniently omitted states:

Thus, grain is in short supply because the civil strife has interrupted normal agriculture, not because the crops were "smitten".



This is total misdirection. The context of the actual passage is IPU-WER speaking to pharaoh and telling him that proper leadership is not being seen:

Thus, far from saying "the land is without light", this passage rather says that the glory of pharaoh is not being seen (or upheld).


The other quotes from the link are similarly misused, but the above examples should serve to expose their agenda. The best bet is to skip the website, find a decent (annotated) translation, and read the entire document for one's self.

[ANET = "Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament", James B. Pritchard, ed., Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton N.J.]

Amlodhi

spin

I'm only running on very distant memory, so 1500 was a ballpark figure but I thought it was an 18th dynasty copy, which means before 1300, but don't trust me... get a reputable academic source. Pritchard may of course be correct. I just have a conflicting memory of the info.


spin

judge

I dpn't know that much about this but I do have a reference to a John Van Seeters who dates the document to the end of the XIII dynasty.

John Van seeters. "A Date fror the 'Admonitions'" The journal of Egtyptian Archeology, L (1964) pp 13-23.
Cf. Pense III (Winter 1973) pp.36-37.

I have not actually read the journal but have just seen a reference to it and am not sure how accurate the reference is?

Thanks for the further information Amholdi. Very Interesting.
:notworthy

p.s. hope to get back to something on preterism at some stage , just too busy at the moment.

added in edit I think the XIII dynasty is the end of the middle kingdom (?) around 1788-1688 BCE (?)

Marduk

Ancient texts are full of these pissings and moanings about something or another, usually referred to as ‘laments’ as in The Lament of Inanna or the Lament of Ur, crops failing, animals dying, dead bodies piled up in mounds, type stuff, does this mean Sumer and Babylon got hit with the same plagues as Egypt?

Vorkosigan

Yes. In the original version, Moses was triplets...