Life, power and mortality in Egypt and Mesopotamia

Part 1 · Learning to ask and read

What does a person in power owe someone who asks to be heard? What can achievement offer someone who must die? Two ancient works, one a set of instructions and the other a narrative poem, let us approach these questions from different directions.

In selected passages from the Teaching of Ptahhotep, listening meets unequal power in an Egyptian setting. Gilgamesh then turns our attention to friendship, loss and mortality in Mesopotamia. Throughout, the habits of the opening module help us keep what each text says apart from what we make of it. The next module moves to South Asia, and to questions about the self and liberation.

Time, place and approach. Egypt and Mesopotamia have separate histories, and in each a work’s setting, its composition and its surviving manuscripts may belong to different times. We read these two works side by side without assuming that either influenced the other; they are two examples from a much wider history of early thought.

After these lessons

• Distinguish a duty to listen from an equal share of political power.
• Explain how a narrative can explore mortality without offering a single doctrine.
• Relate an interpretation to its text, genre and surviving evidence.

Useful preparation

You can begin here: each lesson introduces its text and the evidence we have for it. For a refresher on the difference between a work and a surviving copy, return to lesson 3.

• Review: How do we know what earlier thinkers thought?