Listening, power and the Teaching of Ptahhotep

Who deserves to be heard?

A person with little authority approaches someone who can refuse their request. Before the request itself is considered, an earlier decision has to be made: will the person be allowed to finish speaking?

The Teaching of Ptahhotep returns to listening several times. Section 4 of UCL’s translation suggests that valuable speech can come from people without learning or high status. Sections 5–7 give different advice for dealing with opponents of different ranks. Section 20 urges a leader to hear a petitioner, someone making a request, all the way through, even when the request will not be granted. [1]

It matters who is listening to whom. The leader hears a petitioner; elsewhere the son hears and follows instruction. In the king’s reply, the translator Miriam Lichtheim renders hearing as obedience, which makes that second sense explicit. [3]

Together these passages raise the question this lesson pursues: how far can a commitment to listening challenge an unequal relationship? It is our question, one way of reading the work, and it leads to claims we can examine and test.

Listening, respect and political power

Consider three claims. First, someone may know something useful despite lacking status. Second, a person may deserve a hearing even when their request should be refused. Third, everyone may be entitled to an equal share of political power.

The first two claims do not establish the third. Nor would rejecting equal political power show that the first two are mistaken. Keeping the three apart lets us ask how far the teaching’s advice actually goes, without mistaking it for a modern account of equality or dismissing it before we have considered what it asks of a person in power. The distinctions are ours, drawn in order to examine the passages; we are not suggesting that the ancient writer set out these claims in our terms.

A council hears a complaint

Imagine a council hearing complaints about a water schedule. A resident begins to explain that the published hours clash with their work, and the chair cuts in: “The rule is the same for everyone.”

Why let the resident finish? The chair might learn about an effect the council had not anticipated. The resident might deserve a chance to explain their position even if the policy stays the same. Or the chair might simply hope that listening will calm the resident without anything having to change.

Watching the chair sit quietly wouldn’t tell us which reason was at work. Nor would it tell us whether the resident could appeal, whether the chair had to respond to evidence or whether the council’s authority was justified.

Now imagine two versions of the hearing. In one, the chair listens closely, discovers an avoidable problem and changes the schedule. In the other, the chair listens just as closely but refuses to let new information affect the decision. Both residents were allowed to speak, but only in the first could what they said make any difference to the outcome.

The council is invented. It tells us nothing about how Egyptian officials actually behaved. What it does show is how much more we would need to know before calling a hearing just.

Right conduct and divine order

The teaching ties right conduct to divine order. In Lichtheim’s maxim 5, justice endures from the time of the god Osiris, and the epilogue links hearing and heeding instruction with divine favor. These are claims made within the work; they do not tell us that every Egyptian understood good conduct in the same way. [3]

The reference entry on maat looks at two later Egyptian objects whose museum descriptions connect right order, kingship and divinity. [2] Because the objects come from different periods, they cannot settle when the teaching was composed. They are a further, limited reminder that ideas about good conduct can be bound up with religious life.

A work that appeals to divine order still gives us reasons to examine. Whom does its advice serve? What follows from it? Where might its recommendations pull against one another?

Advice of this kind can restrain an abuse of power while leaving power in the same hands. That may improve someone’s life, help an unequal arrangement last, or do both at once. Deciding how to judge it takes an argument.

Pause and try

A reader says, “Because a leader should listen patiently, the teaching must endorse equal political authority.” Does the conclusion follow? State a more careful claim.

Read an explanatory answer

No. A leader can listen patiently and still keep the power to decide. A more careful claim is that the selected instruction makes a demand on how the leader hears a petition. To argue that it also supports equal political power, we would need further evidence from the text and a reason connecting listening with authority. This settles how far the passage supports the reader’s claim; it does not decide whether equality is desirable.

What changes when someone is heard?

Listening may help us learn, show respect or manage someone’s dissatisfaction, and it may do several of these at once. To tell them apart, ask what can change because someone has been heard. That question takes us past admiring a piece of advice to examining what it makes possible.

The next lesson moves to a different text, place and kind of writing, following one version of Gilgamesh as it explores mortality.

Sources and limits

[1] UCL, “Teaching of Ptahhotep”. The section symbol, §, refers here to UCL’s divisions of the text:

• §4: Papyrus Prisse column 5, lines 8–10.
• §§5–7: column 5, line 10 through column 6, line 3.
• §20: column 9, lines 3–7.

The selected passages were also compared with Lichtheim’s translation, in which UCL §4 corresponds to maxim 1, §§5–7 to maxims 2–4, and §20 to maxim 17. Because editions number the passages differently, keep the translator’s name with the number; [3] gives Lichtheim’s edition and passage references. The comparison supports the lesson’s account of listening and rank, though the translations differ in particular lines. It is not a complete study of the Egyptian language or of the text’s history.

[2] The maat reference cites the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s object records 29.3.1 and 29.6.2. The council case and the distinctions about listening are original exercises in reasoning; they do not reconstruct an ancient event.

[3] Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, volume I, The Old and Middle Kingdoms, in the 2019 collected edition (University of California Press), “The Instruction of Ptahhotep.” The entry is in the EPUB file OEBPS/Volume1_Part_01_Chapter_05.xhtml#head14.

• Selected comparison: maxims 1–4, internal markers page98–page99, with printed textual markers (61 = 5, 11), (70) and (81 = 6, 3) and notes 7–10; maxim 17, page103, marker (273).
• Hearing and obedience: the king’s reply in the prologue and note 5 (fn115).
• Religious context: maxim 5, page99, marker (90), note 11; the epilogue, page109–page110, markers (540 = 16, 5) and (550).

The page markers locate passages inside the EPUB; they are not verified print-page numbers. The supplied entry and its notes were read, including the notices of omitted passages, but no book was read in full. There was no complete manuscript collation (a systematic comparison of manuscript readings) and no independent analysis of the Egyptian language. The reading guide explains the separate check of two details against images of the manuscript.