Suppose you meet someone who is looking for an argument. What should you do?
If you are Socrates, you engage. After all, in the Phaedo, in which Plato describes his teacher’s final hours, Socrates admonishes his students to beware of becoming “misologues,” that is to say, those who hate argument. (The Greek word misologos, which makes its first textual appearance here, is explicitly compared to misanthrōpos, “hating people”; in another Platonic dialogue, the Laches, it is contrasted with philologos, whence our word “philologist.”) Socrates considers misology so terrible that he says no worse evil can befall a person.
But what if you are Ptahhatp?
Who, you may ask, is Ptahhatp? Many ancient Egyptians had this name, but the one in question was the first vizier of the Old Kingdom pharaoh Izezi, who reigned in the Fifth Dynasty, around the end of the twenty-fifth and beginning of the twenty-fourth centuries B.C., a couple of thousand years before Socrates (d. 399 B.C.) and Plato (d. 348/7 B.C.). Sometimes referred to as “Ptahhotep”—but this is probably a less accurate rendering of the conventional transliteration pthhtp, and it also, in the words of the author of the book under review, doesn’t show “the satisfying coincidence that the name is a palindrome”—this highest royal adviser is the putative author of what has with some justification been called, since 1858, “the oldest book in the world.”
Most well-educated Westerners are unlikely to know all that much about Egyptians before, say, Cleopatra.
You might think that someone with this distinction would be better known, but a combination of bewildered wonder (the Great Pyramid! hieroglyphs! mummified cats!) and dismissal (well, they’re not the Greeks) has meant that even most well-educated Westerners are unlikely to know all that much about Egyptians before, say, Cleopatra (i.e., Cleopatra VII, d. 30 B.C.), with the possible exception of the fourteenth-century B.C. pharaohs Akhenaten (thanks to Philip Glass) and Tutankhamun (thanks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Steve Martin). Sensing an opportunity, the distinguished Egyptologist Bill Manley has now produced a simultaneously engaging and scholarly translation of and narrative commentary on The Teaching of Ptahhatp, published in The Oldest Book in the World: Philosophy in the Age of the Pyramids.1 This is no small achievement: a little over a century ago, the greatest modern scholar of Ancient Egyptian, Sir Alan Gardiner, called The Teaching of Ptahhatp “quite unintelligible”; its first modern editor, Gustave Jéquier, said it was “le texte littéraire égyptien le plus difficile à traduire.”
Manley also includes translations of two other fragmentary pieces of didactic advice whose content likewise traces back, probably, to the Old Kingdom: The Teaching of Kagemni, the end of which is preserved in the same Middle Kingdom papyrus scroll that provides the only complete version of The Teaching of Ptahhatp, now housed in Paris in the Bibliothèque nationale; and The Teaching of Hordedef, bits of which are known from sixteen New Kingdom ostraca and a small wooden board from the Late Period. In addition, Manley devotes his final chapter to the account of creation Why Things Happen found on the Shabaka Stone. Controversies rage over the content and date of the stone, now on display in the British Museum, but whatever one says about this object (whose connection to The Teaching of Ptahhatp seems to me less than robust), it preserves a view of the origin of the world that, in Manley’s words,
certainly predates the earliest accounts of creation in the Western tradition, whether from the Old Testament in the Hebrew written tradition or, for example, from Democritus in the classical tradition—neither of which it agrees with, either in broad terms or in points of detail.
All in all, this is a terrific—and attractively produced—work that should appeal to anyone interested in the ancient world, regardless of knowledge of Egyptian social structure, culture, and religion, and also to philosophers of both the professional and the armchair kinds. Manley does an excellent job balancing detailed accounts of specific papyri with largely easy-to-understand commentary on Ptahhatp’s prologue, thirty-seven teachings, and seven conclusions.
So back to the initial question about entering into an argument. Ptahhatp’s basic answer is the opposite of Plato’s: keep your mouth shut and don’t engage. But the specifics are fascinating: what exactly you do should depend on just how smart, or dumb, you think your interlocutor is. Ptahhatp breaks his advice down into three parts, which appear as the second, third, and fourth of those thirty-seven teachings. Here is the start of Manley’s translation of each:
If you meet someone looking for an argument—a stubborn person, cleverer than you—reach out your hand and bow politely. Just as you disagree with them, they are not going to agree with you.
If you meet someone looking for an argument—an equal who is on your level—show that you are better than them with silence.
If you meet someone looking for an argument—someone ordinary, not your equal—do not abuse them precisely because they are not up to the task: let them have the floor and they will defeat themself.
Food for thought, even if you don’t agree.
Ptahhatp believes in being humble—four of his teachings have the rubric “On humility”—and in listening rather than talking. His seventeenth teaching has the rubric “On listening” and opens with the words “Whenever you are in charge, you should enjoy listening to whoever comes to you with questions”; the eleventh, “On quiet resolution,” includes the admonition “Do not add to what has already been said. Never go against your mind. Doing so is a spiritual offence.” (By the way, these are true rubrics: written in red ink.) We all know people who go on and on without providing new information and who say things they know to be false in order to gain social and political capital. To them especially I commend Ptahhatp and Manley.
Related rubrics include “On quiet leadership,” “On restraint,” “On gossip” (with the amusing translation “Repeat only statements of fact rather than listening to a world of piss-taking”), and “On when to speak.” The last gives this piece of advice: “You should say only what you know how to explain.” As for Ptahhatp’s conclusions, the first begins, “If you listen to the things I have said to you, so all your prospects will improve”; the second and third have the rubrics “Learn to listen” and “Listening is a firm footing”; and the sixth is “Actions not words” (“When your mind is overflowing, restrain your mouth”).
Now, in view of Ptahhatp’s emphasis on verbal discipline, you may well wonder why he would have composed anything at all. The answer is that he was very old and realized that it was high time for him to pass along what he knew from long experience to be wise and true. “Truth,” he writes in his fifth teaching (“On truth”), “is ever important, ever relevant. It has not been changed since the beginning of time.”
And so, as Ptahhatp puts it in his prologue, “A disciple should be appointed for this humble servant so I may tell them words worth hearing.” His first conclusion includes the firm claim that “Every sentence has been tested and has not failed on this earth in all of time.” In the fifth conclusion, we read that any “student who listens to what has been passed down through the ages has the ideal.” From this listening and passing down comes the tradition of merut nefret, “literally . . . ‘philo-sophy’ (‘wanting wisdom’ or ‘wanting the ideal’).” “In other words,” explains Manley, “The Teaching is the oldest surviving philosophy book from anywhere in the world.”
Manley is obviously correct that “philosophy does not have its exclusive origin in classical Greece,” but his almost complete inattention to Plato did come as a bit of a surprise to me in view of the press release from Thames & Hudson that accompanied the review copy, which trumpets in its first sentence that The Teaching of Ptahhatp was “composed two millennia before the birth of Plato.” Yes, the book opens with an epigraph from the Phaedrus in which Socrates speaks of the Egyptian god Thoth’s invention of writing and his interlocutor makes fun of him with the words “O, Socrates, you are too quick to make up stories from Egypt or wherever else you want!” But Manley does nothing with this quotation and has very little generally to say about Socrates and Plato.
Not that Manley’s inattention to the Academy is unreasonable. To the (limited) extent that he speaks of philosophy written in Greek, he concentrates on the Presocratics, especially Anaximander of Miletus, and on the Gospel of John. The cosmogony of the sixth-century B.C. philosopher Anaximander is similar enough to Why Things Happen that Manley allows himself to wonder whether the Presocratics “were not purely the products of indigenous European thought but . . . grew up in a world where the philosophical ideas of ‘pre-scientific’, ‘pre-logical’ Egypt were familiar.” While he does not develop this idea, it is hardly outlandish, and we can look forward to a book on such matters by Thomas Hercules Davies based on his magnificent 2020 Princeton University dissertation “Greek Cosmology and Its Bronze Age Background.”
As for the Gospel, in Why Things Happen, “creation comes into being out of Non-being through the intention of the creator expressed as a word,” an idea with obvious connections to John 1:1. Cross-cultural connections between the origin of the word and the origin of the world merit further exploration as well.
What I missed most in Manley’s book is any sense of how documents like The Teaching of Ptahhatp fit into the wider category of Near Eastern wisdom literature. This genre, the first recorded example of which is usually said to be the mid-third-millennium B.C. Sumerian Instructions of Šuruppak, offers sage pronouncements about how to lead a good life. Indeed, unless my eyes skipped over it, Manley never even uses the phrase “wisdom literature”: an odd omission. Unlike those texts that are conventionally considered philosophical rather than literary, early Greek examples of wisdom literature owe a debt to comparatively well-known material from such languages as Sumerian, Akkadian, and also Egyptian. It would be good to return to works like Hesiod’s Works and Days with Manley in hand.
Manley is a gifted pedagogue, as I know anyway from regular classroom use of his and Mark Collier’s How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs: A Step-by-Step Guide to Teach Yourself, first published in 1998 and based on items in the British Museum. (I have often wished for an American edition keyed to material at the Met.) He quips at one point, “I could rewrite the present book using words like mimesis, ontology and epistemology and you would quickly consign it” to “the category of badly written or very clever . . .—or both!” Fortunately, he wrote the book the way he did (though I could do without “themself”).
And what of Ptahhatp’s book? One of the best-known classical poems is Horace’s Ode 3.30, which begins, “Exegi monumentum aere perennius/ regalique situ pyramidum altius” (I have perfected a monument more lasting than bronze and higher than the kingly site of the pyramids). He is speaking, of course, of his writing. More or less the same idea is found in an Egyptian New Kingdom papyrus from which Manley quotes: “Books are more effective than a funerary estate or a chapel in the west. They are nearer perfect than temple towers, longer lasting than an inscription in a temple.” Ptahhatp might have been nearly a hundred when he composed his Teaching. Now he is over 4,300 years old. Not a bad run.
