Wisdom Literature (with Prof. Maggie Geoga)

Afterlives of Ancient Egypt with Kara Cooney

EPISODE 77 | Professor Maggie Geoga joins Kara and Jordan to discuss ancient Egyptian wisdom literature (also known as instruction texts), specifically “The Teaching of Amenemhat,” a Middle Egyptian poem from ca. 1550 to 500 B.C.E. in which the murdered King Amenemhat I advises his son from beyond the grave. They discuss the challenges of studying this ancient text, who the intended audience for this text might have been, and how its reception by the the ancient Egyptians changed over the centuries.

Learn more about “The Teaching of Amenemhat”

Read a translation of “The Teaching of Amenemhat”

Read Prof. Geoga’s article: “New Insights into Papyrus Millingen and the Reception History of The Teaching of Amenemhat”

Read about Emily Post and check out the website dedicated to her rules of etiquette

Maggie Geoga is Assistant Professor of Egyptology at the University of Chicago and a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography. Her research focuses on ancient Egyptian literature, scribal culture, textual transmission, and reception in both ancient Egypt and later periods. Maggie earned her PhD in Egyptology from Brown University, where she also completed a concurrent MA in Comparative Literature. She is currently working on a monograph on the reception history of the Middle Egyptian poem The Teaching of Amenemhat from ca.1550 to 500 BCE. She also maintains an ongoing project on Jean Terrasson’s 1731 novel Séthos, whose depiction of Egypt strongly influenced numerous eighteenth-century authors, artists, and thinkers and still underlies many contemporary beliefs about ancient Egypt.

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