ref.: "Doomed Prince", April 4, 1999
For your amusement a 'solar motive explanation' of "The Doomed Prince",
compairable with the solar explanation of the snake and his island in
"The Shipwrecked Sailor".
+ When the tale begins, the Prince is locked up in a stone house ->
sun is entombed, in the Duat under the earth
[I'm sure the Egyptian audience at this point would have shaken
their heads amused about so much foolishness in the King's solution
to the problem: to entomb your son alive to have him escape the tomb!
And they would have shaken their heads a second time at the solution
of the Prince: running away to the horrible abroad to escape fate, ts-ts-ts.
In Hebrew literature there was a strong link between 'exile' from your beloved
soil and 'death', and real living as being on your own soil (Gen 2:17+3:24;
Gen 47:8+9; Ezech 37), and that sentiment seems to fit the Egyptian mind
very well (cf. EEF thread Feb 98 "Burials Abroad"). So the Prince's solution
is of the same foolish paradoxal nature as the solution of his father!]
+ He is released and goes with a ferry to the eastern shore ->
the sun takes the ferry to the day bark and rises in the east
+ Prince travels eastward; he leaps high to get to the princess
and kisses/marries her -> sun rises in the sky, and reaches its
highest point where he joins forces with the Solar Eye.
[Q: is there any link between Solar Eye and zenit? Is Tefnut/Sekhmet
ever placed in the bark? Why I think the princess is the Solar Eye
you will see later.]
[The leaping of the suitors is a rather odd trait of this Rapunselic
scene; reminds me of the Saharan Fula(ni) tribes, where a line of
young men jumps up and down, and the one who can jump highest is most
fittest - in the eyes of the watching Fula girls that is. The Fula are
not AfroAsiatic though, so this must be chance.]
+ Thusfar the prince has escaped his fate(s) and prospered, but after the
marriage the tables turn, his fate catches up with him while
he grows careless/weak -> after the noon, the sun lowers in the sky and
grows less strong.
+ When the Prince is off guard, a nightly snake comes to kill
him, but the wife makes it drunk and chops it up -> Sekhmet/Tefnut,
once made drunk herself (beer) to stop her rage, is in some papyrus drawings
pictured as a big cat chopping up the Apophis snake (chaos, dark clouds)
with a big knife.
[Cf. the pendant in the 7th hour of the Amduat book, with
Apophis being cut up by goddesses (Sekhmnet is not named though),
just after the 'deepest point' (6th hour, when Re has joined his
body); the text of the Amduat book says "The cutting up of Apophis..
..although his place is in the sky." In our tale, the snake comes
at night, but in the overall 'chronology' of the tale advocated here,
this would be the fight with Apophis in the day sky (after the 'highest
point' i.e. noon), in the 7th hour of day.]
+ The dog comes, we do not know what it says, and in fear the Prince
descends into the lake ->
Anubis warns for death?; the sun descends into the Duat.
[The dog is a puzzle. He is with the prince since youth,
loved by him, and only at the end turns against(?) him. So he seems
rather an aspect of the Prince himself? Or: he follows him like
a shadow, like the shadow of Death follows us all since birth (no escape
at the end). "What is it that is walking behind the [adult] man that is
coming along the road?" the Prince asks about a dog at the start of the
tale.
A dog reminds us of Anubis, of course, but Anubis is no bringer of death
as such. Is he announcer of death? Hmm.]
+ In the lake is a crocodile -> the evil forces in the Duat
[Reptiles often being premordial chaos creators in AE, although
mostly snakes and amphibians.]
+ The spirit fights the crocodile from sunrise to sunset ->
the body of Re/Osiris is all alone in the darkness of the Duat
from sunrise to sunset, untill the Sun, i.e. the ba of Re,
merges with it in the dept of night, to be reborn.
So when we now follow this underlying 'solar circuit' blue-print, then the
ending dictated would need to be:
the Prince (traveling sun, ba of Re) joins forces with the lake spirit
(body of Re, in Duat) to get revitalized, to beat the crocodile (fight the nightly
Apophian forces, after midnight), and get out of the lake (i.e. Duat,
to rise again in the east). No doubt, now free of his two reptilian fate(s),
the prince can confess he is Prince [why else is it mentionned twice before
that he lies about his father?], and he can return with his bride
(likely plus the dog following as always) to good-old Egypt to complete the
narrative circle. If one needs to die - do it at home.
[As being, let alone dying, far away from the Nile Valley was a horrible
thought, it seems unthinkable to me that the story would end with the Prince
being abroad; see mentionned thread on EEF last year].
What do you mean, "speculative"?? :-)
I'll make no attempt to actually write a text that would fit the above course
of events. But I cannot help think that when modern people go writing an
ending to an incomplete old tale (a standard exercise in egyptological
courses I've understood), that they run the risk to overdo it, adding
spectacular story elements that were not in the tale and putting in
high-spirited moral lessons. In short: make a Walt Disney story of it.
But old stories in my eyes tend to be *plain*, often *cryptic*, with
no very *outspoken* moral lessons. It seems to me, that in our modern
age a tale is good when it is *new*, with *spectacular* discriptions
and effects, and surprising endings, but in the old days a tale was
good when the audience could *recognize* familiar elements and themes
of old, and grin about how skilfully the themes were rehashed and
chuckle for the tenth time when the hero of the plot did the familiar
wrong thing again, and lean back satisfied when the familiar and
predictable end had been narrated.
kind regards,
Aayko Eyma
ayma@tip.nl