The Dispute between a man and his Ba is an ancient Egyptian text dating to the Middle Kingdom

Middle Kingdom of Egypt

The Middle Kingdom of Egypt is the period in the history of ancient Egypt stretching from the establishment of the Eleventh Dynasty to the end of the Fourteenth Dynasty, between 2055 BC and 1650 BC, although some writers include the Thirteenth and Fourteenth dynasties in the Second Intermediate...

 about a man deeply unhappy with his life. It is part of the so-called Wisdom literature

Sebayt

Sebayt is the ancient Egyptian term for a genre of pharaonic literature. The word literally means 'teachings' or 'instructions' and refers to formally written ethical teachings focused on the "way of living truly"....

 and takes the form of a dialogue between a man and his ba. The beginning of the text is missing, there are a number of lacunae

Lacuna (manuscripts)

A lacunaPlural lacunae. From Latin lacūna , diminutive form of lacus . is a gap in a manuscript, inscription, text, painting, or a musical work...

, and translation of the remainder is difficult. The only copy to survive, consisting of 155 columns of hieratic

Hieratic

Hieratic refers to a cursive writing system that was used in the provenance of the pharaohs in Egypt and Nubia that developed alongside the hieroglyphic system, to which it is intimately related...

 writing, is on the recto

Recto

The recto and verso are respectively the "front" and "back" sides of a leaf of paper in a bound item such as a codex, book, broadsheet, or pamphlet. In languages written from left to right the recto is the right-hand page and the verso the left-hand page...

of Papyrus Berlin 3024.

Synopsis (following the translation of M. Lichtheim)

(The beginning is lost) The man accuses his ba of wanting to desert him, of dragging him towards death before his time. He says that life is too heavy for him to bear, that his heart would come to rest in the West (i.e. the afterlife), his name would survive and his body would be protected. He urges his ba to be patient and wait for a son to be born to make the offerings the deceased needed in the afterlife. His ba describes the sadness death brings and retorts to the man's complaints about his lack of worth, his being cut off from humanity and the attractiveness of death by exhorting him to embrace life and promises to stay with him.

In spite of the presence of many symptoms which suicides generally display, there appears to be no hint in the text that the man is considering taking his own life, although Pritchard's rendition strongly suggests the opposite.

Form

In the translation of Miriam Lichtheim

Miriam Lichtheim

Miriam Lichtheim was a translator of ancient Egyptian texts whose translations are still widely used.-Biography:In the 1930s she studied under Hans Jakob Polotsky at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem...

 the text is presented as a mixture of styles: prose, symmetrically structured speech, and lyric poetry.

History

The papyrus was bought by the German Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius

Karl Richard Lepsius

Karl Richard Lepsius was a pioneering Prussian Egyptologist and linguist and pioneer of modern archaeology.-Background:...

 in Egypt in 1843 and is now in the Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung belonging to the Berlin State Museums

Berlin State Museums

The Berlin State Museums, in German Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, are a group of museums in Berlin, Germany overseen by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation and funded by the German federal government in collaboration with Germany's federal states...

. The text has been translated many times, with at times widely differing interpretations.

Literature

• M. Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol.1, University of California Press 1973
• James B. Pritchard ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, Princeton University Press 1950