Literary Devices and Structure of Amenemope Text Essay

Introduction

The text I chose is derived from the book Ancient Egyptian Literature: A Book Of Readings: The New Kingdom by Miriam Lichtheim. The text starts in page 147 of the book and runs to page 148, providing an analysis of the Egyptian literary work Amenemope. For this purpose, the author goes on to provide an in-depth analysis of the text’s structure and cites relevant examples to help classify the text as a presentation of early Egyptian writing. In producing the text, the author seeks to provide a guide for scholars trying to understand the Amenemope to utilize in enhancing their comprehension of the text. This essay seeks to provide a summary of the Lichtheim’s writing in a way that will enable the reader to understand the objectives that guided the development of the piece. To this end, the content of the text shall be broken down and presented in a way that will make a reader develop a full grasp of it, without necessarily having to read the book. No external references will be used in this project in a bid to stick to the primary objective.

The usage of literary devices

In the first paragraph, the author introduces us to the literary devices that are most prominent in the writing (Lichtheim 147). In this regard, he indicates that similes and metaphors are prominent in the 30 chapters of the Amenemope. The author of the text also confirms that splitting the writing into two main categories makes the Amenemope appear structurally strong.

Placement of the main ideas in context

In subsequent paragraphs, the author picks examples from the text to use in explaining why the text falls in the Rameside period (Lichtheim 147). The reader is made aware that the similarities between the content of the Amenemope and works from the Book of Proverbs in the Bible. Lichteim comes to the conclusion that the author of the book of Proverbs in the Bible was familiar with the text of the Amenemope, explaining why there is a lot of similarity in the two texts (Lichtheim 147).

Availability of the material

Towards the end of the writing, the author introduces the reader to the locations of the Amenemope, principally pointing out that most of the text is found in Britain, while some other parts are in Stockholm, Turin, Moscow and Paris (Lichtheim 147).

Structuring of the writing

In the penultimate paragraph, the author provides an explanation of the metrical structure of the writing. The author notes that the ideas and concepts presented in the writing were developed in a free-form flow, further explaining why there is no particular format in the way the breaks develop. In addition, the reader is made aware that the author of the Amenemope consciously grouped the lines into distichs, tristichs and quatrains, hence ruling out the latter-day versions that sometimes provide the text into trophes and stanzas (Lichtheim 148). The author comes to the conclusion that the original Amenemope was a complex piece of writing, whose reproductions contain errors introduced by the copying scribes.

Conclusion

This essay had sought out to provide a synopsis and summary of the writing on the Amenemope, by Miriam Lichtheim. To this end, a critical breakdown of the main facts and ideas was presented, with Lichtheim’s main assertions well evaluated. It should be noted that the text under evaluation was part of a larger chapter.

Works Cited

Lichtheim, Miriam. Ancient Egyptian Literature: A Book Of Readings: The New Kingdom. California: University of California Press, 2006. Print.