Egyptian Boundaries in the Tale of Sinuhe

CAMPAGNO, MARCELO

Fuzzy Boundaries. Festschrift für Antonio Loprieno

Widmaier Verlag

Lugar: Hamburg; Año: 2015; p. 335 - 346

Specifically regarding the world of Sinuhe, he says: ?L?Égyptien et l?Asiatique appartiennent à deux mondes différents dont l?opposition ne peut qu?être neutralisée par la fiction littéraire, par la mimesis individuelle? (Loprieno 2001: 68). Indeed, such a radical contrast corresponds to the ideological sphere and not to the field of socio-political and socio-economic relations between Egypt and the Levant during Middle Kingdom times. This in turn introduces us to another set of contrasts, which Loprieno (1988) has conceptualized in terms of topos and mimesis, i. e. within the framework of the relationships between thearchetypes structuring the Egyptian worldview and situational variations that enable certain margins of divergence regarding these archetypes.The conceptual pair topos-mimesis is a key tool to consider the diversity of perspectives from which the Egyptians conceived the populations living outside the regions controlled by the Egyptian state. In fact, these populations were thought of − from the topos point of view ? in a uniformly negative way, as inhabitants of a chaotic world not regulated according to the Egyptian cosmos and, at the same time ? from the mimesis point of view ? as neighbors withwhom the Egyptians could engage in various, substantially peaceful modes of interaction. In this sense, the tale of Sinuhe offers many examples of the differences between the Egyptian and the Asiatic worlds. But even if it is true, as Loprieno has pointed out, that literary texts such as the tale of Sinuhe are those in which ?la réalité politique qui est négligée dans les contextesde présentation idéologique, est reprise et thématisée? (Loprieno 2001: 69), this does not mean that any reference to the topos is excluded from these texts, but rather that the full range of possible oscillations between certain topoi and their mimesis can be present therein. Here, I would like to consider this issue, trying to emphasize what we could call ethnic markers in the tale of Sinuhe, in order to understand ? through the concepts of topos and mimesis ?the Egyptians? conception of the boundary that distinguished them from the Asiatic realm.