Monday, May 6, 2013

Egyptian Chronicles Present : The Eloquent Peasant

As we are celebrating one of Egypt’s oldest feasts today that goes back to the days of ancient Egyptians aka , I thought of celebrating it this year differently. I proudly present this short film master piece by late Shady Abdel Salam : The Eloquent Peasant
Sham El Nessim
The Eloquent Peasant is one of the oldest and interesting stories from ancient Egyptian literature when it comes to the social and political life of ancient Egyptians. To fight back the injustice Eloquent peasant aka Khun-anup would write nine amazing messages standing for justice and criticizing the ruler.
Here is the short film produced in 1970 after the break.
The eloquent peasant
Unfortunately there are no English subtitles available in this restored version which actually is the best on YouTube. Nevertheless here is an English translation for the story with the original text.Here is another translation for the ancient story.
The original manuscript of the Eloquent Peasant is available in the British Museum 
I hope you enjoy it and think about the messages of the eloquent peasant and about how we do not learn from our great history.

2 comments:

  1. I used to say this in a philosophy class to explain "qualified evil":
    It's bad to beat people up but it's worse if you're a policeman
    It's bad to steal from people but it's worse if you're a banker
    It's bad to encourage people to do bad things but it's worse if you're a teacher
    It's bad to mock people's hopes but it's worse if you're a minister
    It's bad to lie and hide the truth but it's worse if you are a judge
    ...and so on. The translation and commentary were very enjoyable and they made me think of this

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  2. Thank you Zeinobia. This was great and it is sad that most Egyptians have no clue about their own history or ancient literature as in how many Egyptians know or read the story of Sinuhi the Egyptian

    It is time that Egyptians rediscover their history and be proud of it and not want to destroy it

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