Imagining the Past

"Five hundred years before Homer immortalized the Trojan Horse, the ancient Egyptians had already composed a tale of soldiers hiding Ali Baba-like in baskets to capture a besieged city. Shortly after the rise to power of the warrior pharaoh Ramesses II ("the Great"), Egyptian authors began to write stories about battles and conquest. However, these stories were not set in the present, but in the past--they were the world's first works of historical fiction. These literary recreations of past events, which preserve fascinating mixtures of fact and fiction, provide unparalleled information about topics as diverse as ancient Egyptian historiography, religion, and notions of humor and wit. Imagining the Past is the first volume to provide complete translations and commentary for the historical fiction composed during Egypt's New Kingdom. The four tales included here represent a multifaceted approach to history and its actors.^ The Quarrel of Apepi and Seqenenere, set at the end of the Second Intermediate Period, preserves details of political history and taxation that are attested in contemporaneous sources. In The Capture of Joppa, a historically-attested general Djehuty from the reig