The Debate Between a Man Tired of Life and His Soul

An important poem

This post is part of the regular feature ‘Let Me Talk To You About,’ where I discuss creative works of any medium. For this installment I was inspired by the general sadness and distress that has been around me lately to select something fitting of that mood, which I have a personal connection with.

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It is common to look for reflections of one’s own self in ancient sources, common enough to often be a cause of people creating and spreading falsehoods about the past. For me one of the works where I felt the most seen, the most understood, was a fragmented Ancient Egyptian poem. I discovered it through the book Ancient Egyptian Literature An Anthology, translated by John L. Foster, there titled The Debate Between a Man Tired of Life and His Soul.

Talking about this poem individually in a non-academic context isn’t the easiest task, it’s fragmented, notoriously difficult to translate, and open to varying interpretations in a translation shaping way. I will start by discussing it as I first read it when I was much younger, then I will discuss some developments with how the poem is understood today.

As I read it

If I had to compile a list of works that were fundamental to shaping me, The Debate would be an essential inclusion. Usually writing about something for the newsletter prompts me to revisit it, this was the other way around. I picked up the book again to reread that one poem, then decided that I wanted to write about it.

As the title indicates, the poem consists of a single heated conversation between a man and his ba, his own soul. The man despairs over the state of the world and longs for the afterlife while his ba seeks to convince him to live, which offers an interesting angle on Ancient Egyptian views of what makes up a person. Notably the two insult each other over the course of their argument, it is not a harmonious relationship.

When I read the poem, I recognized my own words in the man’s speech. Even divided by culture and time, the feelings expressed were mine. My impression was that only someone who experienced suicidal ideation could have possibly written it. This ancient author understood me at a time when school surrounded me with adults who didn’t have any interest in understanding me or what they did to me.

The timelessness of the poem also became another source of despair in itself. It swept any notion of ‘it gets better’ aside and confirmed my belief that the sentiment was a lie, because it clearly hasn’t, not since the time of the pharaohs. Despair is immortal. Human civilization will always have it, and civilization is too important not to have, especially for someone like me who depends on modern technology to stay alive.

Yet the poem made me feel less alone in a time where my existence felt solitary. It proved that my feelings were real when there are many determined to deny that teenagers can feel anything real. It was a revelation.

One section that stands out to me coming back to the poem years later is the refrain of “who is there to talk to today,” which conveys the sense of isolation well.

“Who is there to talk to today? / No man of satisfied mind; / One to walk quietly with does not exist.

Who is there to talk to today? / I am bowed too low with my misery / lacking someone to share the thoughts in my heart.

Who is there to talk to today? / Wrongdoing beats on the earth, / and of it there is no end.”

Since I’ve spoken much of the poem’s timelessness, I want to balance that by making a note that the Ancient Egyptian afterlife is also important for understanding this poem. Both in the very premise of the man arguing with his ba, with each referring to the other as a brother, and how the man speaks of his expected afterlife, wanting to fight for the gods and make offerings. In that way it like many other works is an interesting snapshot of a specific culture.

Newer developments

While the poem remains incomplete, more fragments have been found, specifically concerning the beginning of the poem, as recorded by Marina Escolano-Poveda in the article New Fragments of Papyrus Berlin 3024: The Missing Beginning of the Debate between a Man and his Ba and the Continuation of the Tale of the Herdsman (P. Mallorca I and II).

With these new fragments much context is added to The Debate Between a Man Tired of Life and His Soul, where it is now known to have a frame narrative featuring a woman and a sick man, who may be the same man whose discourse with his ba comprises the rest of the poem.

Interestingly the woman is named Ankhet, which is the name of a goddess, but said goddess has only been attested in sources younger than the poem, which with other limited context of the fragment indicates she is a human.

That the central character of the poem is a sick man offers a potentially major piece of context for his despair, he is terminally ill. This illness is not named or specified in any recovered piece of the poem, and it is noted by Escolano-Poveda that the Ancient Egyptians believed psychological stress could lead to physical illness, so it’s possible the illness itself is despair, but it’s also not certain.

There are interpretations of the poem that do not involve suicide, but I feel I can still find room for my own reading regarding suicide within this expanded context.

Escolano-Poveda also notes that other Ancient Egyptian literature will sometimes end without returning to the frame story that introduced it. She offers the possibility that the central debate may have been within the sick man’s dream, and that it ends where it does because the man being present in the beginning to describe his dream shows that he did listen to the words of his ba. 

Truthfully, I am not one who should be consulted on academic readings of this poem. My own reading is too personal, I have too much emotional attachment to it. And this poem has been a subject of debate for over one hundred years.

My own feelings are not relevant to any academic discourse or analysis of additional fragments that may be found in the future. I don’t want to distort research to get the result I want. But art is about connection, and I feel connected to this poem, which is important in its own way.