Egyptian Folk Humor and Herodotus

Abstract

Ancient Egyptian humor has been ignored for its great influence. One reason is prudery: it never passed too well into the Classical Tradition. Some writers of high genres from Greece and Rome drained humor and imagination from Egypt just as they filled the Nile with boring scribes and exotic sages. Herodotus was an odd exception. He preserved earthy material he heard from Egyptian storytellers face-to-face. Their humor about the pharaohs resonated well with Greek thought. Both cultures shared a similar sense for problems of male power. But not too much has been written about the oral narratives he preserved – scattered folktales, jokes, and fibs.

In Chapter One we consider some theories about folk humor from Anthropology, Folkloristics, and Humor Studies. Traditional oral narration works from simple patterns of incongruity, which I call ‘mirthemes’. These units of incongruity pass easily across languages and cultures. But humor takes on different meanings in specific cultural contexts or spaces of performance. Rather than looking for any ‘correct’ reading of an ancient folktale, I suggest we entertain diverse ancient spaces and audiences (‘stand-in’ roles): for instance, reading a passage from both Greek and Egyptian angles, as male priests or female peasants, near temples or in rural areas, or from many other valuable intersections of identities that enrich our discussion of the Greek.

In Chapter Two, I move to the modern world to consider a few living humorous storytelling traditions very similar to what’s in Herodotus. I discuss some traditional oral Arab and African humor tales as they pass to tourists and ethnographers from diverse informants. If we are generous with analogy, modern dynamics of transmission might help us fill speculative gaps in the ancient record. For instance, street performers of folktales today at busy places of tourism (like the pyramids) tend to fabricate ‘mirthemes’ on the spot for outsider intellectuals in coded ways (say, to make fun of Western academics). We can reimagine Herodotus by analogy using that sort of interaction as a possible reading.

Chapter Three is an extended discussion of a single anonymous oral narrative someone along the Nile told Herodotus about how a prostitute built one of the pyramids. This was a form of ‘oral graffiti’ with low quality and lack of scholarly visibility. Rather than reading it as a Classical orientalization or exotification of foreigners and women on the part of Herodotus and the Greeks (as has been done) I consider other perspectives. From an Egyptian angle, the gender humor may have come out of very old traditional comic tales about the pyramids, from Nile women’s obscene festival life, with roots in household lore about the sex goddess Hathor. For male priests, it may have had political meaning that can tell us about the mood among Egyptians about Hellenizing cultural influences and democracy.

Egyptian comic narrative patterns from extremely old traditions made their way into Classical literature, but remain unseen and completely unappreciated. They were generated out of an ‘underlore’ of international storytelling among farmers, slaves, women, and foreigners to Greece and Rome reflecting on their own lives. Their creative storytelling was at the roots of the Classics.

People can take readings in this dissertation or leave them. I am certainly not the master voice over these texts.