The Quarrel of Apophis and Seqenenre

"The Quarrel of Apophis and Seqenenre" is an ancient Egyptian story. It is fragmentarily attested only in a papyrus copy made by a scribe named Pentawer during the reign of pharaoh Merenptah of the 19th Dynasty.[1]: 190  The story is set in an earlier date, towards the end of the Second Intermediate Period: the main characters are the two pharaohs Apophis and Seqenenre Tao, though the text is not historically accurate. In it, 'the Hyksos king Apophis challenges Seqenre, the local ruler of Thebes, with an adynaton [puzzle] (the hippopotami of Thebes disturb with their cries the sleep of Apophis, who resides at Avaris on the Nile Delta, hundreds of miles away). The end of the tale has been lost, but Seqenenre presumably found a solution, perhaps with the help of a wise counsellor.' It is part of a wider corpus of ancient Egyptian tales of wisdom-contests: it has some similarities, for example, to the much later "Tale of Setne Khamwas and Si-Osire", attested on papyrus in the Roman period.[2]

References

1. Grimal, Nicolas (1992). A History of Ancient Egypt. Oxford: Blackwell Books. ISBN 9780631174721.
2. Ioannis M. Konstantakos, 'Trial by Riddle: The Testing of the Counsellor and the Contest of Kings in the Legend of Amasis and Bias', Classica et Mediaevalia, 55 (2004), 85-137 (pp. 89-90).

Further reading

• Simpson, William K. (1972). Simpson, William Kelly (ed.). The Literature of Ancient Egypt: An Anthology of Stories, Instructions, and Poetry. translations by R.O. Faulkner, Edward F. Wente, Jr., and William Kelly Simpson. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-01711-1.
• Goedicke, Hans (1986). The Quarrel of Apophis and Seqenenrec. San Antonio: Van Siclen. ISBN 0-933175-06-X. — Includes English running translation of the story pp. 31–32.
• Camilla Di Biase-Dyson, 'Characterisation in The Quarrel of Apophis and Seqenenre and The Taking of Joppa ', in Foreigners and Egyptians in the Late Egyptian Stories, Probleme der Ägyptologie, 32 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 193–255. doi:10.1163/9789004251304_005, ISBN 9789004251304