The Tale of Sinuhe: and Other Ancient Egyptian Poems 1940-1640 B.C.

“The God ascended to his horizon;

the Dual King Sehotepibre

mounted to heaven,

and was united with the sun, the divine flesh mingling with its creator.”

This passage establishes the sun imagery associated with the king, who is considered to be born of the creator god, the sun god, and likewise symbolized as a source of life. The horizon is the king’s tomb or final resting place holding his embalmed body and grave goods, indicating the place where he crosses from the land of the living to the otherworld or land of the dead. These lines introduce the idea of The King as Representation of Natural and Divine Order.

“Figs were in it [this land], and grapes;

its wine was more copious than its water;

great its honey, plentiful its moringa-oil,

with all kinds of fruit on its trees.”

The details of this list illustrate the prosperity that Sinuhe is granted from the king in the foreign land where he takes residence. The inversion of the natural word order, as here, where the object of the sentence is given the subject’s place in the sentence, is a rhetorical device called anastrophe; the position of being first in the sentence adds emphasis to the good things Sinuhe has been granted. The inversion of typical word order, however, also reflects that he is in a foreign land, where many things are the opposite of what he knew in Egypt.