Egypt and the Odyssey : Homeric dialogues with Egyptian travel literature

Abstract

This thesis investigates the relationship between Homer’s Odyssey and the Egyptian tradition of travel literature from the second millennium BC. It is a comparative exploration of portrayals of displacement, exile, and homecoming in two of the premier travel poems of the ancient Mediterranean world: the Tale of Sinuhe and the Odyssey. It explores the multifaceted parallels between these two poems in both dialogic-comparativist and historical-transmissional terms, and it shows that there is an extraordinarily wide range of macrolevel and microlevel parallels suggesting direct cross-cultural influence between the Tale of Sinuhe and the Odyssey. The Introduction discusses the methodological background to this project and the cross-disciplinary gap in scholarship which it fills, as well as the historical, archaeological, cultural, and literary context in which these poems emerged. I explore the parallels between these poems in their beginnings and displacement episodes in Chapter 1, and in their portrayals of exile and homecoming in Chapter 2. In the Conclusion, I discuss the wider context of the project, fruitful avenues for future research, and the ramifications of the findings of this thesis for current understandings of these poems across multiple disciplines.