Merikare

The Teaching for Merikare is an instruction of the kind the Egyptians called sebayt. An old pharaoh speaks to the son who will rule after him, and he gives advice from his own experience, including his own mistakes. The beginning of the text is lost, so the father's name is not preserved in the copies we have, and scholars have inferred it from the context. The usual view is that he was a pharaoh Khety of Herakleopolis. The son is Merikare, who is addressed throughout as the future pharaoh.

The text survives in three manuscripts, all of them from the New Kingdom and so many centuries younger than the pharaoh. The best preserved is a papyrus in Saint Petersburg, and the others are in Moscow and in Copenhagen. When the text was composed is disputed. Some scholars think it was written in the time of Merikare, because it speaks as if the war with the south was going on. Others think it is a later work in the voice of an old pharaoh, a literary text that took the Herakleopolitan period as its setting. Because of this the Teaching has to be used with care. It shows how the Egyptians themselves thought about kingship and about that time, and it may or may not give the very words of a pharaoh.

Much of the advice is about how to hold power without force alone. The father tells his son to be skilled in speech, because the tongue is a sword for a pharaoh and speech is stronger than any fighting. He tells him to do justice, to avoid cruelty and not to kill without need, and to treat the officials fairly, giving rank to young men of ability and not only to the sons of the great. He warns against the hot-headed man who stirs up the people. The tone is that of a ruler who has learned that a throne in a divided land rests on the loyalty of men and not on terror.

The most famous passage is one in which the old pharaoh admits a fault. He says that the region of Thinis, the old holy land around Abydos, was ravaged in his time, and he insists that he did not order it and learned of it only afterwards. Tombs were damaged and a sacred place was hurt. He adds that he knows such a deed will be answered, and he tells his son to avoid repeating it. Scholars take this as a rare record of the war with the south, where the Theban lords were becoming strong. It shows both the violence of the time and a pharaoh who feared the verdict of the gods and of men.

The Teaching also reaches beyond politics. It warns that the judges of the dead are not merciful, and that a man arrives before them with the sum of his deeds, so that no one can rely on a long life or on rank. It says too that the creator made the sky and the earth for the sake of humans, and that humans are his images who came from his body. These are among the oldest clear statements in Egyptian writing that a pharaoh answers to the gods for how he treats people. For readers today, they show that the idea of moral accounting after death was already familiar before the Middle Kingdom.

Of the pharaoh himself, outside the Teaching, there is only a little. His name is recorded on a few documents, and a pyramid called "Flourishing is the life of Merikare" is known from the mention of its name. It is thought to lie at Saqqara, the cemetery of Memphis, which would mean that a Herakleopolitan pharaoh still chose to be buried in the old royal burial ground. It has not been found, and the claim that it was the last royal pyramid of the period is not safe, since other pyramids of the time are known, such as that of Ibi of the Eighth Dynasty at Saqqara South. The tomb of Merikare remains to be discovered.

Merikare is better known as a reader than as a ruler. We have the book written for him, and almost no record of what he did. The Teaching gives a view from the inside of a divided Egypt, of a pharaoh who is afraid of the future, who hopes to be just and who knows that the south is gathering strength. How the Herakleopolitan line ended, and how the Theban family that its pharaohs fought came to rule the whole country, is told on the pages on the Theban ancestors and on the First Intermediate Period.