Khun-Inpu decided to find the owner of the wheat field and plead his case for the return of the donkey and his barley. Neither was the donkey nor the load of barley. When Khun-Inpu regained consciousness, Nemti-Nakht was nowhere to be seen. Then he assaulted Khun-Inpu with a tamarisk and beat him unconscious. He accused him of trespassing on his master’s land, destroying part of the crop, and stealing grain to feed the donkey. Nemti-Nakht started screaming in protest. The donkey flattened some wheat, however, and then decided to stop and eat some grain, notwithstanding Khun-Inpu’s entreaties to to the contrary. Khun-Inpu then stepped into the wheat field pulling his donkey behind him intending to go around the cloak and resume his journey. Khun-Inpu asked him to remove the cloak so that he could resume his journey, but Nemti-Nakht refused. He said his name was Nemti-Nakht and he claimed to be the overseer of the wheat field. A man stepped out of the wheat field and warned him not to move or touch it. Khun-Inpu stopped when he reached the cloak. Along the way, he came to a place where the path narrowed down to the width of a loincloth bordered by a stream on the low side and a wheat field on the high side. The main character is a farmer from the arid and desolate Wadi Natrum named Khun-Inpu, who loaded up his donkey with most of his barley and set off for an urban marketplace in the Nile River valley where he intended to trade the barley for goods to take back to his wife and children. Written sometime during the Middle Kingdom in the 19th century BCE, it relates a story about an incident that occurred during the chaotic First Intermediate Period. The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant is an Ancient Egyptian story about the relationship of Ma’at to justice. Cross posted from Frederick Leatherman Law Blog
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