It is unnecessary to quote the whole work, which is fragmentary and difficult of translation. A few passages will answer our purpose.
From the Admonitions of Ipuwer[600]
.......... The door-keepers say: Let us go and plunder. The confectioners .......... The washerman refuses to carry his load .......... The bird-catchers have drawn up in line of battle .......... The inhabitants of the Marshes carry shields. The brewers .......... sad. A man looks upon his son as his enemy; ....................
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Noble ladies suffer like slave girls. Musicians are in the chambers within the halls. What they sing to the goddess Mert is dirges ........... Forsooth, all female slaves are free with their tongues. When the mistress speaks it is irksome to the servants. Forsooth, princes are hungry and in distress. Servants are served .......... by reason of mourning. Forsooth, the hot-headed (?) man says: “If I knew where God is, then would I make offerings unto him.” Forsooth, right is throughout the land in this its name. What men do in appealing to it is wrong. Forsooth, all animals, their hearts weep. Cattle moan because of the state of the land .................... Forsooth, the ways are .......... The roads are guarded. Men sit over the bushes until the benighted traveler comes, in order to plunder his burden. What is upon him is taken away. He is belabored with blows of the stick and slain wrongfully.
Forsooth, that has perished which yesterday was seen (?). The land is left over to its weariness (?) like the cutting of flax. Poor men are in affliction .......... Would that there might be an end of men, no conception, no birth! O that the earth would cease from noise, and tumult be no more! .......... Forsooth, grain has perished on every side. People are stripped of clothes, spices (?) and oil. Everybody says there is none. The storehouse is ruined. Its keeper is stretched on the ground. It is no happy thing for my heart (?) .......... Would that I had made my voice heard at that moment, that it might save me from the pain in which I am (?) .......... Behold, the powerful of the land, the condition of the people is not reported to them. All is ruin! Behold, no craftsmen work. The enemies of the land have spoilt its crafts.
Similar descriptions of the disorganized state of society might be quoted at much greater length. The passage in which Ipuwer mentions the ideal king is as follows:
.......... lack of people .................... Re; command (?) .......... the West to diminish (?) .......... by the [gods?]. Behold ye, wherefore does he [seek] to fashion [mankind], .......... without distinguishing the timid man from him whose nature is violent. He bringeth coolness upon that which is hot. It is said: he is the herdsman of mankind. No evil is in his heart. When his herds are few, he passes the day to gather them together, their hearts being on fire. Would that he had perceived their nature in the first generation of men; then would he have repressed evils, he would have stretched forth his arm against it, he would have destroyed their seed and their inheritance .......... Where is he today? Is he sleeping? Behold, his might is not seen.
Vogelsang held this to be a picture of a kind of ideal king, comparable in some respects to the prophetic conception of the Messiah in such passages as Isa. 9:1-6; 11:1-8. To this view Gardiner has objected that the parallelism is not real, in that there seems to have been in the mind of the Egyptian sage no expectation that such a king would actually rise, but rather the belief that he once existed as the god Re and has now vanished from earth. To this Breasted and Gressmann reply that the kingly figure is a purely ideal one, and that Ipuwer feels strongly that, if he were on earth all wrongs would be set right, and that in some degree the picture is parallel to the conceptions of the Messiah.
The description of disorganized society which is here reflected is patterned on conditions which existed in Egypt before 2000 B. C., and the conception of the ideal king is equally old.