A Spanish Egyptologist has managed to decipher a 4,000-year-old papyrus that belongs to the museum in Mallorca and has been kept for more than 150 years. The manuscript entitled “Dialogue between a Man and his Bâ” has just revealed all its secrets.
Seven years of research. This is the time it took Marina Escolano-Poveda, a Spanish Egyptologist and professor at the University of Liverpool (UK), to unravel the secrets of a papyrus forgotten in the niches of the museum in Mallorca, Spain. The manuscript was written 4,000 years ago in hieratic language and comes from the Middle Kingdom, more precisely from the 12th Egyptian dynasty, which ruled from 1991 to 1783 BC. BC was enough.
In the 2010s, Dr. Escolano-Poveda found these text fragments in the Mallorcan museum and made it his mission to reconstruct them in order to understand their meaning. After years of research, she managed to make the connection to another document that had been kept in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin since 1842, and whose introduction was amputated. It is thanks to the work of Doctor Escolano-Poveda that the “Dialogue” regained its first lines and the entire work could be recontextualized.
A philosophical story about the soul
The rediscovered introduction to the “Dialogue” therefore places the famous manuscript in context. If the story seems fictional, the Spanish Egyptologist leans more towards a philosophical story that deals with the hypothesis of an impending death experience from which its author would have escaped.
More specifically, the “dialogue between a man and his Bâ” would deal with the question of the soul, and in particular with the “Bâ”, an idea of the soul after death. The lyrics would tell the story of a man speaking to his soul and expressing his desire to travel to the afterlife. The man is finally taught by his Bâ, who reminds him of the value of life.
If the hypotheses for interpreting this ancient dialogue are well suited, Marina Escolano-Poveda continues her study of the fragmented papyrus in anticipation of the most complete explanation. According to an article in Le Point, it contains other excerpts from stories from the Middle Kingdom.