"النار العاتية التي ذاقت من طعم وهج اللهيب:": قراءة بلاغيّة مُقارنة على مستوى الجملة والكلمة لأنشودة معبد أبي سمبل في مديح رمسيس الثاني

This article offers the first Arabic translation of a praise hymn dedicated to Ramsess II (d. 1213 B.C.E.), with philological and poetic commentaries. The text was carved on the facade of Abū Simbel temple twice because of its exceptional literary nature, as this study demonstrates. I discuss why Euro- American scholars were unable to separate the literary dimensions of the praise hymns from its political framework, and also tackle the pictorial nature of ancient Egyptian writing, providing the Arabic reader with the necessary instruments for understanding the several visual features that were creatively deployed by the writer to enhance the reading process of this particular praise hymn. I then trace the early foundations of premodern Arabic khiṭāba and its close relation to constructing oral/aural arguments in comparison with balāgha that deals with the literary devices of the Qur’ānic text.

This study breaks new ground in the discipline of comparative literature by establishing a collation between the two praise hymns of Ramsess II (d. 1213 B.C.E.) and Senwosret III (d. 1839 B.C.E.). This collation makes it possible to rediscover the way each eulogist built unique or similar images to describe the praised king. The article discusses several problematic questions of loanwords to pave the way for further research on ancient Egyptian words that were incorporated inside the classical Arabic dictionary, and the analysis ends with an ancient Egyptian-Arabic lexicon of the hymn under study. It is hoped that this may encourage the new generation of Egyptian Egyptologists to generate a comprehensive dictionary of the ancient Egyptian language based on direct engagement with ancient Egyptian literary texts.