Voices from the Other World

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Principal source: Donald B. Redford, editor, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2001).

The five little-known stories that make up this volume— drawn from the vast output of Egypt’s (and the Arab world’s) greatest modern writer — are all in some way inspired by his country’s ancient past. Written in the 1930s and 1940s, in the early phase of Naguib Mahfouz’s novelistic career — which he began by publishing three books of fiction set in pharaonic times — they may well have been intended as the bases for longer works. Some are in a kind of fable form, as though adapted from folk literature or ancient texts — which, in part, they were. Yet he utterly remade them into his own, and placed them in the cutting-edge literary journals of the day, including three of them (“Evil Adored,” “The Mummy Awakens,” and “A Voice from the Other World”) in his first collection of short stories, The Whisper of Madness (Hams aljunun, the date of whose appearance is still debated). The other two—“King Userkaf’s Forgiveness” and “The Return of Sinuhe”—have languished in the crumbling pages of aging magazines, uncollected and largely ignored.

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