The prince threatened by three fates

Protection becomes confinement

A king who has long wanted a son finally receives one. At the child’s birth, the Hathors announce three possible agents of death: a crocodile, a snake, or a dog. The king responds by having a secluded house built and supplying it with everything the boy needs. Yet isolation cannot keep every desired thing outside. Seeing a dog, the child asks for one, and his father allows him a puppy rather than leave him unhappy.

When the prince grows up, he argues that he should be permitted to live according to his wishes, whatever fate may bring. He leaves Egypt with his dog and travels to Naharina. There another ruler has enclosed his daughter in a lofty residence and promised her to the man who can reach her window. Two protective fathers have thus created two forms of confinement, and the young people’s lives begin to change when those barriers are crossed.

Source: Egyptian Tales, Second Series: Anpu and Bata · The Doomed Prince, pp. 13–20; Papyrus Harris 500 verso 4–6

The princess chooses and protects

The prince conceals his royal identity, presenting himself as the son of an Egyptian officer. He succeeds in reaching the princess. Her father objects to the apparently unsuitable foreigner, but she insists on the marriage and threatens to die rather than be separated from him. The ruler relents.

After the marriage, the prince tells her about the three dangers. She proposes killing his dog; he refuses to destroy the animal he has raised. Instead she watches over him. When a snake approaches the sleeping man, she uses milk to draw it away and kills it. The couple celebrates an apparent victory over one predicted death. Her action turns the story away from passive fatalism: knowledge of a threat can lead to vigilance and effective intervention, even though it does not prove that every threat can be defeated.

Source: Egyptian Tales, Second Series: Anpu and Bata · The Doomed Prince, pp. 20–27; Harris 500 verso 6–8

Where the evidence stops

The dog and the river bring the remaining dangers together. The damaged closing passage moves the prince into the crocodile’s power. The crocodile has its own struggle with a powerful being, whose role the broken story does not resolve. At this decisive point the surviving manuscript breaks. Modern translations differ from Petrie in details of the dog’s pursuit, so the sequence is not expanded here from his older wording alone.

The conventional title, Doomed Prince, can suggest a tragic ending that we do not possess. Neither a final death nor a triumphant escape should be presented as recovered ancient text. We can follow the complete surviving arc from birth through confinement, travel, marriage, and rescue from the snake, while admitting that the conclusion is absent. The princess’s intelligence and the prince’s attachment to his dog remain established parts of that arc, whatever the missing ending once did with them.

Sources: Egyptian Tales, Second Series: Anpu and Bata; Cambridgewordfest previews at Fitzwilliam Museum · The Doomed Prince, closing preserved passage, p. 27; Cambridge/Fitzwilliam description of the damaged ending

Time & the surviving record

Period / witness: New Kingdom; surviving Ramesside literary manuscript.
Recording context: Papyrus Harris 500, British Museum EA10060, verso 4.1–8.14; the final portion of the tale is missing. Its foreign setting does not establish its origin.

A recording location is not necessarily a story’s origin. Dates of texts, copies, and translations answer different questions.

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