"Pharaoh" is the editorial name given to a fragmentary, eight-line

Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th c ...

poem Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in ...

on folio 122r of the later tenth-century anthology known as the

Exeter Book The Exeter Book, also known as the Codex Exoniensis or Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3501, is a large codex of Old English poetry, believed to have been produced in the late tenth century AD. It is one of the four major manuscripts of Old Englis ...

Genre

Critical discussion has focused on the genre of the poem. It is preserved in a collection which also contains the

Exeter Book Riddles The Exeter Book riddles are a fragmentary collection of verse riddles in Old English found in the later tenth-century anthology of Old English poetry known as the Exeter Book. Today standing at around ninety-four (scholars debate precisely how many ...

, but is not technically a riddle in form, but rather a dialogic question about arcane wisdom, and is not traditionally counted among the riddles themselves. Other question-and-answer texts in Old English include the much longer ''

Solomon and Saturn ''Solomon and Saturn'' is the generic name given to four Old English works, which present a dialogue of riddles between Solomon, the king of Israel, and Saturn, identified in two of the poems as a prince of the Chaldeans. On account of earlie ...

''.

The poem bears a certain affinity to one version of the '' Ioca monachorum'', in which the question is posed how many the Egyptians were who pursued the Israelites, and the answer (1,800) depends on one knowing that there were 600 chariots (Ex. 14.7) and three men in each (according to the canticles in the Roman Psalter). One of the two damaged places in the text, Trahern suggests, may actually have provided the reader with the ability to divine the correct answer by referring to three-man chariots.

Text

As edited in the

Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (ASPR) is a six-volume edition intended at the time of its publication to encompass all known Old English poetry. Despite many subsequent editions of individual poems or collections, it has remained the standard refere ...

series, the poem reads: : "Saga me hwæt þær weorudes wære ealles : on Farones fyrde, þa hy folc godes : þurh feondscipe fylgan ongunn...." : "Nat ic hit be wihte, butan ic wene þus, : þæt þær screoda wære gescyred rime : siex hun... ...a searohæbbendra; : þæt eal fornam yþ... : wraþe wyrde in woruldrice." As translated by Patrick J. Murphy, this reads:

"Tell me how many troops in Pharaoh's army there were in all, when they in enmity began to pursue God's people.' 'I do not know anything about it, except that I think there was the number of six hundred armed chariots, which the tumult of the waves swept away; it fiercely destroyed it in the kingdom of the earth."Patrick J. Murphy, ''Unriddling the Exeter Riddles'' (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), p. 34.

References

{{Old English poetry Old English poetry Old English literature Riddles